SEO Checklist
The following list of tips and techniques should be implemented by all web site owners to improve their SEO.
Key Words / Phrases
- Try and use key phrases whenever possible rather than individual words.
- Try and focus on only a couple of key phrases per page
- Use the key phrases in page <title> tags and <h1>, <h2>.. tags
- Try and include key words in your site urls
- Place important key words towards the top of the document
- Use secondary words and phrases for your keywords to improve coverage
- Use keywords in image alt tags, ensuring they still describe the image effectively
- Ensure the meta description tag contains keywords while still summarising the page's content
Content
- Have keyword rich content that is unique on every page
- Regularly update or add new content
- Use bold and italic styles to highlight key words and phrases
Read more about content for SEO.
Links
- Ensure anchor text in incoming links from external sites use your keywords
- While less important, also use keyword based links for internal linking too
- Try and increase the amount of highly ranked, popular websites that link to you. These sites need to be of a similar topic to your own for best results.
- Add yourself to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar high ranking directories to increase quality inbound links.
- Check for any broken links on your website
- Try to limit the amount of outgoing links on your website
- Don't link to untrustworthy sites as you may be penalised
Web Development
- Put all Javascript and stylesheets in external includes
- Avoid splash / doorway pages
- Validate and check every page and stylesheet against the W3C validator
- Provide alternate content where flash or other media rich content is used
- Provide a sitemap to allow easy indexing of your pages
- Avoid using images as text whenever possible
- Avoid using frames
- Use clean urls whenever possible rather than lengthy dynamic ones
For more information about how we can help optimise your website please send us a web development enquiry.
