Every SEOer has his/her own SEO checklist, and it needs to be adjusted quite often for different types of clients. So few days ago, I decided to build this full lists on my blog, so it’s easier for me to find it anywhere anytime, and maybe it can help you as well.
I know this list is far away from perfect, and I will update it on weekly basis. Therefore, I need your help, if I made any mistake (even grammer), please point out, if you have any good point that hasn’t been in this checklist, please let me know by leaving the comments. As a return, I would love to place your link (dofollow) either in reference or contributor if you make this list better.
seo checklist
#Domain registration#
Brainstorm keywords that best describe your business
- Find one-word or two-word terms, don’t exceed three-word
Ask yourself if your business is limited within a country or not.
- Choose .com or .co.uk (or other tld) wisely. If you choose TLD other than .com, do buy .com as well and set up 301 redirection.
Create a unique and short domain.
- E.g. for keyword “seo”, “seomoz.com” is 100 times better than “bestseocompany.com”
Check potential trademark infringement before you register the domain
Find local reliable hosting provider
- If your business is within UK, then find a UK web host.
Choose between dedicated IP or shared IP
- If you are company, make sure to use dedicated IP; if you are just having a blog, make sure to check if your IP is on the ban list
#Keyword research checklist#
Turn off personalised search
- Personalised search may influence keywords ranking check
Write down the main services you provide
- Some of them or all of them will be your core keywords
- Make sure you have individual pages for each of your core keywords
Expand the keywords (10-20 for each core keyword, may expand even more in the future)
- Find possible long-tail keywords around core keywords. E.g. for core keywords “search engine optimisation”, you may want to have long-tail keywords such as “seo checklist” and “seo ranking factors”. These topics are extremely relevant to core keywords and will benefit core keywords in the future.
Analyse the difficulties to rank these keywords
- Use SEO tools to find out how difficult these keywords are to rank on 1st page of SERP
- Analyse competitors to understand how strong they are in terms of on-page optimisation and global link popularity.
#Web structure checklist#
Turn off cookies and Disable JavaScript
- You may find preference setting problems by turning off cookies
- Check is global navigation still working after disabling JavaScript
Keep site structure flat
- best to keep within three levels
Minimise potential page loading speed problem
- external CSS and JavaScript minifying
Robots.txt
- prevent googlebot from crawling some pages you don’t want google to see
Use HTML
- Minimise the use of Ajax, iFrame, JavaScript, Flash…etc, best to avoid them
Valid HTML & CSS
- Does not do any harm to website’s performance on search engine unless there are severe errors which affect crawling
Broken link
- Make sure there is no broken link, especially for important pages. There is debate about
Sitemap
- Both html version and xml version
Browser compatibility
- Make sure website is compatible with evil IE series
Keywords mapping
- Assign appropriate topics throughout the pages
Keyword cannibalisation
- Be wary of keyword cannibalisation and make sure to link from subtopics to main topics. E.g. you may want to have a link back to “SEO checklist” page on “the best SEO checklist” blog entry
Short and descriptive URLs
- It’s not always good practice to have all your keywords in your service or product page’s url, especially they are long and hard to remember. E.g. example.com/they-are-long-and-hard-to-remember, the better practice would be example.com/long. But for blog posts, it’s another story.
Internal linking
- Set up links between pages, e.g. you offer SEO service and PPC service, if you mentioned PPC in your SEO service, do link it to PPC page.
#On-page optimisation checklist#
Keyword in title
- Remember to put most appropriate keyword in title tag
- Never do keyword stuffing
- Keep your title descriptive and within 65 characters
- The earlier position a keyword has, the more weight it will have. (But balance it wisely if your brand name has to be first)
Keyword in URL
- As mentioned before, keep it short and descriptive
Keyword in H1
- SEOmoz claimed that keyword in H1 is not as important as it used to be
- H1 is intuitive to visitors to let them know what a page is about
- Think about usability before you put keyword in H1
Keyword in content
- Never keyword stuffing
- Use synonyms
Keyword in image alt tag
- Put keyword in image alt tag
Keyword in image file name
- Both search engine and human being hate something like “ASDA2312asdas.jpg” right?
Keyword in bold
- Keyword in bold and italic have same weight
Keyword in first 100 words
- It’s a good practice to have the most important keyword in first 100 words, my personal experience was I couldn’t be bothered to read the whole article sometimes…
Canonical tag
- Make sure to have a canonical tag on every important page pointing to correct url
Meta description- Only affect click through rate
- Sometimes it’s better to let spider judge what to show in meta description
- Quality links from local websites
Outbound links
- Better not to exceed 150 outbound links
Anchor text
- Although there is no evidence to prove anchor texts of internal links will affect ranking, but do it for the sake of web usability
#Local SEO#
Claim local business listing
- Google local business center
- Yahoo! Local
- MSN local
Local data providers
- Every country has different primary local data providers
Local business listing address in city of search
Local business listing with proper category
- Make sure to list your company in the most appropriate category
Keyword in local business listing title
- Never keyword stuffing
- Keep descriptive
Keyword in local business listing description
- Never keyword stuffing
- Keep descriptive
Location in local business listing title
Location in local business listing description
Keyword in local business listing customer fields
- List your main services or products
Address on every page
- Search engine is very smart to recognise your address
- Having address on all pages not only help search engine but also your visitors
Regular SEO process with local search in mind
- Keyword in title
- Keyword in content
#Link building#
Don’t build links just for link building
- Don’t spam comments and social media profiles
- Use comments and social media to communicate, you will get quality traffic and links in the long run
Partner- It’s reasonably easy to ask your partner to do you a favor and link to you
Directories
- Premium and high quality directories such as yahoo directory and business.com
- Niche directories
Quality content
- Provide something useful and other websites don’t offer. Such as quality articles or even tools.
Content syndication- Publish compelling articles on authoritative article directories
Guest blogging- Many high quality blogs accept guest blogging, win-win
Widgets- Must be relevant to the content of the page receiving the link
Reverse engineering competitor’s link- One of the oldest techniques to find possible link sources
Reciprocal links
- This is devalued since 2006, but if you have highly relevant websites to exchange links, why not, at least more potential visitors.
Comments, forums, social networks…etc
- Most of these links are either devalued or having “nofollow” tags, but it can attract traffic and generate potential opportunities for others to link to you.
Press Release
- Optimise your press release so it’s easier to get picked up by media editors
Link buying- Money makes things easy, doesn’t it? But be wary of potential penalty, it’s not funny if you get caught. But many companies purchased links and dominated the SERP, well, report them, pray they will get caught and keep working on building natural links.
#Web site/page performance#
Check if domain is penalised
- Search for domain name, if it’s not indexed, you are in trouble [Added by Tola.F: This only applies to website which has established history, it often takes few weeks for new website to get indexed by search engines]
Check how many pages are indexed
- Sometimes “site:example.com” is not accurate
Check duplicated content
- If duplicated contents are found, check canonical tag
Check primary keywords ranking
Check total # of links and # of domains link back
Check anchor text distribution
References:
There are many many resources that I’ve read, but unfortunately I cannot remember all of them, so I will list the primary resources here. More references will be placed here if you leave useful resources in the comment (that can make this list better)
David Mihm local ranking factors
Contributors
If you contribute something great to this list, you will be placed here (with a link)
Related posts:
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Frank, you may also want to indicate benchmarking & measurement practices.
Eg. how to benchmark against 3 key indices:
1. # Pages on Site indexed
2. Traffic coming through from search engines aggregate and for specific key pages
3. Quality of traffic coming through to the site from search engines, in terms of goal conversion
Nice list Frank! Will be useful for me
It’s always nice to read a list like this and feel that you’re well on the right path already.
There seems to be some discussion that meta descriptions may be more relevant again due to movements towards more personalized search results.
Have you heard much about this? Can you offer any insight?
Im new to all this Seo tech and as of now i have spent months deep into this study. We produce HD video content as well as commercial vids and documentaries.
If you know of anyone interested in exchanging services lets move forward. While this topic is of utmost importance it is not my specialty and serves as a distraction of our goal to produce audio visual media. Lets network and rise up.
Nice post, since you said “grammer”, I would like to tell you that it’s “grammar”, Never mind.
Great work, looking forward to updates on this
I am new to SEO too, this is a great article, reading it for the second time, gonna try and apply this to my site and see how it goes. Thanks a lot Frank
Good article with lot of information. We should remember also that we have to “add value” to search engines in order to get the best results. Unique and quality content is the key either for content or backlink purposes. Do not try black hat techniques, they are just temporary fix.
Hi Frank,
Nice list you’ve got here… There are a couple of things I’ll like to add to that though.
First, in reference to placing your keyword and company name on the title tag, I always suggest you place the company name first on the home page, and then all subsequent pages can have the keywords before the company name. But in a situation where the company name IS the domain name, I don’t see the point in putting it in the title tag again (waste of good keyword optimisation if you ask me!)
Secondly, You see to check if the website isn’t indexed then that’s trouble. I’ll suggest to avoid misunderstanding you should state this is for old sites. Or sites a least a few weeks old, seeing as new sites take a while to get indexed by the search engines.
That’s my two cents of suggestions, hope it helps!
Cheers…
this site is excellent………
Frank,
Being reasonably new to SEO in particular, I have gone through the process a number of times for recent websites – it’s amazing how much you can overlook. It’s about time I started tostructure my SEO efforts from this point onwards and your list will help A LOT with this process, so many thanks for your effort.
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