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.
Keep The Site Structure Optimized
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
Keep Your Keywords Ready
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
Page Titles are Important
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
So As Meta Descriptions
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
Headers and Contents Play Huge Part on SEO
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
Make Contents Visually Attractive With Images
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
URLs are the Roads on Internet, Keep Them Clean
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
Inner Linking Keeps Search Engines Busy With Your Site
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
Encourage Visitors to Take Your Pre-Defined Actions
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
Help Google to Understand Your Content Better
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
Start Blogging and expand your natural reach
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
Social Signals will Impact SEO, Sooner or Later
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
Re-check Site's Technical Optimization
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)
Make Site Mobile Friendly and Stay Optimized Across
Devices
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
Optimize
Site Speed for Better Optimization and Conversion
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