Search Engine Optimization Checklist
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Title Tags
Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword/key
phrase for the page, followed by a brief description of the page content. It will be less
than 65 characters and avoid using stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc.
Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters,
hyphens, and commas. |
Description Tags
Good description tags contain information about the page's
content and persuade search engine users to visit your website. They should be between 25
and 35 words in length. Your description tag should also be limited to alphanumeric
character, hyphens and commas. |
Keywords Tags
Your keywords meta tag should contain between 5-10 keywords
or keyword phrases that are also found in page content. Key phrases should be
less than 6 words each. |
Heading Tags
Each page of your site should use at least the H1 heading
tag for the search engines that examine it when crawling your site. Your
content heading should also include your key phrase or keywords for that page. |
Content
Pages should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive
content that contains the keywords specified for the page. Your keywords
should be repeated, but, not over used. Your content must, first and foremost, be an
informative presentation of the information relevant to the subject of that page. A
good and well balanced presentation, providing effective communication of your message is
imperative for your visitors and the same rules that govern a good presentation will
enhance your search engine response. To the extent that you need to indulge some
non-relevant content for some keywords that would seem out of context on a page MegaIQ
recommends incorporating them into the descriptions used in the alternate text associated
with the images on the page. Alternate text provides a service for vision impaired
visitors using a text reader, in some cases it provides navigation assistance, and, it is
considered content by the search engine spiders, so always use alternate text with your
photos and graphics. |
Content/Tags
Because search engines treat websites as a grouping of pages
and not a single entity, each page on your site should be unique so that the tags and
content differ between each page. Doing so increases the number of pages that will rank. |
Density
Pages should contain 300 to 700 words of unique and
descriptive content. A page's meta tag keywords should also be those that occur most
frequently on the page. |
Navigation
Each page of your site should contain links that will lead
to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is a critical step
for the proper indexing and page rank distribution of your site. This is not to say
that every page should contain every link to every other page. If your home page
links to a catagory page and the catagory page links to sub-catagory pages, the search
engine spiders will follow those links. However, some spiders will only index down
the heirarchy to a certain level. MegaIQ recommends building a "Table of
Contents" page which contains a text link to every page in the site, in an organized
manner and that you place a link to the Table of Contents on every page. MegaIQ also
recommends that if you use Flash, Active X Controls or similar plug-in application for
your navigation, some spiders may be unable to read the page links from within those
applications, so be sure to include text links elsewhere on the page to accommodate the
search engines. Obviously, broken links cannot be followed by spiders or
visitors, so always check to ensure all of your links are working properly. |
Sitemap
It's important to use two site maps for your website--an XML
version and a static version. The XML version can be created with a variety of available
site map tools. The static version is what we described above as a "Table of
Contents" and should sit on a static HTML page and contain links to every other page.
Some search engines also require that you place a proprietary file within the root
of your domain to verify you have registered your site properly with them before they will
index you into their database. |
Crawling
It's important that search engine spiders find your
robots.txt file that guides spiders to pages and directories you want crawled and denies
entry to protected areas of your site. |
