SEO Checklists – On-site SEO

Making sure that your website is an optimised as possible for the search engines is one of the simplest and most cost effective ways of improving your search engine rankings.  The time taken to make on-site changes can be very small in relation to going out and link building.  If you have full control of your own site, these changes are even easier to implement, however things can get tricky if you are using an off the shelf CMS or have one written by someone else who charges each time you need something changing.

I’m quite lucky that the sites I work on for Pin Digital are all built by us so we have full control of the site.  Most of the on-site SEO factors below are controllable via the admin.  So if possible I’d recommend getting a development company who can do the same as this can make a lot of difference to your SEO.

So I’ve put together a checklist of on-site SEO factors so that you don’t miss any simple things and are doing everything possible to rank well.

Why on-site SEO matters

Firstly, remember that by optimising your website for the search engines, your goals are the following -

• Allowing the search engines to easily crawl and index your content
• Make it easy for the search engines to work out what your website is about

1. META Data

• META Page titles are all unique, keyword driven, read well and include all key points before 70 characters
• META descriptions are all unique, include website USPs and are about 140 characters
• No use of any META tags excluding pages from being indexed unless necessary

2. Page URLs

• Page URLs are clean, keyword driven and reflect the category structure of the website
• Dashes are used as word separators instead of underscores
• URL lengths are kept as short and descriptive as possible
• Only one version of each page exists, eg no product pages in more than one category on an Ecommerce website

3. Images

• All images have accurate ALT tags with keywords if possible
• Image file names contain a keyword describing the image
• Images have a title or description very close which also describes the image

4. Header Tags

• Each page contains a H1 tag to describe the overall content of the page
• Each page contains a H2 tag to describe products, sub-sections or paragraph headings

5 . Canonical Issues

• Only one version of homepage
• Check www. vs non-www
• Check no extra extensions such as .com/index.html or .com/home.  If these exist, a 301 has been implemented to the correct version

6. Tracking

• Google Analytics has been installed
• Google Webmaster Tools has been installed
• PPC Conversion tracking setup if appropriate
• Keyword searches on the site are being tracked

7. Internal Links, navigation and site structure

• Internal links all point to absolute URLs
• Internal links use descriptive anchor text for the page being linked to
• Use of rel=”nofollow” is used where appropriate such as on links to secure and login pages
• All links are crawlable by the search engines – they don’t use javascript or are located in flash
• Key pages are linked from the homepage
• Navigation is not powered by flash or javascript that the search engines can’t execute and follow
• Large chunks of content are broken up by text anchors

8. Content and Keyword Use

• Each page contains target keywords
• Keywords are located in content as near the start of HTML as possible
• Each page contains content that describes the page
• Use of bold, italics and underline tags on keywords where appropriate

9. Sitemaps

• XML sitemaps created and submitted to the search engines
• HTML sitemap created for users, or several sitemaps for very large websites

10. Robots.txt

• Robots.txt created if required to stop certain content from being indexed

11. Outbound Links

• The website links out to relevant, high quality, authoritative websites
• All outbound links work

Tags: on-site seo, SEO, seo checlists