SEO Checklist
SEO Checklist - what to do and in which order You’ll need to think of a page on your website as three-dimensional to understand this one. There’s a front and back; a top and bottom. The order you tackle this in isn’t as important as actually hitting all the points. You can do more or less, but this is a basic list that will get you started soundly and allow you to post a well-optimized page. I’ll walk through things from top to bottom, BACK TO FRONT. Here’s our list: Doc type Make sure you specify the doc-type here. Finding the right coding is as simple as a quick visit to www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html will give you exactly what you need for many instances. Since most new to web building will start with simple html-based pages, following the examples listed at W3C.org will be straight-forward. In a simple website I run, all html pages, the following doctype is specified: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”> The doctype you use will depend on how your site is coded. Building a site with XHTML will require a different doctype than a site built with plain HTML. Don’t sweat this - just read the information over at W3C.org and grab the doctype they suggest for your circumstances. Chances are, for simple sites, you’ll end up with what’s printed right on this page. Finally, don’t skip this - it’s important to the engines. Meta Data This includes the title, description and keyword data in the head> tags - we’ll break each one out with examples, then provide a full view of the overall set of tags: head> meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″> - specifies the character set used by the content and what the content type is, in this case, text.html title>Red Delicious Apple Seeds/title> - title is simple and uses the keyword/phrase you want the page to rank well for META name=”Description” content=”Red delicious apple seeds guaranteed to grow”> - this uses the main keyword/phrase again and provides a bit more detail on what the page is about overall META name=”Keywords” content=”red delicious apple seeds, apple seeds, red delicious apples, red delicious seeds”> - list the various combinations of the keyword phrase, or the single keyword if that’s the case META NAME=”copyright” CONTENT=”Copyright © your business name. All Rights Reserved.”> - always best to add a copyright tag to help establish the ownership of your content /head> The completed set of tags as seen in the html coding of the page would be: head> meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″> title>Red Delicious Apple Seeds/title> META name=”Description” content=”Red delicious apple seeds guaranteed to grow”> META name=”Keywords” content=”red delicious apple seeds, apple seeds, red delicious apples, red delicious seeds”> META NAME=”copyright” CONTENT=”Copyright © your business name. All Rights Reserved.”> /head> There are limits and pitfalls to avoid when constructing meta tags - here they are: · Title - keep this to 65 characters or less · Description - keep this to 150 characters or less · Keywords - contain only those keywords necessary to match the topic of the content on the page · NEVER try to stuff extra keywords in any tag - repeating the same word over and over is “stuffing” H tags This next bit is easy to implement when building a new website, and somewhat of a pain to change to an already built website. It’s important, though, as it helps guide the spiders in understanding the importance of the content and the focus of the topic. The H> tags refer to “heading” designations for content on the page. The page is grouped into heading (h>/h>) and paragraphs (p>/p>), basically, so each H> tag explains what each following paragraph is focused on - or at least that’s how we’ll use them. The tags range from h1> to h6> or so - rarely will you go that deep. h1> is the biggie - after that, the rest should be obvious to you. (Incidentally, capitals don’t matter here - H v. h - and there should be a < before every instance of these tags.) Style wise, these tags each have different attributes. H1> will increase the font size and bold the text naturally. H2> will be bold and a smaller font size, etc. You can change this, though, by specifying a particular style for the actual text should you want a different look for your site - the h> attribute will remain intact, it’ll just look different. So, from the top down, you’ll create a heading for the page’s content and wrap this heading in h1>/h1> tags. Following this heading, you’ll place the content of the page. This will be followed by another h2> tagged heading for the next content topic on the page (the example below will explain this clearly. You can have as many headings as it makes sense to have given the content of the page - you do not need to use all available h> tags. Here’s and example following our apple theme: h1>Red Delicious Apple Seeds
p>Growing red delicious apples from seeds is simple, but you must have the right conditions to grow a healthy tree. As with all seeds, red delicious seeds require good soil, lots of moisture at regular intervals and …/p> h2>Planting Red Delicious Apple Seeds/h2> p>Planting red delicious apple seeds differs little form the planting of any other seed. Careful attention to…/p> Writing the Content Building your content for a page will either be the worst part of building your site, or the bit you’ll enjoy the most. Regardless, it’s vital for how you rank in the SERPS (search engine results pages). The engines want unique content, and they want lots of it. This basically means you must create content that exists nowhere else, and there’s a preferred limit to overall size, as well. I generally tell folks to run each page between 200 and 300 words. That makes for a nice size page, allows you plenty of space to integrate the phase/keyword you’re targeting and provides enough actual content for the page to be seen as “real” by the engines. Dynamic pages are tougher to deal with, as much of the content, while very real, changes frequently. The engines like to see frequent updates to a website, but they like to see site’s growing in size, not just re-writing pages that already exist. Build up the history with a dynamic site, though, and you’ll have no issues with being ranked well. Just follow the basics from top to bottom, back to front. Integrating Your Keyword You could just sit down and start typing out content for each page, but it’s best to make a plan for integrating your keyword in there. Varying how the keyword or phrase is used is a good idea and if you’re anal about it, shoot for the density you figured out earlier based on comparisons of competing sites. In reality, just try to use the keyword 3 - 5 times near the top of the page. As always, the general rule of thumb is to read the content out loud. If it sounds good, you’re fine. If it sounds like you’re “trying too hard” to get the phrase in there, revise the text. Keywords Density This refers to the number of times the keyword (or phrase) appears when compared to all the rest of the TEXT on the page. It’s expressed as a percentage, so: 100 words on the page, keyword appears as 6 of those words, therefore the keyword density for the keyword is 6%. There are no hard and fast rules as to what density you should target. In fact, this percentage will vary from word to word. Some words should be at 2%, some at 9%, etc. The best way to get a ballpark idea of what YOU should target is to look at the sites that rank well for a term you want to rank well for. Discount the obvious stuff form the list of results such as the brand-name manufacturers or global/national companies. These sites have other advantages which allow them to rank well and keyword density isn’t as important. Instead, look for “enthusiast” sites, or non-official sites on a particular topic. When you find a few well ranked sites which fit this description, you can go look for a neat little free tool to do this next bit of work for you. The tool you’re after is called a “keyword density tool” - go figure. A quick search in Google for free keyword density tool will net you results like this: www.keyworddensity.com/ www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/ www.virtualpromote.com/tools/keyword-analyzer/ - this one does not calculate the percentages for you You’ll need to play with each one to learn how to use it, but the basics are the same - enter the URL you want looked at, tell it the keyword to focus on, and it’ll do the rest. These tools can then be used by you on that list of top-ranked websites to figure out THEIR keyword density numbers - it’s part of why they are well ranked, after all. When you’ve checked 5 - 7 of the top 20 or so best ranked sites, average their densities and start there for yourself. Getting the phrase into the content coherently is important; so don’t just start dropping it in everywhere. In some cases you won’t reach your percentage goal - don’t sweat this. Remember to always write content for the reader first. If it makes sense when read out load, it’s fine. Add more relevant content to the page if you really need to squeak the keyword or phrase in there a couple more times. In the end, you’re shooting for a ballpark here, so a bit either way is just fine. What to Avoid There are plenty of tricks spammers use to try to make it appear as if there is lots of content on a page. Here’s a short list of things to avoid: · Keyword stuffing - repeating the keywords over and over again, blatantly obvious · Content block at the bottom of a page - you’ve seen the pages with a huge paragraph of text or keywords at the bottom of the page - avoid this · Blending font colors to back-grounds - an old trick so users don’t see the text, but it’s still seen by spiders - and they now know the colors of the rainbow, so they’ll see this on the first crawl · Hiding text in the code (so it’s invisible on the page) - a version of blending font & background colors, except the text resides in the coding of the page, and is actually not seen by users. Blending colors can be seen by “Right Click - Select All”. This will highlight everything on the page. Next time you see a large block of open space on a page, try it and see what might be hiding there. In the end, it takes as much work to try to cheat the system as it does to do it right. The main difference being how long your website will last in the indexes. Spam, get caught and get penalized, thus wasting all that effort. Do it right, rank well over time, and build a steady flow of traffic and income.
