Search Engine Optimization Checklist
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, Feb 16, 2010
As SEO or search engine optimization become more important and a critical cornerstone of many Inbound marketing (Internet marketing) projects, I offer the SEO check list below. These are items that need to be a part of your "on page" SEO execution.
1. On-page Optimization:
Keyword Research/No. of Key phrases Optimized - Keyword Research is very important and can literally make or break your SEO campaign. Most popular mistake people make is to select one word or two word keywords to rank on. The whole idea of keyword research is to select realistic keywords which can bring in significant amount of traffic. We use paid version of Word Tracker and Google Keyword Research tool and involve our clients in keyword selection.
Optimization of Titles and Meta Tags – Title tag appears at the top bar of your web browser. Based on the keywords in this tag, search engines list the site relevant to a search made in their engines. It is one of the important aspects of getting rankings in search engines. Since this title also appears in search engines’ result pages, appropriate use of keywords in promotional language may result in more clickthroughs. We optimize the Titles and Meta Tags since these provide information about your Web page to search engine robots so that the search engine can better understand what your site is about. Meta tags provide this information in a format that the web crawlers/spiders that visit your site can understand.
Robot.txt Optimization - This file allows you to hide files or directories that you don’t wish the search engine spiders to find. You can let us know which files or folders you do not want spiders to crawl they will be disallowed. Here we create Robots.txt file. This file is created so that your site can be crawled and added to the search engine database. Using this file, you can also allow or block a search engine from crawling specific parts of your site such as the cgi-bin folder, images folder or any folder containing critical information.
W3c Validations - The Markup Validation Service by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) allows Internet users to check HTML documents for conformance to HTML or XHTML and is also a quick method to check for errors in code. We validate your sites as per W3C guidelines. This is done to make the source code of your web pages clean and concise which allows the search engine spiders to move more efficiently through your site. When it comes time for a search engine to add your page to its results, it’s going to have a much easier time understanding the page if it’s been validated. This will often get you a higher ranking in the results.
Working on the HTML source code - Apart from Title Tag, there are other sections on your web page which can be optimized. These include, Meta Description tag, Image Alt tag, Adding Header tag for important information on your web page. Sometimes we take out Javascripts and making them external to increase Text to HTML ratio. Open any site, right click and check view source option. It will show you the html code. Working on it means we will update the tags, externalize java scripting, add alt tags and hyperlink attributes, etc.
Editing Content for SEO - Copywriters will work on modifying existing content based on the keywords being optimized. Keywords will be strategically used within the content based on various keyword densities.
Image & Hyperlink Optimization - We incorporate keywords in Alt text of image tags and title attribute of hyperlinks. This helps to a certain extent in search engine rankings.
One way to evaluate the condition of a given web site is to have an search engine optimization consulting firm run an analysis and provide the related reports. For example:
Web Site Analysis Report
Search Engine Ranking Report
Ask us for a no cost report that might help you measure the SEO condition of your web site
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