So you got a great snappy new website from a company that does nice enough work and you think it looks pretty good. You had originally been hooked and used their service because they stated not onely nicer designs but search engine ranking and great optimization work? Perhaps you even saw ahead of time they will “submit to over 1,000 search engines for free” (a blah blah $value).
First off the submission is scam, I cant even name 15 search engines and that is what I do for a living, so do you think your shoppers can name or use even 7? likely not. This is aside of the point that the automated software they may do this with is generally tracked and frowned upon by engines as spamming or flooding them, not something to associate yourself with.
So you want to know if they did even the basics right to know they did a good job? heres a few things to look at, though there are so many factors that nothing can tell for sure short of an inspection of allt he facts.
1. Page titles - are they different on every page, targeting an exact phrase on every page, and not repeating useless words like your domain name on every page. They should be unique and keyword built, short and exact.
2. Heading tags - Search the source code of any of your pages, look for H1 and H2 tags, these should generally match the page title in some way.
3. Alt tags - when you mouse over the images on the pages do they have readable relevent keywords in the mouseover hint? they should.
4. Link design - how is the main navigation for your site designed? is it images as buttons? is it text links as buttons? If they used flash or a jump menu there may be something better they should have done.
5. URL’s - What do the page names look like on your site? if you page names are smartly structured and keyword filled they likely did the right thing.
yourdomain.com/widgetpage-name.html would be a decent choice by them, while:
yourdomain.com/seeprod.php?id=12323 would be an oversight on their part.