We all know how important it is to take care of our health, but what about the health of your website? Just like people, websites can be healthy or unhealthy. It is vital to the success of any online business to perform a website health check. A healthy website functions well and is able to perform whatever it was designed to do. Don’t know where to begin with your website health check? What SEO tools to use? How to go about improving DA with a DA tool? Many factors go into determining a website’s health. Our comprehensive checklist will ensure everything is in order.

Website Health Check Table of Contents:

• Your Website’s Content
• Search Engine Optimization
• Domain Authority Score and DA Tool
• Basic Coding and Design
• Images and Accessibility
• Protection from Viruses
• Conclusion

Your Website’s Content

Of course, the most critical piece of a website health check is auditing your content. Content makes a website more than just an empty URL, whether text, audio, images, videos, or even something else. Content has the most significant effect on a website’s health. That’s because it is easier for computers to understand text than images or videos. In fact, text (words and links) determines a website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and domain authority (DA) score. The SEO and DA ensure that people can find your website in the first place.

A website can have the most outstanding features in the world, but those features are worthless if no one can easily access them. Some people think that search engines don’t matter. They think people will remember their URL and spread it through word of mouth. The truth is, even people who frequently use a site on the web are likely to forget the url from time to time. So, it’s essential they re-discover it with the help of a search engine.

Search Engine Optimization

A website health check will encompass all things SEO. A simple Google search can contain hundreds or thousands of results. How do Google and other search engines determine which results are relevant? Is it random? No! A website will consistently appear at the top of search engine results if it has a good SEO strategy: search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization sounds complicated, but it isn’t that difficult to understand. Your website will have a good SEO score if it uses the proper keywords multiple times in a non-spammy way. It’s essential to use the right keywords in the right amounts. If you use them too sparsely, search engines won’t pick up your website. On the other hand, simply copying and pasting keywords repeatedly, without using them in actual sentences, will not help with search engine optimization. Today’s algorithms are too intelligent for that and will treat your site as spam if you resort to such measures.

It’s also important when performing a website health check that you double-check the spellings of all keywords used. Search engines only account for spelling mistakes in certain instances. If you want your website to rank high for a certain keyword, ensure you have used the correct spelling every time!

There are different SEO scores, as companies are constantly tweaking their algorithms. Those algorithms are kept secret so that spammers and bots don’t take advantage of them and flood search engine result pages with irrelevant results.

So, what worked to create a good SEO score in the past, even two years ago, may not work anymore. There are various SEO and DA tools to use. These can help you to learn your keyword rankings and those of your competitors (image below). In other words, they will give you an idea of how close your website is to the top of the front page in a search result. The better your keyword rankings, the more traffic your website will receive. This, in turn, will increase views, sales, and other conversions you are hoping to achieve by operating a website in the first place.

(Image Credit: Content Marketing Insitute)

As you now know, there are multiple DA tools and SEO tools to use, and they all have different SEO scores. While you may be tempted to sign up for every SEO service you can find online, this will likely be more confusing than helpful. Don’t just think about the different SEO scores and your placement. Instead, ask yourself how you will improve after learning these scores. How do you plan on improving your website’s rank? Do you know how to do that?

A good SEO tool will not just tell you your score but also suggest improvements. Perhaps adding some new keywords would make your site more popular. For this, consider using Diib’s SEO tool. Besides SEO, Diib also has a DA tool that will help with improving your overall domain authority. DA, or domain authority, is the next stop on your website health check.

Domain Authority Score

Now you know all about SEO, but what about the domain authority score? What is a good domain authority score in SEO? First things first, the term “domain” refers to your website. “Authority” refers to the site’s trustworthiness. Domains with more authority are pushed up higher in search engine results. So, improving DA will increase a website’s ranking.

A DA score is anywhere from zero to one hundred. Higher scores are better than lower ones. So, how do you get a higher score? It’s simple: use lots of links. The sites with the highest DA scores are sites like Wikipedia. Wikipedia links to many high-quality academic websites when providing sources for their scientific articles. The number and quality of these links give the domain more authority.

(Image Credit: HubSpot Blog)

On the other hand, small business websites tend to have abysmal DA scores. Why? The sites are often totally devoid of outgoing links! This is an easy mistake for people to make when they don’t know anything about DA tools or scores.

Now, you may be wondering: what types of links are appropriate for your site and what is a good domain authority score for SEO? After all, if you have a site revolving around baseball caps, for example, it wouldn’t make sense to link to a history-rich website, even if those are considered high quality. This is where using a DA tool, like the one Diib provides, comes in. With the Diib DA tool, you will get suggestions, updates, and fixes regarding your site’s DA score.

Diib has helped raise the DA scores of countless websites, both in the US and abroad. For example, in one case, with their DA tool, they raised one website’s DA score from 21 to 31. At the same time, the website’s speed increased, the bounce rate lowered, and there were 75 new keyword rankings.

Another time, Diib raised a website’s DA score from 34 to 42. The site went from having 0 keywords in Google to over 3000. Additionally, the site gained more than 400 links from 72 different websites. This allowed the owner to begin making sales from his site through organic traffic, rather than paid ads. Sites can only succeed financially if they have a domain authority score and SERP rank so people can find them.

Diib provides comprehensive website monitoring with a daily health score and a weekly snapshot. Why is this significant? It’s because DA scores, SEO, and similar statistics are constantly changing. Even if your site remains unchanged, its ranking will rise and fall depending on competing sites, traffic shifts and algorithm changes. Therefore, it’s essential to monitor your site’s DA constantly, with a professional DA tool, so you can make adjustments whenever necessary.

Far too many website owners are ignorant of DA scores or how to use a DA tool. They don’t know what domain authority is or how it can help or harm them. After reading all of this, you should be better equipped to understand the importance of DA scores and of choosing the right DA tool.

So, what else is there to know about building and maintaining a healthy website? It all starts with the code.

Basic Coding and Design

Does your website load quickly? Can users easily navigate from one page to another? Are there visual glitches? Are all links clickable? A properly coded website will not have any issues like these. All websites are built off of code, especially HTML. If something doesn’t seem to be right, it’s a good idea to have someone skilled in coding take a look at it. They will probably be able to spot and fix any issues.

Images and Accessibility

The next thing you should include on your website health check is your site’s design. Is it easy to navigate on the web and mobile devices? Do the colors complement one another, or do they clash or fade? Is the text too big or too small? All of this needs to be taken into consideration. After all, now that you have improved the ranking of your website, it needs to be usable! No one wants to spend time on an annoying or confusing website.

Some aspects of website design are up to personal taste. Others can be measured more objectively. In many countries, site owners are legally required to keep them accessible to people with disabilities. Did you know this can improve both SEO and DA?

Modern web pages typically have at least an image or two, in some cases hundreds. You may think simply pasting the image is good enough, but there are two critical things to do next. The first is to add an image description. An image description is precisely what it sounds like: a text description of an image. Doing this is helpful for people with low or no vision who may use screen reader technology. Simply write a description of what is in the image. Believe it or not, this improves search engine optimization, especially for image searches.

(Image Credit: Pinterest)

There’s one more step. Next, add a link to improve your DA score. If your image was sourced from elsewhere on the web, link to the original source or the creator. If the image came from somewhere else, it is still a good idea to add a link for DA purposes. Try and think of something relevant. For instance, if you took a photograph of a famous monument, link to an informative article about it.

See how small changes can lead to big results? Adding proper descriptions and credits to an image can make your website perform better in search engine results.

You should know more about images: keywords and links displayed in an image are useless. Say you wanted a good ranking for the keyword “golden retriever.” It is vitally important to include those words in simple text. An image with the words “golden retriever” will not end up in the keyword results for that phrase because computers only read plain text, not images.

Protection from Viruses

Healthy websites, just like healthy humans, are protected from viruses. In the world of computers, the term virus refers to any type of malware or malicious software. Viruses can break machines and steal personal information, like passwords and credit card numbers. No one wants to use a website that might infect their computers with viruses. In fact, sites that host malicious software will usually be removed from search engine results entirely. How do you keep this from happening?

Viruses can hide inside of advertisements. These viruses are called trojans, in reference to the Trojan horse myth. These trojans can wreak havoc on a computer by installing ransomware or hiding cryptocurrency miners. So, if you plan to run ads on your site, ensure they come from a reputable source.

It’s also important to remember that domain authority depends on the quality of the link as much as quantity. Do not ever include links to untrustworthy sites. Dangerous links could also lead to virus infections. This will result in your domain authority sinking very low.

Besides bad ads and low-quality links, there is another potential source of viruses. Websites can become infected with viruses if they are hacked. Hacking can be prevented by using strong passwords and changing them frequently. You should study and apply other cyber security measures as well. In extreme cases, a website might need DDOS protection.

Diib Digital: Get a Professional Website Health Check Today!

As you can see, keeping a website healthy requires many steps and frequent website health checks. It isn’t something that can be done once and forgotten. It requires constant monitoring, with particular attention to search engine optimization and domain authority. Using a reputable SEO and DA tool could make all the difference in the success of your website. Diib Digital offers a comprehensive User Dashboard. Here are a few of the features you’re sure to love:

• Keyword, backlink, and DA tools
• Blacklist monitoring and objectives for repair
• User experience and mobile speed optimization
• Bounce rate monitoring and repair
• Social media integration and performance
• Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
• Technical SEO monitoring

Click here for your free website health check or simply call 800-303-3510 to speak to one of our growth experts.