SEO Evaluation Checklist

Having fully compliant sites is not mumble jumble, or Magic. It is about a series of good rules, that have to be adaptable for the specific clients. We as a company have moved away from a now antiquated system of keyword metatags and multiple domain names. For example, more and more people don’t type in the address bar we have found, but instead use the google search bar. So it matters less what the domain is, and much more that Google has found the information and can give back the desired results.

It is not about tricking the system to produce what you want, but to use the tools to their full advantage, to show potential readers, and clients what you have to offer, and if it is crap, you can’t expect your results to be on the first page ever on google. (Like this blog)

The first thing we do when evaluating a new project is use our basic SEO check list. It consists of a Component, if the site has it pass/fail our short 1-2 sentence evaluation. The other columns are what does that item mean and a small example of what it should look like.

• Doc Type/ Parse mode - Important to tell bots and Browsers what type of document you have. I am amazed to see many sites that don’t even have this important but simple declaration on their pages.
• Searchable Text - The nightmares of this are we have seen many sites and nearly all the text on the pages are images. We do use fancy fonts, but at least we will either put in alt tags or if it is a image in a Div box, place the original copy in the box so that screen readers, and Search engines can find what you are trying to show them.
• JavaScript/CSS links - This really use to be more of a issue than it is now, but it use to be that search bots would only scan the fix part of a page, now I don’t think that is true. But for clean code, ability to edit a site quickly (such as 1 place to change text), and overall site download and http request. A site should be linking to css and JS files instead of having all of it inline.
• Image Alt tags - Bots don’t see images and identify what it is saying. Hence you need to tell them, with a alt tag.
• Image Title Tag - This isn’t really that important, as long as you have an Alt tag. Similar would be descriptive names of files e.g. minnow.jpg instead of picture1526.jpg. If you have good alt tags, you don’t really need descriptive titles, or good names on your images, but it can’t hurt.
• Meta Descriptions are essential - It is a short 1-2 sentence about the page. Search bots do use this, but more important when your results come up in Google the search bot usually shows this field back to the end user.
• Meta Keywords - These are of less importance. But again if you are going to spend your time working on clients websites you might as well produce a decent list of keywords for the page.
• A sitemap.xml - This is a listing for bots to know which pages to crawl, and what has been updated.
• Robots.txt file - the bots file, tells the good bots were to look, and what to avoid. This is really important when using CMS’ we have found in that we don’t really need the administrative areas listed in our search results, but instead only want the public content to show.
• Finally the most important item that we have found is having good Page titles. More than any other single aspect is have good titles describing the page.

Final Thoughts

Overall this is a list which we have been using for years, but it changes regularly as search engines become smarter. Three years ago, I think it still was focused around Keywords, and Page titles were not that big of an issue. All in all my work axiom is this business totally changes every 3 years. A lot clients that I have do not like this, but its the truth.