SEO Implementation Checklist

At Feras Alhlou’s Ambassador Training Workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, the attending Internet Consultants (ICs) asked for a tips on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Below is a list of factors that ICs can use evaluate and implement their SEO programs. This quick post is by no means comprehensive and doesn’t provide implementation details. This post is intended to provide a quick checklist for the IC to review and use when assessing SEO implementations.

SEO implementation checklist:

Understand products & services being offered
Research the competition
- What are other websites doing to achieve high ranking?
- What useful products & services do they offer?
- What useful content or ideas could be borrowed?
Useful questions to ask clients before implementing any SEO:
- Has any other SEO been done on this website? If yes, what was done?
- Who designed the website? What software did they use?
- Has anyone done any amount of link building for this site?
- Has the content on the website been run through a spelling and grammar check?
- Have you ever run into problems with the search engines before?
- Will someone be able to provide new content about specific keyword phrases or themes?
Onsite factors
- Meta tags
- Title tags
- Keywords appropriateness or competitiveness
- Keyword density
- Unique/relevant content
- Grammar/spelling
- Unethical techniques (e.g. hidden text)
- HTML/CSS correctness
- Robots.txt file considerations
- Sitemap available from any and every page
- Geographical information
- Site structure
- Dynamic pages?
- Navigation/link system
  - Navigation system so you can get to any page from any page
  - Keywords in your navigation system
  - Keywords in natural content links pointing to other onsite pages
Offsite factors
- Link count:
- Mirrored text? (www.copyscape.com)
- Index check: run ite:www.domain.com in Google to see what pages are indexed
- Major directory listings
- Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer