Website Optimisation Checklist

SEO ChecklistIt’s important to get the ratio of S.E.O. techniques, and overall performance from a website, if you want to get your site seen. Use the following steps to ensure you’re doing everything you can, and everything properly to get good organic results.
 

1. Title tags, make them unique to every page, duplicate titles don’t do so well with Google and other search engines, try to include your most vital keywords in your titles, without over burdening it. If you are a plumber avoid such titles as “Plumbing Nottingham, Nottingham plumbing, Plumbers in Nottingham.” And focus on a cleaner yet just as effective substitute such as “Doo Dah Plumbers : Professional Plumbing services in Nottingham.”
 

2. Remember that your site isn’t just accessed by humans, spiders regularly crawl your pages to keep listings up-to-date and indexed properly. It is important that your site is friendly to spiders to ensure that it gets the full potential from its pages.
 
Content:
It’s important to remember that your content has to viable to spiders, this doesn’t mean slamming your pages full of keywords, it means creating original clean content and ensuring that it shows what you’re about. Remember that spiders can’t see your images, so always try and make your content as clear as possible.
 
META & Alt tags:
Spiders can’t see images, so you need to provide alt tags for each image, try and keep them short and sweet but descriptive, such as “Double glazing in Nottingham.” Meta data should also be unique to your pages, each page should have a short description and unique keywords, explaining what that exact page is about.
 
Spider Crawlability:
If spiders can’t see images, you can imagine the trouble they have with flash and script alike, so try and provide accurate text replacements specifically for spiders and screen reader users.
 

3. If your website is created via a shopping cart program, CMS, or any dynamic program, try and arrange rename links to be more S.E.O. compliant, a lot of pages within shopping cart systems just become bland titles such as /store.php, try and give something more unique and direct, for example /a3-products-nottingham.php. Also, a lot of websites with generally have option to be set S.E.O. measures, ensure these are set to on or yes.
 

4. You’ve got the space so use it, see the bit at the bottom of your page, get some internal links in there! Putting some links in your footer to your most important pages can often help S.E.O. as spiders have more of a wide crawl area. Though, be cautious, if you fill it with hundreds, then the entire idea of having the most important sites is wasted.
 

5. If you haven’t got them, then you should have; Site maps. There are multiple sites that can create xml and html sitemaps for you. Get these uploaded to the relevant search engines and link the sitemaps to allow better crawling of your site. E.G.: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
 

6. Backlinking and affiliation can be brilliant for getting your name about, however, be careful who you share links with as there black hat methods could get you into trouble too, and finish with your site getting sandboxed. If you have a good strategy though, these can improve your S.E.O. tenfold, using forums, directories and social feeds to get your name around can really help, vary your link, description and the url accordingly, as in; don’t always direct everything to your home page.
 

This is the most important thing to remember though, not all results are instantaneous, S.E.O. can take time, and a lot of patience, remember, this is a very competitive field, but don’t give up, just keep practicing your techniques, varying your content and your strategies, and take full advantage of the tools that are there for you.
 

Below are some useful links that you should consider using to improve your S.E.O. campaign.
 
Webmasters from Google – A brilliant development exclusively to help you interact with your sites SEO efforts.
 
Woo-rank – An ideal tool for measuring your sites performance and obtaining reports directly regarding your site. (If you use Google Chrome, you can get an app directly for your browser).
 
YouTube – That’s right… YouTube! Brilliant for watching a massive array of videos whether it be about S.E.O., web design, or even bicycle riding madmen… but for the purposes of this post; we’ll stick to S.E.O. videos.

 

And there you have it, the basics to optimising your site!

PDF Download Button