I was hoping you guys could please share hope you can know what's wrong with a website or what needs adjusting. What I mean is when do you know you need to adjust or need more keywords or when do you know when you need more backlinks....etc how can you spot where the problem is and what tools do you use?
This is such a hard question to answer. There's so many things that can go wrong: Over optimized on-page Bad site structure and silo'ing Lack of social presence Bad anchor text distribution ... and about 100 more things And to make things even more difficult is Google's ranking document's algorithm and the Google dance, that can make you think things are going wrong when they're actually not. If you're looking for a quick fix, Id suggest hiring or befriending a seasoned SEO to take a look. There's just too many aspects involved. In the meantime: Look at your on-page keyword usage and chop that down to 1% (including title, description and URL). Use synonyms instead. Make sure 50%+ of your anchors are branded or URL. Whenever I help folks, one of these is usually the problem.
Thanks for that Diggity, I'm not having trouble with my site I was just interested in how the guys thats good at SEO figures out whats wrong. I would think that it comes with experience as, knowing what to look out for as things change and how a site structure is supposed to be laid out..etc
Look @LOOM most of the problems are already discussed by @DiggitySEO what i am going to add more here is the solution it looks like he has forget that let me add it !! Okay so you're question was "when do you know you need to adjust or need more keywords... when do you know when you need more Back-links....etc " We came to know when to adjust it is by seeing our and our competitor site status if he is doing well and we are getting down the list we adjust our keywords back links etc. "how can you spot where the problem is and what tools do you use?" We spot the problem just by looking our rankings i am sure if you're ranking is going down then there is something wrong and that can easily be predicted, we have the advantage of Google Webmaster Tool- yes GWT is itself a great tool that is able to point out all the problem going down to your site but the thing is you need to learn how to use the GWT in an effective manner other than this what i use is the Majestic SEO, ahrefs, raventools etc. actually the problem is there is no any fixed tool things keep on changing according to time. I would say what is fixed through out the whole SEO thing is Google Webmaster Tools, it is answer to most of your question.
For getting the right results, it is important to work on the right keywords. If the traffic to your website is reducing, it means there is nothing interesting on your website. You need to have a check on the website design and content before proceeding further.
As john said above, keep tracking your Google analytics and webmasters account to analyze the traffic, referrals, errors, conversions and more. What you need then just improve the things as guided by these two superb tools.
There are various tool out there in market but which ever free tool people used they are not so efficient. So, I suggest hire some good SEO or Buy some tool. If you want to know what exactly wrong with your site you can Analyze time to time. I use www.quicksprout.com Its free and awesome tool to use.
You can use keyword tools (Google has a good one here: https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?__u=8527621811&__c=3256069691) and keep up to date with SEO practices. Another thing I think is important is QA and testing your site. Sometimes it's not just SEO that's wrong with your site. Sometimes it's the navigation, the content, the topic - it could be anything! I recommend you read some articles or books on usability (Nielsen and Krug are some good authors). QA your site - make sure all the links work, etc. Ask some friends to use the site and give you honest feedback. You also can do actual usability testing, which I have done at some of my jobs. You can get people to come in and walk through a website and "think out loud" about what they're doing and what they expect to see, or you can even get a company to get the testing done for you. One company I work for sometimes, userlytics, is one of the companies that can set it up for you, run it, analyze it, whatever you need. But, really, any amount of testing and illicitation of honest, impartial feedback (tricky!) will give you lots to go on. Sometimes it's something really simple! Anyway, good luck!