Checklist for SEO

14 December, 2010

A high search engine results position or SERP cannot be earned overnight. However, here is a checklist to guide you on what important factors to consider when doing search engine optimisation or SEO.

• Domain name and page titles – it helps if your domain name and page titles contain your primary keyword.
• Keywords – embed in your web content keywords that are being searched for in relation to your website. Use keywords and their synonyms in titles, headings, and body of articles.
• Keyword density – this is the percentage of keywords to the web content text. The ideal density is around 2%, but do check with competition what density they’re using. Do not overstuff your content with keywords though because this is considered spamming.
• White hat SEO – use only good techniques in optimising your website. Bad techniques like spamming, cloaking, hiding text, link farming, and having mirror pages can result in your website being blacklisted or penalised.
• Separate content and presentation – this can be done by putting all your presentation code in cascading style sheets or CSS. This makes your HTML files up to 50% smaller, as well.
• Robots.txt – placing this file in the root of your website code will help search engine bots to not get 404 errors.
• Content quality and quantity – great content will keep visitors coming back to your website. Place as much information as you can but make certain that your content is credible and written well. Creating great content is a vital part of SEO.
• Static URLs – some search engines encounter issues when indexing web pages in php or asf. To solve this, you must avoid creating dynamic URLs, use static ones instead.
• Site map – created a well-constructed site map that details all of the pages in your website, as well as active links to each of them.
• Site design and theme – choose your design and theme carefully. You will rank better if you focus on one theme or topic. Search engine crawlers will detect your theme through the kinds of keywords you use. As for design, use SEO to make it appealing to both users and search engines.
• Alternatives to frames – provide alternative ways for search engines to crawl and index your website. This is because some search engines can hardly follow frame links.
• Title tags and meta description – create a unique title tag that contains two or three keywords for each of your web pages. Title tags are the first things users see in search results. In conjunction with your title tags are meta descriptions that should help raise your keyword relevance.
• Author tags – this will help your company name rank higher in search results.
• Robot tags – placing this in your pages will instruct robots to crawl those pages.
• Change content – alter your content as you deem fit. It is necessary to edit your content as part of SEO.