Tuesday 31 May 2011

A ten-point SEO checklist to make sure your site ticks the right boxes

Before you launch a website live onto the Internet, it is always a good idea to run through an SEO checklist! When launching any website, you should keep in mind that you are not doing it just for the sake of having a website, especially if this is for your business. There are things you need to consider when you are fixing the contents of your website to give it the very best chance of attracting the search engines' interest. This SEO Checklist provides the important things you need to check before launching a website.

SEO Checklist

* Have you done good research on your keywords? It is very important that you choose the most used terms that are relevant to the topic you want to promote. This is the first priority in your SEO checklist. Keywords are very important, because these are the things people type in searches. If you want to be on top of the search engine rankings, you must have good popular keywords and each page on your site must have a clear focus as to which keyword it is targeting.

* Do you have a good Page Title? A good page title will usually contain the primary keyword that your page is written for, and must have a concise description of the webpage or product you are promoting. Google gives importance to the title of the pages, which is why you need to make a title that will say everything about your product or article in just a few words. The title refers to the text between the title tags in the head section of your webpage's source code.

* Is your keyword density sufficient? That's an important point to consider in your SEO checklist. Your keywords will need to be repeated several times in one page. This will increase your chance of ranking well in search engine results. You might ask, why not make a page with keywords repeated again and again without really making any sense? Good question. Google is aware of keyword stuffing, as such abuse is called, and will penalize a web page that it considers guilty. A keyword density of your primary keyword in the range of 1% to 2% is considered plenty. A free tool at http://keywordhacker.com/ can help you determine the primary keyword and density of your web pages or articles.

* Another important thing you will want to include in your SEO checklist is the on page SEO. How do you make sure that your website is friendly to search engines? Unique content is one way of earning those points. You will also do well if you label your headlines using H Tags. This shows the search engines which lines are most important to your page - in particular the H1 tag.

* Backlinks are also very important in your SEO checklist. The number of your backlinks plays a very important role in increasing your search engine ranking. However, you cannot post links to your website indiscriminately; you also have to bear in mind the quality of these links and whether they have any relevance in your website. Google places a lot of importance on quality backlinks to your site from other related ones on the Internet as it considers each inbound link to you as a vote of confidence..

* Content Writing is another factor in increasing SEO ranking. It is a very important item on your SEO Checklist because Google is constantly improving its search engine so that it only offers results that have high quality, useful content. The Internet is full of content that is there simply to raise keyword count. The results are content that have useless text. Natural content is achieved when you genuinely try to HELP other people who may visit your site. It is done through good research, patience, and strategic arrangement of the information in your website. Some of the best natural content articles are press releases because they tend to be genuine-sounding content and get right to the point without unnecessary waffle. Google's recent Panda/Farmer update has reinforced their desire to weed out poor quality content and reward the better written web pages.

* Your SEO checklist must also include the work you do to market your site. One good way of doing this is through article marketing. Create articles about your website and then submit these to the Internet Article Directories, of which there are thousands. You can also promote your website in forums that are dedicated to the industry you are involved with, say cosmetics forums, or health supplements forums, but be careful that you don't contravene the forums' house rules - some do not allow self-publicity.

* Finally, although it is important to make your website as attractive as possible to the search engines, because it is they who will send you free, natural traffic, always remember that it is real people who will make you money. You site must tick the SEO boxes, but it must always remain human-friendly and capable of answering questions and problems that real people are asking. One of the biggest mistakes that Internet marketers make is to focus too closely on the needs of the search engines and forget that real people have to use the web site.

Overall, you can create a website that is SEO friendly and user friendly simply by following the tips above. You may ask the help of SEO companies to enhance your content for SEO. If you like, you can create or select articles and then submit these to your SEO company; they will review your article, and rewrite it to make it more SEO friendly. It is difficult to stay on top of the competition when it comes to SEO ranking, but if you follow these tips you will be ahead of the crowd.

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