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My Internal SEO Checklist

Submitted by Kevin Ohashi on Wed, 03/02/2011 - 23:36
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I compiled a list of everything I know of that you can do internally (on your own webpage) to improve your SEO and rankings. I have broken it down into categories: header, content, navigation, graphic/image, and other. The header stuff is inside <head> tag. Content is about your actual text content. Navigation is structural/linking. Graphic/Image is about <IMG> and when to use it. Other is everything else.

This checklist does not tell you exactly how to resolve your specific seo issues. It is designed as a reminder about all the things you can do to try and improve your rankings.

Feel free to add anything you feel is missing for internal SEO and I would be happy to add it.

Header Related

  • Title Tags – Proper <title> tags with relevant keyword on each page.
  • Meta Description – Describe content of the page briefly (155 chars according to seomoz).
  • Meta Keywords – Some search engines still give these weight.

Content Related

  • Header Tags – H1, ONCE, overall purpose/keyword. H2 describing sections. H3 and more if needed for sub sections.
  • Bold/Strong/Italic/Underline Keywords – inline where appropriate.
  • Unique Content – Duplicate content often gets ignored/buried.
  • Link Authoritative Content – Not only do incoming links help, where you link out to may as well.
  • If you use Flash - Make sure it's SEO friendly.

Navigation

  • Describe Links – 'Read More about <Keyword/Product/Service>' instead of 'Read More'.
  • Breadcrumbs – Let users find their way around website structure properly, more internal links.
  • Cross Linking – Appropriately link you content internally within content.
  • URL Structure – Should have a logical order/hierarchy.
  • URL Content – Instead of 'service.html' use 'keyword_service.html'.
  • HTML Sitemap – Display structure of content for users (sitemap.xml is for search engines).
  • Title Tags for Navigation Links – <a href='keyword_service.html' title='keyword services we provide'>.

Graphic and Image Related

  • Minimize Graphic Text – Use text not images when appropriate.
  • Alt Tags – Primarily for images, describe the content of the image with relevant keywords included.
  • Image Filenames – Properly name files with relevant keywords.
  • Surrounding Text – Text near an image should be relevant to the image (it's name/alt tags).

Other

  • Robots.txt – Control how you get crawled (what gets crawled and how frequently).
  • Sitemap – Ensure /sitemap.xml exists, submit to search engines.
  • Error Pages – 404 is most important.
  • Analytics – Always a good idea to keep track of your performance.
  • W3C Validation – Valid code makes the crawlers happy and also makes users see less errors across browsers.
  • 301 Redirects – Any old/duplicate content should be pointed to a single version.
  • Canonical Issues – www vs no www, pick one.
  • Absolute URLs instead of Relative – 'http://example.com/keyword.html' vs '/keyword.html'. Sometimes helps with dupe issues and scrapers depending on site design especially if you haven't resolved canonical issues. Also can help rankings if your content gets scraped.
  • Load Speed - Faster page loads increase rankings. There are so many things you can do to improve performance from faster hardware, to caching, to optimizing code that a new article (or book) could be written on the topic.