SEO SEM Check List - Avanindra

1.Valid XHTML

validate document through the W3C Markup Validation Service - http://validator.w3.org/

2.Title Tag

Every page needs a distinct title tag that defines what that page is about, it should also contain the keywords for that page in a locigal coherant manner, not just randomly placed in there. Build relevancy, matching title and H1 tags are a very wise idea.

This tag belongs in the section of your page and should appear before any other tags in the head section, it is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing you'll put on the page so make it count and make it relevant!
* Example:

3.Description

Under the title tag each page should have a clear and relevant description summarising what that page is about.
* Example:


4.Keywords
Every page needs the keywords tag that if you didn't guess it contains the keywords you're page is relevant to.

* Example:


5.Alternate media / Mobile version
Take a look around, people are surfing everywhere and making your site accessible to them gives them access to your content wherever they are without the need to be tied to a desk.
* Example:


Staggering number of people browsing the web on mobile devices, iPhones, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile and a whole plethora of smartphones. If you're got nice clean markup and not bloated your site with flash and javascript the chances are it may possibly work well on a mobile device.

You can then tell the search engines spiders about your mobile site using the link rel tag and setting the media as handheld.


Mowser rocks, if your site shows Google AdSense it will convert your normal AdSense ad units into 'AdSense for Mobile Content' ad units. Way cool.

A more advanced way to deliver a mobile site would be to detect any mobile phones that visit your site so you can serve them a custom experience suited for their handset
* My mobile device detection function written in PHP - http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/
* Check how well your mobile site might perform - http://ready.mobi/


6. Navigational structure
A site that is easy to navigate from a humand point of view is easy to navigate from a spider / search engine point of view. Think of your site as a virtual town, each page is a street and in order for people to find that street you need to ensure you have easy to undertstand signs (links) pointing out where they are.



7.Popularity filtering / Folksonomy

Show links to your most popular content on every page or make them a big part of navigation to place emphasis on the pages that are being viewed the most, do this with sales, aggregate your internal search queries.


* See the Wikipedia article on Folksonomy for a better understanding of the concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy



8.Alt tag on images

To add relevancy to your images you should use the alt tag to specify some short descriptive, keyword rich text. This will show in the place of the image whilst the image is loading and will be shown instead of the image when the visitor can't view images either because they've got a visual imparement and are using a screen reading tool or they disabled images in their browser settings.

Also, using relevant file names in your images will help build relevancy, image1.jpg doesn't say anything of any value whereas seo-checklist.jpg speaks volumes!

9.Title on hyperlinks

Adding a title element to a hyperlink will show whatever you put inside that element in a little bubble when the user places their mouse over the link. This is another way of reinforcing the relevancy we're trying to build.

* Example: SEO Checklist



10.Keywords in page / file names

If you have a page all about SEO tips but you called the file page_6.htm there is no relevancy, that page would hold better value if it were titled seo-tips.htm



Try to make your file names and URLs easy to understand and read from a human point of view. /seo-tips.html is easy for the mind to understand /page_6.php?paramter1=2&paramater2=1 is just confusing for humans.

Firefox has the most awesome search facility in the address bar, making URLs and file names easy to understand and keyword rich makes it easier for users to find you again.



11.Keywords in domain
Try to include your keywords in your domain name putting the most important keywords first if you can.

A site about SEO Tips that is hosted at www.pettravelinsurance.net is giving off very mixed signals indeed. It would be much better off hosted at www.seo-tips.com or www.seotips.com - try to include your keywords in your domain name putting the most important keywords first if you can.


12.Keywords in links both internally and externally
Make sure all your links work and the keywords used in the URL, title and anchor text all tie up with the content of the page.
Remember, if you're linking to internal pages try to use the same text in the link anchor as what appears on the page in the title tag.


A quality link on your site will contain all the elements we've just covered, here's an example of a bangingly good hyperlink
* Example: SEO Checklist

As far as a search engine goes it isn't going to have any issues at all working out what that page is going to be about.

It contains keywords in the URL, keywords in the title and keywords in the anchor text. How could even an idiot fail to understand what the page on the end of that link is about!?!? Just make sure all your links work and the keywords used in the URL, title and anchor text all tie up with the content of the page.

That link above points to a page with a title of 'SEO Checklist' and a H1 tag saying 'SEO Checklist' - everything ties up perfect.


13.robots.txt

robots.txt is a small text file that tells seach engine spiders which parts of your site you want them to view and which parts of your site you don't want them to view. Create a plain text file called robots.txt and upload it to your main www / htdocs / public_html directory

This is the contents of the robots.txt file I uploaded to http://seochecklist.mobi/robots.txt

User-Agent: *

Allow: /
* robotstxt.org has this page http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html which again is a perfect example of keywords in a domain and in the filename and explains robots.txt in a nutshell



14.XML sitemap

XML sitemaps help search engines discover content they might not have otherwise found during their regular spiderings, publishing a site map with a comprehensive list of all the pages on your site is a way to directly tell the engines what you have and where it is!

Google has a good article on XML sitemaps and afterall it's traffic from Google you're most wanting so you know you're gonna click it!


15.CONTENT IS KING!

Always write your content for humans not spiders.




16.RSS feeds

RSS stands for really simply syndication and is a pretty simple way to syndicate your content so it's easy to publish on other people's sites. Each site that uses your RSS feed earns you near real-time backlinks, feeds can be harvested by Google, Outlook, a number of sites and applications, allowing users to connect to you through updates without them having to check your site every day. I monitor a number of feeds in my Outlook, it lets me scan the headline and content to see if I want to click through to read the page behind it all.

RSS is a valuable tool for both getting links on other sites and getting your content into the inbox of your visitors.

For stats on how many times your feed is being accessed there's a free service available over at http://feedburner.com/ Take a wild and random guess who owns it now? I'll give you a clue, it begins with a G and ends in oogle. Begs the question: do they rank the sites behind the most popular feeds higher?


17.Social bookmarking tools

Social bookmarking tools will easily let your visitors bookmarks and share your site, this not only makes it easier for them to come back again but it adds to the number of inbound links you have pointing to your site and should increase your traffic.


Adding a free tool like this makes it easy for your visitors to bookmark your site on popular sites like Twitter, Facebook and many many more. Whilst social networking can in this case be great and a traffic bringer it's something personally I've sacked in favour of actually phoning and seeing people instead, I've reclaimed many hours and liberated myself from being sucked into what I feel is total time killing junk.


This service also works on mobile devices allows visitors to your mobile site to share and bookmark you on the mobile versions of the most popular social networking site.


18.Publish fresh content often (spider you more often )

Google and the search engines love fresh content, if you publish new content often they'll be excited by it, they'll spider you more often and be prone to send you more visitors. There's nothing exciting about a site that's stagnating and was last updated in March 2001. Fresh content to spiders is like the smell of freshly baked bread to us humans, they love it, it gives them an appetite for your site and will want to feast on your new content.

Using dynamic methods like aggregating the most popular content and showing it is a way of emulating freshness in that the engines will see your site update often with relevent keywords. Whilst nothing compares with freshly squeezed content dynamic changes on the site can be viewed as a good thing.



19.Tweet when publishing content

When you publish new content push a Tweet to Twitter, freshly published content bring in instant visitors thanks to it being Tweeted.

* Twitter API - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/


Personally I can no longer stand Twitter, I agreed with David Cameron when he said 'Too many tweets make a twat' on Absolute Radio. However from an SEO persepective it has benefits, millions and millions of users, trending topics, hashtags and a growing number of sites and applications on mobile that allow you to search twitter means that pushing your links to it are invaluable.


20.Blog when publishing content

Most if not all blogging or web publishing platforms include an option to ping a number of sites to tell them that you've published fresh content, you can integrate your own ping service when publishing content though it would be simpler to run a relevant blog about your site and publish a post when you've just released fresh content.
* See this post for a list of popular ping services: http://seoblackhat.com/2005/09/05/rss-ping-list/




21.Place your keywords in many tags

H1, H2, H3, LI, P, B - I don't mean stuff the keywords in every tag you can, I mean use your keyword wisely in a number of tags, H1 is the most important tag after the title tag, having your keywords in a number of tags, in bold and in links just reinforces your relevancy.


22.Don't build your entire site in flash unless you don't want traffic!

Spiders find it hard to understand what flash is saying, yes it might look damn pretty and swirly and do funky things when you move your mouse around but it it can't be read by search engine spiders, those on screen readers or mobile devices there's no much point in it.

Keep flash to a minimum, use it for eye candy and funk but don't build a whole site with the stuff, spiders can't read it, there's no keeping of state between pages and nagivating flash can be a nightmare sometimes.



23.Follow Webmaster Guidelines
* Google Webmaster Guidelines
* Bing / MSN Guidelines for successful indexing


24.Don't link to junk

Only ever link to external websites that are QUALITY, many SEO folks would say never link to anything that's less than PageRank 3 but really if it's well written relevant content with relevant anchor text on your page you're onto a winner.

Simply never link to crap, the links away from your site as as valuable as the internal ones, you don't want to send traffic to a junky site as the visitor you're sending there is going to think less of you for doing so, they'll class you as being less authorative that they did before they clicked the duff link and search engines will view links to junk in the same way.

Only link to relevant, high quality pages and sites. Always use anchor text in those links that bring benefit to your page and has relevancy to the page you're linking to.



25.Publish content that is worth linking to

You need to be publishing content that is rich enough in quality that other site owners will want to link to it. If you can do that then the hard long slog of a job that is link building will be much easier. If you publish content that is worth linking to and make it easy for folks to share the content and link to the page through the social network bookmarking services like addthis.com you're even more likely to win.



26.Avoid duplicating pages / duplicate content sucks!

Duplicate content sucks, all the search engines hate it. Near the very top of this list it mentions having UNIQUE title tags, UNIQUE is the important bit here. Make sure all your pages are different, it shows a well organised site and face it as a human if you clicked a link on a page and it took you to an identicle page you'd be a little confuzzled, same applies to the bots. Don't confuzzle your users and don't confuzzle the bots. (Confuse and puzzle if you're on the other side of the irony filter that is the atlantic)



27.Host all images and media files under your URL

Don't leach of other folks bandwitdh, host all the images on your site on your site. This gives you control over the file names so you can optimise them to suit your needs, it also makes you look more authorative than a site that leaches it's content from another source.


28.Use Google alerts to monitor your keywords and contribute where you can

Google Alerts is an invaluable free service that lets you keep an eye on what's coming up on the Google radar for the given search term. This then lets you check out that page and if the content is relevant and there is the opportunity to publish a comment you should do your best to add something valuable to earn a back link.

Note the word contribute, don't spam, no seriously don't spam, it's a bad habit and yeilds no rewards, contributions that are valid and relevant bring something to table and as such the author often gets a credit via a link. Some would protest that blogs use nofollow on external links but the real thing about getting traffic is you want humans and real users, funny eh, real users and humans read blogs. Contribute, get your link there regardlesss of nofollow and it will bring you traffic.Contextual contributions are fine, link spam should be a shootable offence.

Another reason to not spam is Akismet, a spam filter for the WordPress bloggin system, if your URL is added to that you're comments on any WordPress blog will go to trash and never be published, consider it bad karma for link spamming.
* Create a Google Alert - http://www.google.com/alerts



29.Use Google Analytics to monitor your traffic, conversions and keywords

Because if you don't how do you measure your success? Making money is one thing, knowing what your money terms are and where the money comes from it another.


30.Use Google WebMaster Tools

It will tell you which pages have duplicate titles, which URLs are broken and much more


31.Use Google AdSense

It brings in bots and forces Google to browse your content in order for them to show relevant ads, whilst they deny making preference to sites that show AdSense getting Google to come by and check out your site so they can show relevant content is not only priceless in my mind but a revenue generator too that you could reinvest in marketing your site.


32.Don't try anything daft or dodgy

Google is smarter than you are, they'll bust your ass if you try to blag them. They know, they can bin you from results so it's better to play it safe, be honest and be in it for the long game than try to sneakily get to the top of the results to be blown out the water a later time. I refer to the point above about webmaster guidelines, it's better to follow them than break them.