SEO Checklist

A quick SEO checklist for reference…

The SEO of a  website is 60% off-site stuff and 40% on-site stuff.

Off site is basically links to your site from other websites.
On-site is how your website is structured, what words it has on it and how they are presented.

The checklist below will help boost your search result ranking on search engines E.g. Google (which you can’t pay to change).

What you can pay for, are sponsored ads E.g. Google Adwords.  These are words / phrases that should be relevant to your business (Eg “personal trainer Leeds”) and when people search for (or look at pages relating to) these terms, you pay Google to show an advert for your business in the “sponsored ads” section.  In addition to appearing on Google’s search page, the advert may also be shown on numerous websites throughout the World and via applications (like Google’s email application) – but only when the content is relevant to your Adwords.  Each time someone clicks on one of these adverts (and goes to your site), you pay Google a small fee (the fees vary depending on the popularity of the Adword).  You set up a monthly budget and Google will continue to serve up your ads until the budget runs out, it will then stop showing them until the next month.

General Approach

• Identify Key Phrases for each of the page types – broad for top level, getting progressively more specific (E.g. as you drill down the product structure)
• Each page must be discoverable by text links (not form submissions) and relevant to the page’s key phrase

Content

• Technical

Technical

• Loading Speed – where possible mimimise images, consolidate js/css etc files

• Identify broken links (using Google Webmaster tools) and fix

• Handle broken links by taking to the next level up / or show a custom 404 error page

• The custom 404 page should provide links to home / sitemap, a search box, contact information and load fast

• Markup should validate (as much as possible) using W3C validation tools

• URLs should contain keywords, be as short as possible and relevant

• URL variants should redirect to the usual Eg .htm > .html URL with slash at end redirects to URL without slash

• If page content is duplicated then use the canonical tag to define the “main page”

• HTML Titles should contain key phrase, follow breadcrumb structure and have most useful info first

• All images should have alt tags that contain key phrase

• Headers, right menus, left menus and footers should contain as many keyphrases as possible

• Page should be structured as heading1, heading2, list, heading2, list etc

• Product hierarchies should be structured as lists containing headings if possible

• Linking images should contain alt text that is the keyword for the destination page

• (Product) images should show product descriptions (as thee will be keywords)

• Page should be viewed with styling disabled (as a crawler would see it)

• Key phrase should be top

• Heading tags should follow

• Then content (lists, paragraphs etc)

• Left / Right Menus should appear at the bottom

• Images shouldn’t (where possible) contain text – the copy should be “broken out” of the image

• Use SEO tools (in Firefox) to improve (Web Develop toolbar, SEOpen, SEO for Firefox, Search Status, Firebug)