SEO

Here’s a portion of the SEO checklist I use when applying search engine optimization techniques to a website. Most of these techniques are used by certified SEO Specialists and experienced SEO consultants. This list of SEO tasks can be applied to any website aiming to achieve better search engine rankings. I purposely left out a few for myself (server, regex, aging, nofollows, etc).

The following is pretty much the core of my SEO tasks. Most of these should be done BEFORE you do any link building or off page SEO.

Perhaps I’ll blog about each of these later. However, if you don’t understand it you can always just Google it, after all that’s how most SEO Specialists & webmasters learn SEO.

Technical SEO Checklist & Questionnaire

Navigation: spiderable or non-spiderable? (EG: javascript) Using static or CSS menus for easy spidering?
FLASH Pages: Search engines still can’t read Flash. Is navigation flash-based? Or, is entire page flash? Is it possible to add simple HTML?
Framing: Frames or No frames? Iframes?
List Links: Drop down form lists as links or simple HTML links?
Java Links: Links in Javascript or flash? Search engines can’t read Java links either.
URLS: Dynamic URLS with more than 2 parameters? Or session IDs? (’&’ and ‘?’s)
Using mod_rewrite to rename dynamic URLS?
Page File Name: keyword.htm, keyword in file name. Think about root placement, trailing slashes (/), location in folders, etc.
Web bots: Robots.txt or meta tags that are preventing spidering?
Indexed pages check: site:command. How pages are within the domain? How many pages do the search engines recognize?
Set browser and CSS capabilities so font can be adjusted in windows explorer. (Aesthetic SEO)
Other Files: A. XML site map, B. urllist.txt, C. ror
Broken links check: Check and fix all broken links.
Google Webmaster Tools: Google site maps diagnostic stats -web crawl, indexed pages, similar sites, etc. Make best of Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Canonicalization: How many home pages are there? Is www or .com/index.htm redirecting to non-www?
404: Does your 404 page return a real 404 http status code? Check with a http header checker (below)

Create Template page for future new pages. Save as template.htm.

OnPage SEO and Keyword Placement

Keyword Research & Assignment: Assign 1-3 good keywords to each page.
Prioritize keywords: for h1’s and meta descriptions <hx>’s: <h1> Primary keyword, <h2> secondary keyword, etc.
Title Tags: 3 Main keywords, 5-10 words/10-60 characters
Description Tags: Rearranged title, 1st sentence in page content containing keyword, then keyword-rich sentence describing site. (w/2ndaries)
Other Meta Tags: Keyword Tag, Classification Tag, Author Tag & GOOGLEBOT Tag
Keyword Tag Thoughts: Alpha robot order. Keyword in same order as keywords in content or headers. Word Stemming, stem, stems, stemmed…
Keyword CSS File: CSS file has short main keyword name right after metas. keyword.css
Prioritize Header Tags: Make sure H1- h4 tags are in correct order and placement on page. Using your Hx’s correctly is crucial.
Logo: Set logo as background image w/css background attribute so that the <h1> can really be the 1st thing on page.
Keyword Prominence: Is the keyword in 1st 10 words of page? Prominent location in indexable content & in body text.
Table Summaries: Add keywords in particular table to the table attribute tag table. summary=”whatever in h2, or h1″
Keyword Font Attributes: Bold, CAPITALIZATION, italic, bullets, underlined, size, color.
CSS Style Names: Keywords have own untouched h1 attribute or style is named after keyword.
Keyword SEO Factors: density, proximity, frequency, prominence, surrounding content…
Body Content: 150 keyword-rich words (MINIMUM) in body content. Make sure keyword is prominent and dense.
Body Content Keyword Density: 1/20 Density - mention keyword once every 20 words. Or once every 111 characters.
Latent content: Underlying topical relevance to keyword throughout whole page and body content.
Image Alt tags: add alternative attributes to images. alt=”keyword”
Image SEO: Keyword in caption & in same cell/table as picture, matches the <hx>’s & table summaries. Is image’s file name keyword-rich?
Last 10 Words: Put keyword in last 10 words of page. 1 way to do this is by putting next to copyright. But, there’s debates on this being effective due to Search engines labeling some parts of the page duplicate or too similar each other causing those parts of pages to get filtered out.
Updated Contact Info: Are there geo-targeted keywords somewhere on page, or current business contact info on every page?
Outbound Links: Link to a site with keyword in anchor text and link title. Website linking to must have keyword in Title and Meta tags.
External Links Open in New Window: target all external links target= “_blank”. This will get you a little more time on site time. Plus the visitor may want a easy return back to the web page.
Special $ Keyword Placement: Where is that money spot to place the keyword? Where is it in the HTML coding and visually?
Bookmark Page: Add bookmark page option to all pages and right next to quality content.
Internal Linking: Create own internal linking algorithm so every time you create a page, PR is added. Internal deep linking?
Link Titles: All links have the title=” ” attribute.
Site Theming: Siloing? Keyword root directory theming keyword/phrases/seo.htm? Latent SEO theming? What type of theming is site using? This quite possibly the most effective SEO technique.
Create a Site Map: Site map links to every page for sites with under 50 pages or to the top pages.

SIMILAR + DUPLICATE CONTENT triggers and penalties

Similar Content: See if page has similar content to other pages and websites.
Titles Tag: Are first 2 words of title and meta descriptions unique? Fix all duplicate and similar titles.
Meta Tags: Duplicate meta descriptions will trigger similar content filter.
Templates: Site wide template with very little content can trigger duplicate content penalty.
Internal Linking: Several URLS pointing to same page? (sometimes dynamic) Can be good or Bad thing.
Redirected domains? http://www.domain.com vs http://domain.com | What type of redirecting is being used?
Articles/Blog Post: annotated or commented on to make it different?
Similar Pages: Interior pages that are too similar or don’t have many links pointing to= supplemental index. SUPPLEMENTAL results = no ranking for pages in queries with over 40,000 to 1,000,000 results
Typical Similar Pages: Glossary, directory, testimonials, FAQ’s, List, etc. Either make extremely different or use “nofollow” Are the helping or hurting?

Record Site Stats: link popularity, keyword SERP rankings, Alexa, density, visitors, indexed pages, etc. And record competitor’s stats too.

How old is the site or new page? Index it ASAP!!!

***Remember download time & easy navigation

This is just an on page SEO checklist of tasks and questions you should have already asked yourself. You can follow my blog for link building tips, or watch me in social networks to see how I use Web 2.0 sites to leverage my SEO initiatives.

(Sorry, but I had to take out a few to keep for myself and my buddies.)

Here’s a link to a friend of mine’s SEO checklist.