Alaska’s Best SEO

Here is a simple SEO Checklist you can use to get started in enhancing your site’s visibility.

Basic SEO Checklist:

• Determine what specific key words you want to target with search engines. You can use a tool such as Wordtracker to see what search words are popular, and optimize your site for them. Make sure the key words you choose are relevant.
• Clean up your URLs. Don’t use capital letters, spaces, or special characters. Separate each word with a “-” dash.
• Redirect the non-www version of your site (many hosts allow for you to browse to http:// and http://www). When you enter mygreatdomain.com into the browser, it should redirect you to www.mygreatdomain.com using a SEO friendly 301 redirection.
• Make sure you don’t link to “index.htm” or “index.php”. Instead, link to “/”. If you know of or find specific links from other sites, ask them to do the same.
• Good relevant content. SEO will be much harder if you don’t have plenty of content, so spend more time writing!
• Add both an HTML sitemap (containing a link to every page on your site) as well as an XML sitemap. Use this tool for your site (free if your site is less than 500 pages).
• Remove frames from your site.
• Ensure the title and meta (description and keywords) are different on every page of the site.
• Remove any flash or image based navigation. If using CSS styled text for navigation is not possible, then add a text based footer navigation on every page.
• Optimize your images. Ensure all have alt tags and are placed near text that is relevant to the image.

There are lots more things one can do beyond the basics, but with these simple items…you’ll be headed in teh right direction.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am and is filed under SEO Techniques, SEO Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.