SEO Checklist

As with many things, it's often worth making a checklist and ticking each item off as you go. Here is a simple SEO Checklist to apply to your site. Tick off all these items from the SEO checklist and your website will be in much better shape.

This list is in no particular order.

• Decide what search phrases you want to target. Use a tool such as the Digital Point suggestion tool to see what search phrases are popular, and optimise your site for these. You can optimise for any number of phrases - a bigger site can target a greater range of phrases. If you don't know how to research phrases properly, pick some phrases that you think people might search for, and optimise for these. Make sure the phrases you choose are relevant to your content.
• Clean up your URLs. No capital letters, no spaces, no special characters. Seperate each word with a "-" dash. Make sure each URL accurately describes the page.
• Remove Querystrings from URLs. No question marks in your URLs.
• Redirect the non-www version of your site. When you enter domain.com into the browser, it should redirect you to www.domain.com using a SEO friendly 301 redirection.
• Make sure you don't link to "index.htm" or "index.php". Instead, link to "/".
• Remove frames from your site - unless you really, really know what you are doing.
• Ensure the title is different on every page of the site.
• Ensure the Meta Description and keywords are different on every page of the site, or leave them empty.
• Ensure every page has a H1 heading. Ensure the main body content is immediately after the H1, with no breadcrumbs or navigation in between.
• If your main navigation is flash or image based, ask yourself if it can be done using CSS. If it can, do it.
• If using CSS styled text for navigation is unthinkable, then add text based footer navigation on every page.
• Add a sitemap, containing a link to every page on your site.
• Add a Google XML sitemap. Even if it's just a simple list of all the URLs on your site. Submit this to Google through the Google Sitemaps program (sign up if you have not already)
• Is your website tables based? Consider a cleaner CSS based layout for your site.
• Have you got a website statistics program installed? Do you know how to access it, and do you check it regularly? If not, do it.
• Do you know where your website currently sits for your main phrases? If not, go find out. Check Google, the localized version of Google eg google.co.nz, Yahoo and MSN. Very few visitors will search past page 3.
• Check the Optimisation of each page. Pick 1 search phrase that is relevant to the content on the page. Ensure the page contains the phrase in the Tilte, H1 heading, twice in the Meta Description, twice in the opening paragraph, and also in the URL if possible. The page you are reading now is optimised for "SEO Checklist".
• Have you got good content? SEO will be much harder if you don't have plenty of original text content, so perhaps spend less time reading SEO Articles, and more time writing good content.
• Check the source order of your page. Good source code will have the page content as clost to the top of the HTML document as possible, and the least important elements such as sidebars and footers last. If you can get the content above the main navigation, great.
• Spider your website using a program such as Xenu. Action all recommendations that it makes, such as fixing broken links. Look carefully at the list of URLs, and make sure they look tidy (no spaces, capitals etc).
• Optimise your images. Ensure all are named appropriately, have alt tags and are placed near text that is relevant to the image.
• Check the search engines to see how well indexed your site is. If the search engines have indexed pages that have since been moved or deleted, setup a 301 redirect to redirect all trafic that these pages generate (or lose it).
• If you are a local "bricks and mortar" business, make sure you use your town / city / country on every page, in the title if possible, and in close proximity to your chosen search phrase.

If you can tick off most of the items on this list, your site will be looking in reasonable shape.

Link building

Why isn't link building on the list? Because link building isn't something you "check off". Link building should be a constant task that you are always working on.

Have I missed anything?

Probably. Why not post a comment and I'll add your recommendation to the SEO Checklist.

Choosing a SEO Company

I have read a number of articles on how to choose a SEO company. Most of them raise some valid points, including asking what tactics they will be using, and ensuring they will not be doing anything black hat.

But almost all of these articles put a lot of focus on what sort of rankings the SEO company is getting for their own site. I would argue that this is not as important as it may seem.

The SEO Company's Website

Choosing the SEO company that is number one for "SEO" or "SEO Company" in your relevant country is a likely sign that they know their stuff. When a SEO company has good rankings, this adds a lot of credibility to what they are saying. Great stuff.

But I consider the true measure of quality is what they can do with a client's website, on a limited budget. When a SEO company optimises their own website, countless man hours go into this, often over several years.

• When a SEO company offers you a quote for 30 hours of SEO work, is it wise to expect similar results to what they are getting on their own site, which may have taken hundreds of hours?
  
  
• Is it wise to expect results similar to a site that has been around for 5 years, when you are wanting optimisation for a brand new site on a brand new domain?
  
  
• Is it likely that the SEO company with the best rankings is also the best value / best service / best ability for your particular requirements?

The Important Questions

When choosing a SEO company, I think the important question is "what can you do to a site like mine, with a budget like mine?".
Ask to see some sites similar to yours - sites of around the same size, similar age, or similar functionality, and where a similar budget was spent.

Once you ask this question, the SEO firm may show you a project that is not their best showpiece work, but a more accurate reflection of what to expect. Ask them to describe the project in detail to get a feel for the sort of techniques that were used, and whether a similar approach might be used on your site.

It's also good if the SEO firm can show you results they have achieved for clients. Search Engine Marketing firm, Apogee Search, shows a good example of this on their Google rankings page.

The bottom line - when you have 5k to spend on SEO, don't look for a SEO company that can achieve fantastic results with a 50k budget. Take the time to find the company that can produce the best results with the budget you have.

A small word of caution

SEO related phrases tend to be more competetive than other phrases, and there are plenty of really good SEO companies that don't make it to page one in their own country for "SEO" or "SEO Services" or "SEO help".

But there are also plenty of "SEO specialists" out there that can't even get found for their own company name.

So you do need to see some results for some reasonable SEO related phrases. If it's not obvious, ask what phrases they are targeting, and go check the rankings yourself. For a SEO firm, good rankings are as much about credibility as they are about traffic.

On-page SEO is like the lottery

It happens quite often that on-page SEO is done to a site and it doesn't yield any results. This is generally considered a bad thing. I'd like to throw an alternative viewpoint out there.

This came about after we declined a job because we didn't think we could make a fair ROI for the site, based on the cost of our time.

The site in question was flash based and had appalling on-page SEO. Before you even start thinking about links, you need to get the basics right. This site needed considerable work done, at considerable expense - to the point where it be unlikely to get a ROI.

Fixing mistakes

Some would say doing this SEO work is a waste of time, but really it's not SEO work that is being done. I would consider this work fixing mistakes of the original website. The original site got so many basic principles wrong, that these needed to be fixed before you could start doing actual SEO work.

It's the same concept as putting an extra bedroom on your house - but to be able to do that, the builder says he has to replace the structural timber which wasn't done right and won't support the new bedroom.
Not really fair to blame the builder for being expensive in this case, so why blame your SEO when he has to fix past mistakes as part of the job?

It's not that all web developers should be experts in SEO, but a client should probably be told that their flash based website has almost no show of being found in Google, and a smarter approach is to do a HTML website containing selected flash elements, such as image rotations or galleries.

The lottery

Doing on-page SEO to your site is not like winning the lottery of great rankings. It is comparable to buying a ticket. Without the basics done right, you stand almost no chance of being found, ie you don't even have a ticket.
With the on-page work done, you may still never be found, but it's then up to the content, links and time to do it's thing. The point is that you can be found.

I consider on-page SEO to be as much a part of good web development practice as it is SEO.
What is good for the user is usually good for search engines.

10 ways to kill your site

When explaining SEO to a potential client I usually break it down into 3 key areas.
Technical SEO, being all those on-site things they don't understand such as duplicate content and fixing ugly URLs etc.
On-page SEO being the process of choosing the best words for your pages and using them in the right places.
And link building, the process of getting people to link to you. Clients often confuse this one with linking out to other people, thinking it's helping them somehow.

Technical SEO is not really a matter of improving your rankings, it's more about making sure you don't make some colossal cockup that will stop your site from being indexed.

This post covers 10 common mistakes people make with their technical SEO.

1. Brand new website, completely flash

I had the privilege of explaining to someone recently that the 5k he had just spend on his new website recently was not money well spent. The whole site was one flash file, and had no text content, making it invisible to search engines. The sad part was that the site didn't need flash - animation effects were limited to mouseovers on buttons, easily replicated using javascript.

Just because Google says they can read content within swf files doesn't make it a good idea. If search engine rankings are important, make sure there is plenty of text content for spiders to find.

2. Forgetting to redirect old pages

When you replace that old Frontpage site with your swanky new CMS and completely change all URLs on the site, make sure you setup 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages.
If you don't, all the links you have naturally been accumulating will now be broken, meaning Google is likely to ignore them for ranking purposes, and webmasters are likely to remove them from their sites.

Anyone who has gone through the process of building links naturally will know how precious these are, so 301ing the old pages to the new pages is critical.

It takes only a few minutes to do, pay someone to do it if you have to.

3. A robots.txt blunder

Putting a bad line into your robots.txt file is a pretty fast way to axe your site from the search results. If you don't know what robots.txt is all about, then perhaps it's worth thinking twice about playing with it?

Google has a tool for checking your robots file, so take the time that any changes are done correctly.

4.

No H1 headings

I hate this one so much. Who really knows if the H1 is weighted heavily or not in Google's algorithm, but my gut feeling is that it is important. I so often see websites where the major heading on the page is not a H1, it's a styled paragraph or simply a div.

CSS can be used to redefine the styles for existing page elements, such as H1 headings, so it just makes sense to use a H1 tag for your major heading.

5. Sitewide meta description

It's really easy to stick a meta description into your website template and see it used on every page of your site. Unfortunately, this can axe your site from the search results pretty quickly. If you have a sitewide meta description, then all it takes is a more powerful site to steal your meta description and suddenly they will be ranking instead of you (your site will be lost in the duplicate content filter).

Take the time to use a unique meta description on every page, or leave it blank.

6. Splash pages

The splash page or flash intro page is essentially an empty page (as far as the search engines see it) with a single link to your homepage.
What this means is that your navigation structure is now one level deeper. The page that would have beena PR5 is now a PR4, and Google visits your "homepage" less often (because the splash page is actually the homepage).

If you really really must use a flash intro or splash page, do the right thing and add a little paragraph of text at the bottom for the search engines to see. Also place links to your other top-level pages, not just the homepage, so the link juice spreads around the site properly.

7. 404s with content

I have seen some interesting ways of rewriting URLs, and my favourite had to be the 404 method. Basically, every page returns a 404 header, and a custom 404 handler (a php script) was used to deliver the page content to the browser.

Unfortunately, Google ignores the content and just sees the 404 error, so this site had no show of appearing in search results.

This is uncommon, but it's worth using a little extra caution when delivering a 404 to the browser. 404s can spell bad things for your site when you get them wrong.

8. Ads, ads, ads

While not strictly a technical issue, nothing screams "don't link to me" like an affiliate thin content site crawling with Adsense. If you expect to do well in the search engines, you need links, and it's not worth losing links for the sake of a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue.

Advertising is something that should be added to an established website with established traffic, it's unlikely you will get rich from advertising revenue on a brand new domain with no links.

9. Black hat that doesn't need to be black hat

Har har, I'll write this paragraph of really crap content with some useful keywords and make it white on a white background so people can't see it.

Thing is, it doesn't take much more effort to create good content with useful keywords in it and make it visible to your users. People spend time creating dodgy doorway pages when they should be optimising their content pages. Adding crap hidden content to the homepage when they should be writing good sales copy.

Black hat tricks like this are an invitation for other webmasters to burn you (Google never finds out on it's own). Before going ahead with a black hat scheme, look for white or grey hat alternatives first.

10. Multiple domains and dupe content

I once brought a site from top 60 rankings to top 20 by doing nothing other than removing 14 out of 15 versions of their homepage.
They had...
www.domain.co.nz
domain.co.nz
www.domain.co.nz/default.asp
www.domain.co.nz/default.asp?pageid=1
www.domain.com
www.otherdomain.co.nz
otherdomain.co.nz
secure.domain.co.nz
secure.domain.co.nz/default.asp
etc.

Each version of the homepage had a certain amount of link authority, and the version with the most power showed up in the search results. I redirected all that link power into the main page, and all of a sudden, the rankings jumped, having changed nothing else.

Is your site wasting precious link juice on duplicate versions of yoyur homepage?

Other

There are plenty of other ways to kill your website in the search engines, and I have deliberately skipped some of the obvious and less interesting ones. SEO is often less about doing things well and more about not doing things badly.

Getting the most out of tags

What is a tags page

A tags page isn't much different to a search results page, in that it shows a summary of content on your site that match a particular criteria.

Actually, this makes a pretty good entry point - if you have several posts on a site covering, say, link building, then the tags page gives the user a better introduction and overview to "link building" than any one post.

Spamdexing

However, tags pages, or search results can look a bit nasty, being just another form of automated content. Matt Cutts has gone on record to say that you should be using a noindex meta tag or robots.txt to hide these pages from Google - covered in my previous post on indexed search results.

Reading between the lines, I think Matt is saying that he wants to see some quality content rather than mass machine-generated shit. And that's not unreasonable.

How to optimise tags pages

• Treat your tags page link any other page. The same rules regarding titles, URLs, meta descriptions and page content apply. Do your on-page SEO properly.
• Choose tags for your posts that make appropriate search phrases - this means that most of your tags should be 2-3 words. Istead of tagging something as "links", go with "link building" or "link building strategies" instead.
• Add some unique content to the page. Because the tags page is generated from snippets of content from other pages, Google can quite easily disregard the page as being duplicate. But if you add a medium sized paragraph of text to each tag, then it's much harder for Google to ignore. And because the paragraph is well written and designed to introduce the user to the topic, it's hard for a search engineer to say it's spam. If you have 100 tags on your blog, this might take you a day to do to your site - not the end of the world.
• A nice design counts for a lot. If these pages are to be ranking in search results and become entry points to your site, then it makes sense to make them asthetically pleasing to look at. Just like any other landing page.
• If your tags pages are optimised and ranking well, you can back off on your SEO for the posts themselves - write them for the user and focus less on trying to bludgeon silly phrases into your body content and headings.

The future of tags pages

Aaron Wall says that tags pages are dominating Yahoo search results at present. He suggests that Yahoo should turn down the dial on this for the benefit of their users.

If you rely on tags pages ranking, then it becomes important to maintain an air of quality over these pages so that you don't get burned when search engines decide that tags pages are spam. Make sure your tags pages look the same as great content pages before judgement day comes.

Google should discontinue toolbar pagerank

Hands up if you use toolbar PageRank when you are evaluating the value of a link? I do - I'm guilty as charged. For all it's criticisms and obvious issues, the little green bar does an "ok" job of assessing link value.

If a site looks like it doesn't get much traffic, and it's a PR1, there's no way I'm going to spend time analysing backlinks and checking it's rankings. On the other hand, if that exact same site is PR6, I'm definitely going to take it more seriously when looking for that link. I know for a fact a lot of other webmasters do the same as me on this, so stop trying to tell yourself that it's not important to you.

Yes, I'm well aware that toolbar PR means little in terms of rankings, and it's only updated infrequently etc. This doesn't matter - PR is still the chief measure in determining link value for a lot of people / sites.

No toolbar PR?

Google hates paid links. Really, the best thing they could do to slow down the paid link trade is to remove the mechanism that so many people rely on for valuing links, the toolbar PR.

Backlash

I wonder if this would piss a lot of webmasters off? I'm pretty sure it would. Does Google fear a PR backlash (Public Relations, not PageRank) if they were to disable PR (PageRank, not Public Relations)?

I still get emails from my clients when their PR increases thanking me for my good work. PR is a useful metric to a lot of people, not just SEOs.

Google in need of SEO

I had one of the best laughs of my life recently while reading a page explaining what Google's homepage would look like if they had to SEO their site like everyone else.

It was beautiful, and I'm so jealous I didn't think of it first.

So with that funny story firmly planted in my mind, we got an enquiry at SearchMasters coming from the search term "search engine". Because we are optimised for "search engine optimisation", by default we are optimised for "search engine" as well.

As I normally do, I went out and scoped out the SERPS to see what was happening...

Above: SearchMasters outranks google.co.nz for the term "search engine"

Outranked!

Funny how SearchMasters and others are beating Google for this phrase. Maybe if Google applied some of the SEO suggestions recommended in the above link, they could rank top for this term :)

Clearly there isn't any bias being applied here - Google's homepage isn't optimised for this term, and it's not ranking top as a result. Great to know we are (at least sometimes) operating on a level playing field.

Update

So after thinking it through, I thought it a little unfair to pick on Google over this one, so I decided to check out Yahoo and MSN as well.

Nuff said really. Out of the 3 major engines, Google is ranking itself best. Even Yahoo is listing Google as the first result, which says all kinds of things really. I kept these results to NZ only for consistency with the original Google result, but upon thinking about it, MSN probably doesn't have a NZ site and could well be filtering itself out of the results. Yahoo on the other hand is branded as Yahoo Xtra, so one would assume this is a New Zealand site, or at least it should be.

If you search the worldwide versions of these phrases, you get all kinds of funny results. MSN lists every major search engine you can think of, except itself, on the top 10 results

What do weight loss and SEO have in common?

I'm going through the process of losing some weight. It's been one of those things which I have needed to do for 10 years or so, made especially worse by the fact I work in front of a computer and don't play any sport. I have managed to lost 12kg (26 pounds) so far, which isn't a bad start, but I have a lot further to go.

So what has this got to do with SEO?

Well, I could have visited a weight loss expert at any point in time over my life, and got some advice on how to lose weight. Any expert would have probably told me I needed to do more exercise, and maintain a balanced diet. Without being rude to weight loss experts, I think the bottleneck is always lack of motivation rather than lack of information.

When you ask for SEO advice on a website, it's just like asking someone how to lose weight. The expert will tell you you aren't targeting the right words in your titles and body copy, and that you need more links.

As a fat person, I bought a book on diet and exercise only after I had got into the habit of going for a walk every day, and had already lost some weight. I didn't need to waste money on a book when motivation was the bottleneck. The book talks about the more advanced concepts of how to balance different food types, and which muscle exercises to do etc. Great stuff, once you are in the habit of doing any exercise at all.

When you are seeking help on your site, you get the best value when you sort out the basic stuff yourself. Do a little bit of homework, and put the basic measures into place, otherwise the expert will spend their time explaining obvious problems. You wouldn't want to pay a weight loss guru to tell you to do more exercise and to eat less food, would you? Likewise, no point in paying someone to tell you that you need more links, when you could be out there getting more links.

SEO reports

I used to offer a free service where I did a SEO report on people's site - and I'd politely ask for a link as a way of saying thanks. I'd suggest obvious changes to site structure and content, but most of the time the advice got ignored, and people would leave their homepage title as "Untitled document" and their H1 as "Welcome to our site".

It's the same reason why fat people are still out there buying pies - Learning how to fix a problem is much easier than actually fixing it, but it won't get you results.

I don't do free reports anymore, because people don't value them enough to actually do anything with the information I give them. I still do paid reports, and even these have a fairly average ratio of recommendation to implementation. Knowing this, I try to prioritize the recommendations so that people can start with the most important and "low hanging fruit" changes.

SEO for 100% flash websites

I'm booked tomorrow to do my first full-flash SEO implementation ever on a website. This has been a long time coming, and I can think of a few reasons why this is my first full-flash SEO project.

• There are plenty of good reasons why full-flash sites are a bad idea. Most of the time, SEO is one of them, but it doesn't have to be.
• Most clients simply can't afford the expense of re-architecting their shiny new flash website, and opt for Adwords instead.
• Quite often you can achieve the exact same effect with unobtrusive Javascript and CSS, which is preferable. I'll talk people out of Flash if it's not needed.
• And my Actionscript skills suck, so I haven't been chasing this work.

The plan of attack

The plan is brutally simple, and in my opinion this should be the default logic for new flash-only sites.

• Get your designer to create a great flash site, leaving blank areas for content that needs to be indexable.
• Store your body content in a database / XML file / config file, or external data source.
• Use a little actionscript to allow Flash to read content from your external data source. Flash reads the content from the database, and displays it in the content area.
• When a HTML page is requested, a PHP script (or alternative technology) reads the same content from the same data source.
• The HTML page outputs the content, but hides the plain content from the user. swfObject is used to replace the plain content with the Flash version of the content.
• When the user enters the site from a page other than the homepage, we use FlashVars to fire up the Flash movie at the right place.

What Google Sees

Google sees a plain HTML website, with nicely optimised titles, H1 headings, meta descriptions, and body content. Like a good bot, it caches your site and includes it in search results.

What the user sees

If they have Javascript / Flash, the user sees the Flash content and not the HTML content. This is perfectly white-hat because the HTML content is a fair and honest representation of what the user sees in the Flash - in fact, it's coming from the same data source. The Flash-enabled user gets to see additional animations and interactive effects, but the core content is the same.

What mobile phones and speech readers see

the same as Google sees. Once again, what's good for SEO is good for the website as a whole (when done with good intentions).

Updating content

Content is stored in one place, so unsurprisingly, it's very easy to make changes to the site. Gone are the old days of having to maintain a Flash site and a non-Flash site independently. You can even use a CMS database as your data source, making it even easier to update content.

Not so hard really?

The logic of all this is brutally simple. It's white hat, and it improves accessibility of an otherwise disasterous technology. I posted my concerns about Google indexing flash earlier this year when they announced changes to their algorithm. My point was that developers should stop worrying about how Google indexes Flash files, and worry instead about accessibility - by fixing the accessibility issues (using the above method), the SEO issues take care of themselves.