Simple SEO Checklist
For people who are new to search engine optimization, you don’t have to learn a lot before you can implement a successfully optimized web site. One important element to successful search engine optimization is common sense.
The purpose of building a web page is to convey a message to human visitors who came to the site out of search engine results or referred to by other pages. They might be people who are researching for something or looking to buy something. In order to compel them to act on certain call to action such as subscribe to a newsletter, buy a product or send an enquiry, the page must address to a visitor’s needs:
- The page must be of good quality, with absence of grammatical or spelling errors.
- The page layout must be clean and content is placed in a conspicuous location.
- Placement of alternate text on images and other items that address accessibility issues.
- Providing enough content without artificially stuffing a page with targeted keywords.
Now, to optimize the site we also think of the following checklist of items we need to be aware of (in no particular order):
- Domain name age
- Page title
- Anchor text
- Server headers
- URL canonicalization
- Alt text
- Subdomain vs subfolder
- Meta description
- Page title
- Sitemap
- Keyword prominence
- Menu structure
- Redirection methods
- Freshness of page
- Quality of backlinks
- Language
- Theme of topics
- Usage of frames, Flash and non-navigable elements
- Linking method
- File and folder naming convention
- Text heading and style
- Keyword selection
- Implementation of robots.txt
- Dynamic page handling
- Session ID management
If you have any question about any of the items I enumerated, feel free to send me a message at elmer.w.cagape at gmail.com. I plan to dedicate specific articles on each of them.
