Website Health: A Long Way To Go

Since my last post here, my personal health has deteriorated, and my website health has suffered as a result.

A few days after my last post, a fall resulted in a broken back, a broken skull, a broken knee, and broken dreams. But 2012 is the year to set all that aside. A time to fix the health of this website, and improve the health of all my visitors.

In a new project, I am working on bringing health freedom to people, their businesses, and their networks. I will share more of that with you as that develops, but since this website is here to support everyone who is responsible for building and operating websites, let me focus on website health here today.

There is a lot of confusing information about the way to test the health of your website. Various technical experts offer different views on the importance of many aspects of page structure. Various marketeers offer different views on the importance of many aspects of search engine optimization. Various online checkers have different methods for analyzing your page health. It is very easy to lose focus. We spend more time monitoring, analyzing, and improving, but that distracts us from the important job of delivering an easy-to-navigate website to as many people as possible.

I have recently discovered the best tool to help webmasters since Google shared it’s vital Webmaster Tools. This new tool is only available to Firefox users at the moment. But then again, so am I.

Actually, that last bit is not strictly true, because I’ll work for anyone. However, I believe Firefox is the best browser for website building. Chrome is improving, and I also retain Microsoft Internet Explorer for testing. But successful webmasters are productive webmasters, so stick with whatever works for you. I use Chrome and Firefox together everyday. You are going to have to install Firefox if you want to take advantage of the tool I am about to describe. Other browsers may be covered in future releases.

Your Website Health

Before I start, I should warn that the following tool will not fix a bad site structure. If you have ignored my advice about a good website structure, then you will always be tending a sick donkey, compared to a thoroughbred race hound. I cannot blame you too much for not having a good plan, as I have not finished my articles about how to generate one on my management website. Let’s leave that one for now.

The tool you need for better website health is the aptly named SEO Doctor from the exotically named Vladimir Prelovac. Once installed as an add-on to your Firefox browser, SEO Doctor analyzes every page as it loads, giving you vital information about the health of your web pages. You get bonus points if you follow Vladimir’s advice:

SEO Doctor works really well with Search Status, in fact these may be the only two SEO extensions you will ever need in your browser.

Actually they might be the only ones you NEED, but if I ever share my own add-on list with you, they will not be the only ones you WANT.

Over the next few days, I will describe the tests that SEO Doctor performs, and explain why they are important to you. In the meantime, there is excellent help built-in, and that includes links to Vladimir’s website for a more thorough explanation. Or, if you are stuck, or need any other help, please ask in the website health forum.