Website SEO CheckList - A Comprehensive Site Audit Guide

This SEO checklist is a comprehensive list of all the things of your website, you should analyze to point out the errors and gauge site's effectiveness and performance.

1. Have validated your webpages HTML from W3C (it has several advantages)
2. Do you have a user friendly and easy to navigate website
3. Have you implemented Silo structure for better crawling, indexing and optimization

4. Have you done proper keyword analysis for each page (per products / services / topics)
5. Have you used Google Adwrods Keyword Planner tool to analyze competitive keywords
6. Have you Jotted down important LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords from Google
7. Have you used Uber Suggest tool to find out more LSI keywords and Long Tail Pro for long tail keywords
8. Do you have an excel with selected keywords sorted by average search volume and competition

9. Have you written descriptive page titles on each webpages, reflecting the page topics clearly
10. Have you placed the main keyword on the page title? Mention the primary keyword at the beginning of the page title
11. Do you have any page title written more than 60 characters long? Make it within 60 chars
12. Do you have all unique page titles in your website
13. Have you included same or similar keywords on multiple page’s page titles? Do not put same or similar keywords on multiple page titles
14. Do you have interesting and tempting page titles to get more CTR (Click Through Rate) from Search Pages

15. Have you composed appealing meta description briefing the topic of the webpage
16. Have you placed your main, variation and/or related keywords on meta description
17. Have you completed the meta description within 2 sentences and maximum 150 characters
18. Have you rechecked the spelling, grammar and punctuation of the meta descriptions
19. Do you have unique meta description on each webpages of the site

20. H1 are the content main header, hence must reflect the page topic clearly
21. Mentioning main keyword on H1 is important for better ranking
22. Make H1 descriptive and a bit different from the page title
23. H1 must be compelling and unique on each pages of a site for better conversion
24. Each webpage should contain one H1 (multiple H1 is technically possible on HTML5 but not suggested from SEO standpoint)
25. Write valuable and as much long content as possible, Google loves in-depth long contents
26. Never write contents less than 500 words, Google may consider and mark contents less than 500 words as thin content. Thin contents are always prone to get hit by Google Panda algorithm updates
27. Write minimum 750 words, valuable and informative content for better optimization
28. Break long content in multiple small paragraphs with relevant headings (H2 to H6)
29. Place the main primary or focus keyword in the first (best) or second sentence
30. Repeat main keywords couple of times on different places on the main copy
31. Add different variations and LSI keywords on the copy
32. Never over use keywords on the content copy, better maintain 2% to 4% keyword density
33. Highlighting of important keywords is always good (Bold using Strong HTML element and Italic using Em HTML element)
34. Write content for human readers, keywords should come on the natural flow of writing
35. Never write contents for Search Engines but optimize them for search engines
36. Reread (proofreading) the contents couple of times to make sure there are no spelling, grammar or punctuation errors across the website
37. Update contents occasionally for better ranking
38. Do not hide any part of your content using Javascript or CSS, Google may not crawl them
39. Minimize the use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to load contents as much as possible, Google always find them difficult to crawl and index. Recently Google declared that they may stop crawling AJAX loaded content pages

40. Add attractive images for better user experience and engagements
41. Each page should have minimum one considerably big and clear image
42. Optimize image file names with relevant keywords
43. Always include relevant keywords on image alt and title attributes
44. Image title attribute should be short but descriptive and human friendly
45. Multiple images on a webpage should have different alt and title texts
46. Do not steal images from other websites. Use your own and original or copyright free images for better ranking

47. Optimized URLs play a major role on ranking
48. Make URLs as short as possible
49. Include main keywords in the URL
50. Separate words with hyphens (-) in URLs
51. Write URLs only in small letters
52. Remove all stop words (e.g. of, or, and, but, the, a, etc.) from the URL (shorter is better)
53. Make sure the URLs are completely readable, do not include any unwanted special characters
54. Use .htaccess file to rewrite dynamic URLs to make them static and optimized
55. Make use of custom URL or Permalink option of the CMS software
56. Create folder structure in URLs (fewer folder is better)
57. Add trailing slash in URLs
58. Do not use Javascript URLs on website
59. If there are any unskippable and unnecessary parameters in a URL, even after the URL optimization and URL rewriting, add a hash (#) before the parameter

60. Inner-linking between the pages of a site, helps search crawlers to crawl and index inter-linked pages, and pass Page Rank from one webpage to another of the site
61. Use fully qualified absolute URLs to make inner-links across the website
62. Build contextual inner-links from the main copy of the webpages apart from the regular menu and footer inner-links
63. Build inner-links with relevant and descriptive anchor texts which are pertinent both to the linking and the linked page and should be a part of the content’s natural flow
64. Add related link title to the contextual inner-links
65. Make use of BreadCrumb navigation
66. Add authority outbound links to the relevant webpages to share related and valuable information with site visitors
67. Outbound links should open in separate browser tabs (target=”_blank”)
68. Make sure there are no inner and outbound broken links, in general broken links do not affect ranking but too many broken links can cause problems

69. Place Call to Action (CTA) at the top fold of each landing pages
70. Repeat CTAs on multiple prominent places of a landing page as required
71. Use complementary color schemes to make CTAs clearly visible and attractive
72. Add minimum form fields which are absolutely necessary in a lead generation form. Can use multi-part forms to break long forms into multiple related sections

73. Make use of Structured Data, especially Schema
74. Write business Name, Address and Phone number (NAP) on the footer section of each pages or at least on the contact page of a site and mark them properly with structured data
75. Depending on your business and website, use different types of schema mark-ups (reviews, voting, events, products, people, business and organization etc.) for better CTR from SERP

76. Create one blog for the business website ASAP, if there is not one
77. Make sure to create the blog on subfolder (e.g. example.com/blog)
78. Write niche specific and informative articles consistently

79. Add major social links, like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Youtube etc. from each of the webpage of a site
80. Add Authorship markup to your site, do focus and be active on Google Plus for better optimization and ranking
81. Social shares, comments, mentions, Google +1s, Twitter tweets / retweets, Facebook likes, Pinterest pins / repins pass good amount of social signals to Google
82. Encourage your readers to share the contents of your site to increase and strengthen the social signal, generally the more organic and continuous social signals your site get, the more visible it will be on search engines

83. Website should open either with www or without www, redirect to any one of these two permanently
84. Create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.html file of your site
85. Add a proper robots.txt file, put the XML sitemap link on the last line of the robots file
86. Do not block the Javascript and CSS files or folders from Google
87. Make sure that there are no unwanted meta robots tag (noindex, nofollow) on any of the pages
88. Build custom error pages for comparatively better user experience, in case of a broken link
89. Make sure each webpage has a proper rel canonical tag in the HTML head section
90. Carefully use permanent (301) redirection and temporary (302) redirection as and when required
91. Google should index one URL for each webpage, if there are multiple URLs for a same webpage, make sure to permanently redirect them to the original URL and also put the rel canonical tag, pointing to the original URL you want search engines to index
92. Use page-to-page 301 redirections, do not make page-to-domain 301 redirection
93. Do not create redirection chain (A --> B --> C , redirect this as A --> C)

94. Build a mobile friendly responsive website for the best results, Google officially declared that they are counting this as a strong ranking signal from April 21, 2015 onwards
95. Make sure to place proper rel canonical (on mobile page) and rel alternate (on desktop page) on each webpages, in case of separate mobile site (m.example.com)
96. Include proper viewport meta tag in the HTML head section
97. Ensure tap targets are appropriately designed with enough spacing for easy tapping on mobile devices
98. Avoid flash and iFrames on website

99. Test your site loading time, faster sites generally rank higher also get better conversions, Google started showing a ‘red slow label’ on mobile SERP for slow loading sites
100. Get rid of all the unnecessary codes from the HTML to load site faster
101. Use external CSS and Javascript files
102. Use one big CSS file and minimum Javascript files to minimize the http calls
103. Minify the CSS and Javascript codes/ files
104. If possible place all the Javascript files and codes before the end of the webpage (just before the HTML end body tag)
105. Make use of CSS Sprite
106. Resize the image to the size to be displayed on the webpage
107. Cut the unnecessary EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data to make images optimized
108. Use GZip compression
109. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
110. Implement browser caching

111. Add your site to Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster) and Bing Webmaster tool
112. Submit your XML sitemap file/s to webmaster ‘Sitemaps’ section
113. Fetch each important webpages of your site using webmaster ‘Fetch as Google’ section, the first time you add your site on Google webmaster tool. Ignore those webpages which you do not want Google to crawl and index
114. Resubmit the sitemap.xml file each time you create a new webpage on your site
115. A newly created URL (page) should be fetched by webmaster ‘Fetch as Google’ section
116. Check for the duplicate, short, long or missing page title and meta description from webmaster ‘HTML Improvements’ section
117. Ensure Google is crawling your site regularly from the webmaster ‘Crawl Stats’ section
118. Find out the 404 and soft 404 error pages from webmaster ‘Crawl Errors’ section and make necessary 301 redirection ASAP
119. Check whether your site's DNS and server working properly or not from webmaster ‘Crawl Errors’ section
120. Ensure Google is able to fetch your robots.txt file
121. Check the keywords your site is ranking for, also track the impressions, clicks, CTR and average position on SERP from webmaster ‘Search Analytics’ section
122. Make sure there are no structured data errors on webmaster ‘Structured Data’ section
123. Check webmaster ‘Security Issues’ section to see if there are any security problems with your site
124. Add your site to Google Analytics
125. Track the session, visitors, returning visitors, page views, average visit duration, bounce rate etc. on the Google Analytics ‘Audience’ section
126. Track the organic, referral and social traffic on your site from Google Analytics ‘Acquisition’ section
127. Create Analytics Segments, Events and Goals to measure the conversions

128. Start monitoring your competitor site’s backlinks. Use backlink analysis tools like Moz Open Site Explorer or SEO Profiler or AHREFS etc.
129. Do not use any software or tools to build backlinks
130. Do not build links in bulk, link building and earning is a continuous process
131. Do not build links too fast, backlink velocity is a factor and can cause damage to a site, build backlinks slowly but consistently
132. Before building a link on a site, search on Google with the site domain-name and check whether it’s coming on the first position with sitelinks or not. If the site is not coming on the first position, do not build backlinks on that site
133. Build links from high authority sites only
134. Get links from aged domains
135. Links from number of unique domains have better impact on ranking, build links from different domains from different class-C IP address
136. Relevancy is the key factor, build link from a webpage which is relevant to your webpage
137. Check the quality and the volume of the webpage’s content before building the backlink
138. Build links from sites or webpages which can refer your targeted visitors to your site
139. Build links from sites which have good Domain Authority (DA)
140. Build links from different types of sites, blog comments, web2.0 sites, guest posts, social sites etc.
141. Diversify the anchor texts of backlinks. Avoid exact or partial match anchor texts as much as possible. A natural link profile should have more branded anchor texts
142. Use image links for natural anchor text distribution
143. Mix up the link profile with Nofollow and Dofollow links, you should not have all Dofollow links, that’s unnatural
144. Do not use PR sites for link building purpose. In case you are submitting a news of your business, always add a branded anchor text or naked URL pointing to the relevant page of your site
145. Don’t be a part of any link networks
146. Don’t get involved in link exchanging or other types of link schemes
147. Provide something valuable to the readers, audiences and customers through your business to earn natural backlinks
148. Write long, in-depth and informative contents consistently to earn more authority links naturally, this is by far one of the best ways of link building
149. Get a brand mention or citation from an authority site from where you are unable to get a backlink
150. Track Google Webmaster ‘Links to Your Site’ section to monitor and test each and every backlinks you are getting (earning or building)

151. Select your website's domain name carefully, do not buy an EMD (Exact Match Domain) preferably go with a branded domain also do check the past of the domain, whether the domain got any penalty or not
152. If you are a global business, select gTLD (Generic Top Level Domain) like .com or .org or .net or .info etc.
153. Local or country specific businesses can select ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) like .co.uk or .au or .in or .co.in or .fr etc.
154. Big and global sites should use https secured site and dedicated server with dedicated IP address
155. Select short, easily readable, memorable, sharable and brand-able domain name from a reliable hosting company

156. Add and verify your website to Google My Business if you are a local business
157. Concentrate on consistent NAP (business Name, Address and Phone number) citation building on major local business listing sites
158. Get reviews on Google My Business page, Facebook, Yelp and other third party sites for better local ranking

159. Check your site on Google with site:your-site.com and see the number of pages of your site Google indexed
160. Additionally check whether Google is showing anything like “repeat the search with the omitted results included” or not. For a comparatively smaller site this message may not be a good thing. Most probably the site has duplicate contents
161. Search with the brand name on Google and check whether your site is coming on the first position or not, also check the sitelinks Google is showing. If the site is not on the first position, the site might have been hit by any of the Google algorithm updates

162. Add Contact Us, About Us, Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions page
163. Always use up-to-date software, Content Management System and other settings to keep your site secured
164. Use website like Woorank to audit your website and pages
165. Invest some time to learn SEO online or in classroom