Here is a quick SEO checklist for your website, with memes showing you how to get the search engines to rank your website better.
Make sure no page is left un-linked. All the pages should be linked to some other page.
Your website should be a never ending story all heading towards the punch line which should be your call to action. Buy now, download, subscribe or whatever. This is also good for search engines as they find your content quicker by following in page links.
<a href=”poetry/mypage.html“>My Other Page</a>
Write quality content.
It’s a well-known fact that a website’s content determines its search engine ranking, but more than that, it attracts potential customers. Your website is your business’ presence online, so it needs to be inviting; not just in its design, but also in its content.
Audience
It’s essential to know who your target audience is, as this determines nearly everything you will write. You need to target the people who are going to be searching for your specific service.
Tone
Your brand’s tone of voice is the most important factor to consider once you have established your audience. Your content’s style will reflect the “personality” of your business, so you need to get it right.
Information
As an expert in your field, use your inside knowledge to give your customers the information they have been searching for. Informative content is an effective way of selling your business, even if you are not directly advertising.
Relevance
Make sure you keep up to date on the information you are providing – refresh your content regularly, giving your visitors the newest information possible.
Well Written
Double and triple check your spelling and grammar! Microsoft Word will do most of the work for you, but before you publish anything on the internet have a careful read of it, a few times.
Check whether all your images are placed with an alt attribute.
One of the simplest ways to make your Web site more accessible is to use an alt attribute in your image tags. It’s amazing to me how many people forget to use this simple attribute.Many browsers also display the alt text when the customer rests their mouse on the image. This means that the text should be clear and easy to read and not create a huge popup nightmare for any reader pausing their mouse on your page.
Adding alt text is simple, simply use the alt attribute on your image:
<img src=”image.gif” alt=”This is my dog, Fido” />
Tips for writing alt tags:
- Be brief:
“a 10-foot tall sycamore tree with mostly brown leaves and possibly something wrong with its bark” – too much - Be clear:
“a tree” – good
“a sycamore tree” – better - Be contextual:
If you’ve got an image of the company logo, you should write “Company Name” and not “Company Name Logo”
Use the online broken link checkers to prevent your website from broken links.
Broken links are dead-links which are not good for search engine and also for your readers. These are links that give 404 status codes. Too many broken links are not treated as sign of quality site, so we should make sure to fix such links and point them to right URL.These free online link checker tools will check your sites for any broken links. This means, it could be internal broken link or could be external broken links. Search engines bots hate broken links, which can result in low ranks in search engines and less traffic to your blog. From a search engine perspective, broken links are treated as dead end.
- Online Broken Checker
- W3 Validator
- Broken Link Check
- Web Tools
- Axandra Broken Link Checker
Submit your sitemaps to search engines.
Sitemap is a list of pages on a website that is accessible to all users. An XML sitemap is a way for website owners to tell search engines about all the pages that exist on their website. WordPress XML sitemap also tells search engines which links on your website are more important than others and how frequently you update your website. While sitemaps do not boost your search rankings, it allows search engines to better crawl your website.
Example picture with explanations what each column is.
If you have WordPress, this is as easy as installing the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. If not, you could use xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have your sitemap.xml file ready, go to web master tool and add the new site. You will have to prove you own the site by uploading a simple file and then you can submit your sitemap and your site is ready to be indexed by Google.
Make sure you have google analytics installed.
Great site statistics is probably the single most important success factor of any website. The best way to know your audience is through your traffic stats and this is what Google Analytics provides for FREE.Google analytics allow you to keep track of:
- Who visits your site?
- What do they do when they are on your website?
- When they visit your website?
- Where did they arrive on your website from?
- How they interact with your site’s content?
If you use wordpress to manage your website, installing google analytics is as simple as installing the Google Analytics plugin. If you don’t use wordpress, it isn’t so complicated either. Just go to the Google Analyics webpage, sign-up using your gmail account And the help sections will guide you through how to install it on your web page.
Update pages and make changes in your website frequently.
Updating content frequently has some major benefits that can actually make you more money and increase your visibility on the web. Although there isn’t a specific guidebook to how many times you should update your Website, you can use the word “frequently” to determine how often you should update the content on your site.Google loves new content! Google has updated their algorithm several times to provide their users with quality search results. It’s more important than ever. Therefore, strategize on what content is valuable for your visitors to read. Ask yourself “what questions are my customers constantly asking?” Use this as a way to provide valuable content to your site visitors.Frequent content updates to a blog is one of the best strategies and it takes minimal time off your busy schedule. Think of all things you can blog about! Your visitors need travel advice, customer reviews, pictures of sunsets, and answers to frequently asked questions. Local events and nearby restaurant recommendations are helpful to post as well.
Avoid poor coding and poor design.
One of the most unpleasant (and unfortunately most frequent) situations you will confront as a developer is to have to fix bugs or add features into code that is badly designed. As good craftsmen, you would want to leave the code in a better state than you find it. Often new features cannot be implemented if you do not refactor the design. Well – they could, but that would make the code even worse.Unfortunately this is exactly what you will have a hard time with. It is so hard to refactor bad code, especially when you have deadlines. Touching bad and complex code that just about seems to work is scary. As a result you introduce even more clutter when you hack a new feature into the code without modifying existing code.
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