SEO Checklist

Here are the basics to optimising your own website.

This checklist highlights the areas you need to get right on your website before building any links.

Keywords

Of course before you even begin your SEO journey you'll going to need to understand exactly what people are searching for so you know what to optimse for. The best way to start is to use one of the free keyword tools to work on. This can be very time consuming but well worth it.

Start off with a "top level" query. So for example, if you have a pet shop type in "pet shop" or even just "pet(s)" to see what's there. Then hone down to phrases that people search for less often.

For a new site it's probably best if you optimise for phrases that get a few searches per day - why? because you'll a) be able to test out your SEO skills and b) less people will be optimising for these phrases so you'll likely have more success.

It's better to be number 1 for 10 phrases that will get you 50 visitors each than for trying for a difficult phrase that may eventually get you 500 per day.

Try the seo book keyword search tool here

If you undertake this research but are still struggling for phrases then a synonym search is also a good idea. Use the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator tool here but be very careful with the numbers that are given. These are "broad match" results which means the volume they provide for (say) "cars" includes every search ever made with the word "cars" in it. It's best just to use this for phrase research then use the seobook tool for the numbers.

Metatags

• Your title tag - the title tag is perhaps the most important element for each page. Ensure it describes what is on the page and no more. You have around 60 characters to play with. The search engines will display this tag in the results pages. Make sure each title tag is 100% unique for each page of your website.
• Your description tag - this is the snippet shown underneath the title tag in the SERPS (search engine results pages) and is key. If you don't have a description the search engines attempt to write it for you. We have seen pages not rank at all without a description tag but as soon as we wrote one the page was ranked #1 - #3. Again make sure it's unique.
• use H1 and H2 headings - maybe not so important as it used to be but if you use "H" headings make sure you only have one H1 tag. Change the appearence of these using CSS

Page copywriting

You should ensure that the keywords and phrases you are targeting on the page not only appear in the H1 tag but also in your body copy.

Technical Aspects

Ensure all of your pages point back to your index page. But also ensure you just point it to your root domain. Do not add in the index extension such as index.php or index.html as the search engines will treat this as an additional page and you may find yourself with duplicate content issues.

Also ensure you only have one version of your site either starting with "www" or not. You can permanently redirect your site using .htaccess - look up canonical issues for more information.