Before you waste money on any SEO consultancy you should resolve the basics.

Have you done a review of your website to check off the basics?

In this article we cover an SEO Checklist with 7 points. This is designed to help you assess if at least you have the basics rights for optimizing your blog/website for Google.

1.  Do you have unique titles for every page

Imagine walking into a library full of books with no titles on the cover.

Google looks for a page title for every page it indexes.  The title is really important for Google but a lot of times we don’t create titles, have ones that are not optimized or we have duplicate titles.

Action – Go to Google and type in site:<name of website> (e.g. site:razorsocial.flywheelsites.com).  When you put in your own page Google will show you a selection of posts and will include the title for the post.

2.  Do you have unique descriptions for every page?

In the image above we have highlighted the page titles.  Directly under the titles is the description.  This is not used for SEO purposes but it is still every important.  When someone searches and finds you on Google they are likely to read the description before clicking.

Action: Make sure you configure unique and enticing descriptions for each post you create.

3.  Do you have keyword rich page names?

When you look at the page names for each of your posts it should contain relevant keywords.  This also helps Google rank your page correctly.

On Toprankblog Lee Odden has a post called: “Should your CEO actively use Social Media? Here’s how from Chris Brogan” but you’ll see the page name is “social-media-for-executives-ceos”.  This reason is that it’s more likely people will search for this rather than the long title.

Action:  Take a look at your page names.  If they have keywords in them just make sure to optimize them for each post.  If they don’t have keywords in them you’ll have to talk to your developers.

4. What is your Domain Rank?

SEOMoz has a proprietary algorithm (they made it up themselves!) which ranks websites and pages out of 100.  Because they rank so many websites it’s a good indicator to how Google rates your site.

If you go to Open Site Explorer you can enter your domain name.  The following showsa domain authority of 74 out of 100 which is very high.

The page rank is a rank of a specific page on the website.  On this site the  page has a rank of the home page is 78 out of 100.

Action:  Check your domain authority and your competitors.  If your domain authority is low you need to start to get links from websites that have a high domain  authority and preferably from a page that has a high page authority!

5.  How many unique domains link to you?

If you’re popular on the web lots of high quality websites will link to you.  In the example in the image above  1,082 unique domains link to the site.  The more unique links the better as long as they are quality websites.

Action:  Check how many unique domains link to you and work to ensure this increases.  Reach out to companies to request links, write guest posts on their blogs, share with them great content that they may want to link to etc.

6.  Do you tag your images correctly

When you upload your images you need to create:

a). Alt Tag – This is what Google uses for indexing

b). Name – You need to name your image with a good relevant description

c). Title – You need to give you image a title which appears when someone hovers over your image with a mouse.

Action – Read this post on how to optimize images

7.  What keywords are people using when they link to you?

In the old days if you wanted to rank highly on Google you just needed to get  many links to your site using the keywords you want to rank on within the link.

But that doesn’t work any more.

Google likes to see that websites are linking to lots of different pages and using lots of different terms when they link to you.

It’s natural that people may link to your name or domain name more than anything else but you want a spread.

Using a tool called Ahref’s you can check to see what are the terms generally used and what percentage of time they are used for.

In the following example I have too many links using my name and business name and need to start building links to other pages more.

Action:  Check the distribution of your links. If it’s too heavily focussed on a couple of terms try to build links with a range of other terms.

Summary

This is not an exhaustive list but covers some of the basics for an SEO Checklist. What have you found after going through this?  What other checks would you recommend?

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