My SEO Checklist / Basic Strategy

Jan 17, 2011 by Dan Bochichio

I’ve often been asked by colleagues, friends, and clients a simple but valid question. “What is your process for doing SEO on a website?” – usually this is followed up by a few questions before I can even begin to answer it. Every situation is different. Is it SEO on a currently existing site, or a brand new site? Is the new site live or still under construction? If it already exists, did the old web developer do or know much about SEO? These are all important factors that will effect my entire SEO procedure, plan, and solution.

Code & Image Optimization

There are many things you can do to your code to help increase your SEO efforts. Some are obvious and others are often overlooked. Code optimization can increase efficiently, reduce server strain, and increase your website’s overall SEO value (load times effect and broken code will affect placement) – if a Spider is having a difficult time crawling your site, your content may not get properly indexed.

You can increase load times by setting up browser caching via Cookies. I won’t go into details on how to do this for this post, but I may cover it in the future. If your website uses a lot of JavaScript, consider compressing your JavaScript files and if possible, put all your Scripts into a single .JS file (and then compress that). You can use GZIP compression to reduce file sizes of your JavaScript up to 75% in some cases. The same goes for CSS. Consider reducing as much white space in your CSS file, try using only 1 CSS document to handle all the styling, and remove any unnecessary CSS elements that may be present (this is especially important for those who use templates that come with pre-made bulky CSS files). If capable, use PHP ‘includes’ to remove code redundancy (for most of us this includes our website’s header, primary navigation, and footer code). This helps with bandwidth but also makes updating certain aspects of your website much easier (imaging having to add a new navigation button to 100s of pages.. if you use an “includes” – you just need to update that single file once and it’ll change globally).

Another big step of optimizing a website is taking a look at the media files. If you have images present, make sure the code includes ALT and TITLE tags that properly describe the image, also make sure the image name is descriptive. If it’s a picture of a car, call it “car” or “redcar” instead of “IMG00025″ – this helps search engine spiders identify images and will also help get them to show up on Google Images. If possible, include dimension parameters (height=”X” width=”Y”), this will reinforce your image’s presence on Google Images. Once your image is properly named and has it’s parameters set, check the file’ size of the image itself. Large images can hault page loading and drastically affect a user’s experience on your website. Dynamic Drive has an amazing online Image Optimizer which allows you to link an image or upload an image to it’s server, and it’ll show you several variations of compressed file formats for your picture, allowing you to cut down on load times without sacrificing image quality.

I’ve already talked about the benefits of using Benefits of Google Webmaster Tools. You will find it extremely useful for both web design and for search engine optimization purposes. It’ll help you find commonly overlooked coding and crawl errors.

I check for, or add, a canonical tag in a page’s header, whenever possible. Lastly, I check the Robots.txt file. Always make sure the Robots.txt is configured properly, or you may end up blocking search engines from indexing all your pages.

Web & SEO Tools I use fairly often:

• Website Grader – This site provides a general analysis of various “SEO factors”
• Social Mention – This site provides a general social awareness of the keyword or domain in question
• Website Optimization – This site provides optimization tips on how to increase your website’s loading time and reduce bandwidth consumption
• Xenu Link Sleuth – Find broken links on any website

Onsite SEO Items

When it comes to onsite SEO, most of my methods are very straight forward. I always make sure that every single page has a unique set of title tags which involve their keywords, but in a “human friendly” way (not stuffed). I also make sure that the META description tag is an enticing block of text, also unique on a “page by page basis” – Google doesn’t always use this, but it has been practical for increasing click-through traffic from time to time.

Next up is the sitemap. An XML Sitemap is a pretty critical part of onsite SEO strategy. The sitemap is great because it allows search engines to easily find all of the pages on your website, it’s especially handy for people who have very deep pages that may not be 1-2 jumps away from the homepage. Always be sure to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and to Yahoo/Bing for the best results.

Link Profile

Checking a Website’s link profile is important is that you’ll find out where most of the “link juice” is flowing to. Things to find out: 1) Are there any authority links pointing at the website? Is the site linked with anchor text? (If not, you may want to contact that authority site and nicely request them to update the link, many people will happily do so). You also want to try and make sure enough of your sub-pages have links going to them. If you have 1000s of links pointing at your homepage, but only a few pointing at your product or services page, then that may flag Google to assume your website doesn’t have that much valuable content, which may end up landing you lower in the SERPs.

Social Media

Which networks, for which clients? Your client’s website most likely won’t “fit in” properly to most social media sites. Your efforts are best focused on which social networks have your target audience. Building profiles and being absent works but only to a minor extent (these profiles work as landing pages and shouldn’t be considered “proper use of Social Media” – which many low quality SEO companies will include when they bill you for social media).

I may have gotten a bit more involved in this post than I had expected, but at a glance it’s still a very basic “introduction” to each aspect of my SEO Checklist. Every website is different and my approach will vary “case by case” but hopefully after reading all of this, you’ve learned a few things or I’ve at least reinforce a few things that you were unsure of. In the future I may discuss topics above with more specifics and in greater detail, but that’s for a different day and a different post.

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