I wanted to create a SEO check list for every website that I work on, that way I could go back and reference it after finishing up a site. These methods are proven and if you follow this SEO checklist as well, then you will have increased traffic on your site too. If you want proof of it working, you can check out my other post Search Engine Optimization Techniques where I explain more in detail about all these points. This check list is just a quick guide to help remind you of whats left to finish on the website to optimize it for Search engine ranking. Here we go:
- First, you need to validate all of your webpages on your site (meaning your html code needs to not have any errors or warnings in it). This is the most important step because if the bot can’t index your page then how is it going to know how to categorize it. You can do that here: w3c Markup Validation Service
- Select the keywords that pertain to your particular post or page. Its important to select your keywords using a Keyword Tool, like Google Adwords Keyword Tool, so you know how many people are searching the specific terms you are choosing and which ones have the least competition.
- Insert your keywords into these parts of the webpage:
- Title – Very important, the title appears in the search engine results page as the link, Google uses the title tag for determining page relevance and ranks the page higher if the saearch phrase is found in the title.
- URL – Your keywords should be used in the url that specific page, either in the directory or file name. Its good to use hyphens instead of a space in naming convention.
- headings – Every page should have a heading <h1> tag, and the keywords should be used in this and the h1 tag should be used only once.
- Text – In the text on your page, its very important to use the keywords in the first part of your webpage content. Also, if there is a small amount of text on the page it could cause the page to be ranked poorly too.
- keywords Meta Tag – Every webpage should have the keywords used in “Keywords Meta Tag”. You add this line of code in between the <head> tags:<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your specific keywords” >
- Description Meta Tag – You add them like this:<meta name=”description” content=”A description sentence about your page or post pertaining to your keywords” >
- Links – Use keywords in your links instead of using “click here” or phrases like that.
- Images – all <img> tags should use the alt attribute using the keywords
- Include a robots.txt file in the site root of your website. Even if the robots.txt file is blank upload one to your server because it will prevent your site from producing error messages every time a search engine spider visits your site.
- Include a sitemap.xml file in the site root of your website. There is a website that will automate or help you create/ edit a sitemap.xml file, it called xml-sitemaps.com.
This is just a really quick seo check list that will dramatically help with your websites overall SEO, but if you don’t think your site is being indexed by google still, you can go to google.com/addurl and add your site url and google will start to index your site.
Cya
