Jan 11
2
High Level SEO Website Checklist
There are a lot of action items below, covering a high level listing of all things SEO that is required to fully expose your website to the world. There is no techie talk, so go on and give it a quick read. It will help!
There is a lot more detail behind these action items (your should see our action/task plan!) – but please ensure you at least consider these tasks in order to maximise traffic to your website.
Basically you need to:
- Know your market
- Know the keyphrases that your customers use
- Build and optimise your website around these keywords
- Build a collection of quality and relevant links TO your website as search engines do not rank lonely Billy No-Mates websites, no matter how lovely they are!
- Launch your website to the world – Website Promotion
- Monitor your traffic and analyse what works and does not work on your website
- Maintain continuous improvment to your website and keep building those links
Here is a bit more detail covering what you should keep in mind (please note that I have purposely kept each item to one sentence to help with readability):
(1). Know your Market
- Understand what SEO is all about and that organic SEO takes time.
- Are you going global, continental, national, provincial, regional or local – single or multiple geo-locations?
- Know and target your website market(s), what is their geolocation and who are they? Have you only one market?
- Know what your business is, define it, what are you selling?
- What makes your business different from your competitors?
- Know your 4 P’s – Product, Price, Place and Promote
(2). Keyword Research by Product/service (Critical SEO)
- Section (1) above will have focussed you on your keyphrases.
- Know the keyphrases that your competitors use.
- Use Keyword Tools such as Googles (because its free and uses Google Adword data) to determine how many times your keywords are used and does it suggest better and more common keyword alternatives that should be used.
- Group your keyphrases by product / service.
(3). Site Structure
- Build your site for your customer and NOT the search engines, if it works for your customer is will work for the search engine.
- Have a look at those competitors that use your selected keywords, is there anything nice or useful on their sites
- How many pages and sections (products/service groupings) will you have, build a plan.
- Make sure all pages are correctly linked to each other, where neccessary.
- Your site navigation structure must be clean and easy to find and a visitor sitemap is also beneficial.
- Work around Flash, lots of fancy Javascript apps and Frames – as they affect the search engines indexing of your site. The search engines only reads the source code text that makes up your pages.
- Build your site by product/service to ensure each section is seperately and fully optimised
- Website branding and look and feel must be constant across your site.
- Set up website goals that can be measured and are achievable.
- Smart phone and the likes of iPads are being used more by web surfers, forget these users at your peril!
(4) On Page SEO (Critical)
- Use those keyphrases efficently – such as in page titles, headings, bold, italic, as links to elsewhere in your site. (Note: this one task, when done correctly, is great SEO)
- Keyphrases can be attached to images (ALT tag), the Search Engines cannot read image text content but can read these ALT tags.
- Keep away from Black Hat SEO – do not try and trick the search engines, give them what they want.
(5) LaunchYour Site and Website Promotion
- Ensure your site hoster is trustworthy and has authority and determine their online performance.
- Set up in Google, Yahoo and Bing webmaster sections.
- Upload a search engine sitemap, as this is what they look for when they come calling.
- Set yourself up in Google Maps (Google Places).
- Check your page loading times.
- Announce your site to the world using online article and launch websites.
(6) Build those relevant and trusted (back)Links to your site (Critical SEO)
- This link building is a biggie and as mentioned above as search engines do not rank lonely Billy No-Mates websites, no matter how lovely they are!
- Search for Online Directories specific to your product(s)/service(s) and add your site
- Join Forums specific to your product(s)/service(s) and add a link to your site – remember you are an expert at what you do!
- Write articles and submit them with a link back to your site.
- Please be sure of who you are dealing with and do not buy links, as this is a potential No-No!
- Continue exchanging and adding links once or twice a week – every week from now on!
(7) Social Media and Blogging
- Social Media Marketing is big, getting bigger and is great SEO – but will not suit everyone nor all companies, products and services.
- There could be a huge amount of work tied up in this, but at least add your company to Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and set up a blog AND try to update them!
- It will work brilliantly for some
(8) Website Analytics and Continuos Improvement (Critical)
- Website analytics is all about monitoring who and how traffic gets to your site, what your visitors do on your site and finding out what works and does not work!
- Continuos Improvement means looking after this wonderful marketing tool that works 24/7 and won’t complain.
- Do not launch your website and then forget all about it!
(9) Pay-Per-Click / Adwords
- Have you an advertising budget? If you have then perhaps you could pay Google etc. to display your link?
- Remember though only 20% of all clicks comes through this way – but PPC works!
Oh well, I tried to keep this action list small – but if you are serious about your customer finding you then you must consider the above. It would be best not ignore anything flagged as (Critical).
I have tried to keep away from those buzzwords and hopefully will not have confused or fightened off too many of you. If you have any questions, just give us a shout (or even an email).
All the best for 2011 – and remember, be found out there!
Cheers
Paul – SeoWebsite.ie
