Ultimate SEO Checklist
Here is a quick checklist of SEO tasks to complete for any website that you want to optimize:
1. Pick a few keywords or key phrases to optimize for. You will need to do your research to see which words and phrases are already saturated. For example, one of the key phrases I’m optimizing for Decent Global is fashion jewelry.
2. Optimize TITLE tags for all pages. Aim for a max of 70 characters in the title.
3. ALT descriptions to all images, relevant ones. Do NOT keyword stuff your ALT tags.
4. Add META descriptions and META keywords to all pages. Keep descriptions under 150 characters and use less than 10 META keywords.
5. Use <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> header tags appropriately to draw attention to important text on a page. You can also bold important text.
6. Optimize URL structure (also called URL rewriting). No ugly dynamic strings should be in your URL’s.
7. Make sure your content has the proper keyword density. I believe the proper density is 2% to 6%. Use the SEO for FireFox add-on to check this.
8. If possible, move to a domain that has a keyword you need in its domain name (i.e. www.fashionjewelry.com). Register that domain for more than one year. Search engines may trust your domain more if you do.
9. Create quality backlinks. No spamming and no link buying. The best places to leave backlinks are pages with medium to high PR that have content that is relevant to the keywords you are optimizing for. Your anchor text (the stuff that goes between your <a> tag) should NOT be your site name. It should be a keyword or phrase that you are optimizing for.
10. Enter your site into website registries (like DMOZ or Yahoo). Search engines will trust your site more if it is listed in a quality website registry (one with human reviewers that don’t accept spammy sites).
Some extras:
- Use Google Webmaster to check how Google is indexing your website. Fix any errors you see.
- Use a robots.txt file to block search engines from indexing content that you don’t want indexed.
- Use nofollow on links (inbound or outbound) that you do not want to pass link juice to.
- Search “site:www.yourdomain.com” on Google to view your indexed pages and check to see that the titles and descriptions are all correct.
- Get your site’s HTML and CSS validated by using the Site Validate tool by W3. Try to follow established web standards as often as possible.
- Use the Website Grader tool to check your SEO progress and compare that to your competitors progress.
And that’s it. Remember, this checklist is not all-inclusive but it is a good start for anyone trying to tackle SEO.