Friday, June 26, 2009

Onsite Seo Checklist

Going to upload a brand new site? Here are some important checklists to ensure that your site is search engine friendly.

1.) Check to see if all pages have unique Title tags: Check all pages of your website to ensure that each page has a unique title tag. Even pages like “copyrights page” and “privacy policy page” that do not hold any value when it comes to SEO should have a proper title tag.

2.) Check to see if all pages have unique Meta tags: Meta tags (description and keywords tag) do not hold much value when it comes to SEO but they can act as effective marketing tools. If you decide to have Meta tags on your site ensure that every page has a unique meta description and keywords tag. It is better not to have meta tags at all than to repeat the same tags on all pages.

3.) Check for broken links: Make sure that your website does not have any broken links. There are many online tools available that will help you check for broken links will ease.

4.) Check for orphan pages: Orphan pages are those pages that have a link from an external web page but no link from an internal page. If your site has any such pages, make sure to link to them from an internal page or delete them permanently from the server.

5.) Check to see if you have Robots.txt: Add a robots.txt page to your site and use it to block unwanted pages from getting crawled. You can block search pages, login pages, admin panels and everything else that you feel is not important.

6.) Check for canonical issues: Canonical URLs can give rise to duplication issues, so make sure to check your site for canonical issues and rectify then. You can rectify most of the canonical issues easily by using the recently available canonical meta tag. Just Google up the term ‘canonical meta tag’ to get more information

7.) Check redirects to ensure they are 301: If your site uses any redirects check them to ensure that they are being redirected using a 301 permanent redirect. You can use a “server header checker” program to find what type of redirect the server is using. Many such tools are available free on the net. Just Google up for the term 'server header checker' to find a host of free tools.

8.) Check to see if your site has a custom 404 error page: Make sure that your site has a custom 404 error page to handle 404 errors. Your custom page needs to have links back to important pages of your site. Having a 404 error page also shows that your site is professional.

9.) Check to see that your main links are no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage: Make sure that all your important pages are no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage of your site. This is not only useful from the SEO point of view, but also useful from the web usability point of view. Remember that links present on the homepage are given the maximum level of importance by a search engine.

10.) Check to see if your site has a Sitemap: Make sure that your site has a sitemap with links to all the important pages on your site. If your sitemap has more than 100 links on it, consider splitting it up into different pages.

More detail visit SEO Services.

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