Revised 3/2/2011
In helping fellow small business owners with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I have been amazed at how often website design tools/packages, website hosting services, and website designers preclude important SEO actions/elements by the very design of a website. It is also surprising how often bad SEO is built into a site. Good SEO can significantly enhance the likelihood that people will find a site when they search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Bad SEO at the worst can get a website banned from the search engines or at the least waste time and money.
Over time I have created the following checklist to facilitate the process of evaluating website design tools/packages, website hosting services, and website designers.
When a small business owner considers a website building package or talks to someone about building a website for them it is important to verify that the website design will not foreclose important SEO actions/elements and does not build in bad SEO. I suggest small business owners require that any website built for them provides for the following capabilities/restrictions. Note: The SEO actions/elements which inspired this list are beyond the scope of this post. To understand the reasons behind the items in the list I suggest a review of more in-depth articles such as The Beginner's Guide to SEO.
The Checklist:
Each capability/restriction listed below is needed for good SEO. Each item is not necessarily utilized right away. However, the capability/restriction needs to be in place from the beginning.
[ ] Unique title tags for each page
[ ] Unique meta description for each page
[ ] Unique headers and subheaders on all pages
[ ] Bolded and italicized keywords can be part of the body text
[ ] Keyword based internal and external links can be part of the body text
[ ] Unique alt tags for each image
[ ] Informational/instructional content pages are easy to create and maintain
[ ] Product/listing pages are easy to create and maintain
[ ] No keyword stuffing
[ ] No hidden text
[ ] No hidden outgoing links
[ ] All outgoing links are specifically authorized by the client
[ ] All paid outgoing links are nofollowed
[ ] Website content and content copyright are the property of the client (not the developer or hosting service)
[ ] The domain name is the property of the client (not the developer or hosting service)
[ ] The two standard forms of the domain name resolve to the same domain name (for example, example.com and www.example.com both resolve to www.example.com)
[ ] Unused related domain names resolve to the client's domain name
[ ] URL architecture uses simple keyword based folder, subfolder and file names
[ ] The client's domain name is the root for all page urls
[ ] Page URLs are simple keyword based names (especially for informational/instructional content pages and product/listing pages)
[ ] Keyword based file names for each image
[ ] Statistics include at least pages visited, keywords used and referring pages (Google Analytics is best for basic statistics)
[ ] Website is easy for visitors to navigate
[ ] Website is easy to update and maintain
[ ] Site Map for search engines
[ ] A custom robots.txt to point to the search engine site map
[ ] Custom robots.txt to restrict how the site is crawled
[ ] Permanent redirects for renamed and deleted pages
[ ] Pages are designed for fast loading
[ ] Pages are optimized for fast loading
[ ] Optional media is loaded on visitor request rather than automatically with a visit to the page
[ ] No flash except for visitor requested features/functions
[ ] Website works properly when JavaScript is turned off (especially internal navigation)
[ ] Website works properly when cookies are turned off
[ ] Website is compatible with the latest versions of commonly used browsers
Note: Search Engines may not directly rank pages on all of the above at the present time. However, I take the broader view that I want to be ahead of the curve as Search Engines constantly work to guide their users to the best experience.
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