I’ve had a few people ask about where they can see a checklist to help with SEO so without further ado I’ve scribbled up the following checks. Its not exhaustive, I think a detailed exhaustive checklist would probably take up several pages but this should be enough for most applications.
If I forgot something or you just want to comment or question anything please comment below. I promise to approve any half intelligent comment but I do not approve spam.
- Crawl check – Look for reported crawl errors (Useful Tools: SEOMoz Crawl/Xenu/ScreamingFrog/SEO-Browser)
- Check robots meta tags and robots.txt file – Are there unintended impediments to crawling and indexing from these?
- Crawling & Indexing – Are all pages indexed?
- Penalties – Has the site suffered any search engine penalties for previous mistakes?
- GA/GWT – Review Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools – Any problems? Any pointers to easy targets?
- Site Structure & Code – Is the site structured logically? Is there excess code that can be moved off-page or replaced entirely?
- Navigation/Internal Linking – Is navigation and content internal linking consistent with structure? Consider using alt tags and title tags for internal links especially image links.
- Sitemaps – Are any sitemaps up to date?
- Keyword Research – Ok for now or more work needed?
- Current Rankings – Start rank tracking now?
- Content Targeting Keywords – Does the site have unique page titles, headings, descriptions and text targeting different keywords?
- Content Quality & Quantity – Does the site have sufficient unique index-able content?
- Images – Optimised for file size, filename and alt tags?
- Address – Contact info and address details on site?
- Google Places – Check listing if appropriate, is entry complete? Citation references?
- Site Function – Page load times ok?
- Outgoing Links – Any outgoing links to inappropriate sites? Traffic leaks losing visitors?
- Domain/URLs – Are the domain and urls search engine friendly?
- Canonicalization & Duplicates – Canonical preferences set? Only one version of url rendering (check trailing slash)?
- Check domain authority
- Backlinks – Check backlink sources and anchor text
- Competitors Backlinks – Check competitors backlink sources and anchor text. Linkbuilding campaign required?