SEO Quick Checklist
If you don’t know a whole lot about this SEO thing (that’s Search Engine Optimization), but you still want to help your site’s rankings, then you’ve come to the right place.
I’ve developed a bit of a checklist for all you John Does out there that you can go through to make your site more friendly to search engines (Google, we’re looking at you).
Note: When I refer to “keyword” I mean the term that you want people to find you on Google. So if you’re selling “African soap” then that would be a keyword to focus on.
Plusses
- Putting your keywords in the <title> tag of your page
- Meta tags have your keywords in them (this is pretty normal thing that most people do)
- Having your keywords in your URL (eg: http://www.domain.com/my-keyword.html)
- Your keywords in heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc..)
- Put images to use by putting your keywords in the alt tag
- Get people to link to you with your keyword as the anchor
- Google loves content, the more the better. So have lots of blogs, article, etc..
- Also, Mr. Google loves fresh content. The more your site is updated, the more Google will index you.
- Site maps are good as they help Google know where to go when indexing your content
Minuses
- Repeating your keyword too many times. Google will frown on you if you’re keyword density is more than 7%.
- Having an excessive amount of keywords per page.
- Having a lot of outbound links (links to other domains) is generally not liked by Google
- If you have illegal content, you can kiss your site goodbye
- Duplicate content is not liked, so if you’re planning on ripping off a bunch of articles, don’t even waste your time. It won’t be worth it.
- Frames, but then again, who uses them?
- Heavy flash! As of right now Google can’t index flash content, but they are working on the technology to do so.
- Hosting down time! If you’re site is down all the time then you’ll be indexed less often.
- Dynamic URLS. Search engines don’t like these kind of URLs: http://www.domain.com/index.php?action=view&id=123&title=My%20Site
- Session IDs in the URL. This is almost as bad as dynamic URLs.
