On Site SEO Checklist

At ROI, we have created an Onsite SEO Checklist to ensure that all elements will be implemented when working on our client's sites.

A checklist like this is invaluable when benchmarking the SEO status of a website. By using an onsite SEO checklist in this manner, one can see exactly which elements are not present and what steps need to be taken in order to implement them. Listed below are a few of the most important elements which should be implemented for SEO compliance.

1. URL's - All URL's should be in directory-type format. Some examples of a good URL structure are: http://www.site.com/main-category/sub-category/product.
Example of Bad URL Structure: http://www.site.com/main-category_ee02860pd

2. Meta Tags - Keyword density and proximity are two very important factors to take into consideration when populating your Meta tags.

3. Meta Keywords - Before deciding on the most appropriate Industry specific keywords, extensive keyword research need to be done for every page of the site. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to keyword spam in the Meta tag.

4. Meta Titles - These titles found in the browser window, are regarded by many as the most important onsite element to be optimised. Short and to the point should be the rule when creating your Title tags.

5. Meta Description - The Meta description can be seen as the summary of the page. This is the text that will show up in the search engine results beneath your sites title. As you may have noticed, Google for example, only displays a limited amount of text. The length of the description should be around 160 characters and this includes spaces. This description is primarily used for users to be able to know what your site or page is about, so it's worth writing a good description. If a browser views your site in the results and you have a relevant and concise description of your site, the chances are high that the user will click through to your site.

6. Image Alt Tags - Spiders can't read images or graphics. For this reason, all images used should be tagged with a short description of the image using Alt tags. The Alt tag should make sense and accurately describe your image.

7. Internal Linking - Internal Links are the links pointing to and from the other pages of your site. Users find their way around your site either through the navigational tabs or through internal links in the content of the page. Anchor text within the content should be used to point the user in the direction of a page with further information. In essence, the keyword used as anchor text will serve the purpose of telling the user what information this link leads to. For example, the anchor text "SEO should lead to a page on your site containing more information on SEO.
Internal linking has another purpose. Spiders also use links as the "doorways" to the next page and if there isn't any way for the spiders to navigate through your site, the site will not be correctly spidered in its entirety.

8. WWW and non-WWW domains - Many developers make the mistake of keeping their sites live on both the www and non-www domain. For example, your site is live on www.domain.com and the same site is also live on domain.com.
This is something that should altogether be avoided, as this will represent an exact replica of your site. Google does not appreciate duplicated content. You might not get penalized through rankings, but you are losing power by having more than one of the same site.

9. Sitemaps - There are two kinds of sitemaps. Firstly, you have the static sitemap, which is a graphical representation of the architecture of the site. The static sitemap is for the users to be able to browse and explore the site easily. Then we have the XML Sitemap. This sitemap is not visible to the user and is used by Google to crawl the site effectively. The advantage of uploading a XML Sitemap is that Google will be able to crawl all URL's of the site even if the internal linking structure isn't up to scratch.

10. Graphical Text - Many developers use graphics above the fold. The problem with this is that the text used in the graphic is more often than not also graphical text. As mentioned above, spiders are unable to read images, so the text in the graphical image will not be spidered and indexed.

11. Site Tracking - Google provides webmasters with fantastic free tools, such as Analytics and Webmaster Tools, to track the progress of your site and also to view any problems with your site i.e. 404 error pages that need to be fixed. Create an account immediately and make use of these tools.

12. Robots.txt - When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it will look for a special file, which is also usually located on your site. That file is called robots.txt and it tells the search engine spider which webpage's of your site should be indexed and which webpage's should be ignored. There may be some information that you do not want indexed in the Search Engines, for this purpose you should utilize your Robots.txt file.

And last, but definitely not least...

13. Content - The content on your site is of utmost importance! Information is the driving factor behind all of us who use the web. Content can be the one element that will drive your rankings up in all Search Engines. The main purpose of Google is to provide the most relevant and reliable information to the user, based on the queries they use to search. This is why the smart people at Google spend so much time perfecting their search results. It's all about the content!
Always create unique and relevant information for your site and make sure that there is plenty of it!

So there you have it, ensure that these elements are implemented when creating onsite SEO for a site this is a great start for achieving those top rankings.