I was offered a free Search Engine Visibility test so I took the bait. According to their findings, my site is not optimized well. Is this true? I mean they put a lot of emphasis on meta tags which is totally bogus. Who cares about meta tags anymore? I think the results are constructed to make me think I need to buy their services. What do you think?



Top 10 SEO checklist results for http://www.silveradosierra.com/

Want better search engine results? Our Top Ten SEO Checklist can help. We've analyzed your site and found the following issues. Correct them and boost your site's exposure and traffic.

Proper Title Tags
Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword for the page, followed by a brief description of the page content. It will be less than 65 characters and avoid using stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.
Look out! The majority of your pages have title tag issues.
14 pages have invalid title tag characters.
50 pages have stop words in the title.
1 page has title > 65 characters.

Proper Description Tags
Good description tags contain information about the page's content and persuade search engine users to visit your web site. They should be between 25 and 35 words in length.
Look out! The majority of your pages have description tag issues.
36 pages have non-alpha characters in the description meta tag.
349 pages have no description tags.

Proper Keywords Tags
Your keywords meta tag should contain between 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in page content.
Look out! The majority of your pages have keywords meta tag issues.
14 pages have keyword phrases > 6 words.
349 pages have no keywords meta tag.

Proper Heading Tags
Each page of your site should use at least the H1 heading tag for the search engines that examine it when crawling your site.
Great work! No significant heading tag issues to speak of.

Page Content
Pages should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contains the keywords specified for the page.
Look out! The majority of your pages have page content issues.
405 pages have a highest meta tag keyword density of less than 2%.

Proper Navigation
Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is a critical step for the proper indexing and page rank distribution of your site.
Look out! The majority of your pages have navigation issues.
195 pages have broken internal links.
195 pages have broken external links.
2 pages have no external links.

Proper Sitemap
It's important to use two site maps for your website--an XML version and a static version. The XML version can be created with Search Engine Visibility's site map tool. The static version should sit on a static HTML page and contain links to every other page.
Look out! No site map found.
A sitemap XML file was not found.

Controlled Crawling
It's important that search engine spiders find your robots.txt file that guides spiders to pages and directories you want crawled and denies entry to protected areas of your site.
Look out! You have robots.txt file issues.
No robots.txt file found

Duplicate Content/Tags
Because search engines treat web sites as a grouping of pages and not a single entity, each page on your site should be unique so that the tags and content differ between each page. Doing so increases the number of pages that will rank.
You have minor duplicate tag issues.
38 pages are using the same description tag.
375 pages are using the same title tag.

Word Density
Pages should contain 300 to 700 words of unique and descriptive content. A page's meta tag keywords should also be those that occur most frequently on the page.
Look out! You have major word density issues.
280 pages have their most frequent word appear less than 2% of the time.


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So I thought phpBB-SEO takes care of all these issues? Are they lying or is phpBB-SEO not as good as it claims to be?

Look out! They are trying to sell you services to correct minor problems at great expense.

OK, OK... their suggestions, while not wholly worthless, are SEO 101 suggestions that Google Webmaster Tools would point out. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and focus on creating content worth finding. You cannot polish a turd, and SEO cannot make mediocre content look better to search engines.