I wrote an email today to client about things she should do to help improve her sites rank on various search engines. Some of what I sent her had nothing to do per say with actually improving the rank, as much as it did improving the accessibility to various search engines. In any case, I felt it might be worth sharing with everyone.
Here’s is what my checklist tends to be when it comes to getting as SEO’d as possible (as well as to get as much traffic as possible):
- Google Sitemap – Helps insure google see’s all your pages.
- Robot.txt file – Even if it’s set to allow all, search engines like to see this.
- *UNIQUE* Title tags on every page
- Make good use of <h1><h2><h3>’s as well as ><strong>.
- Avoid Table based design if at all possible. This helps to encourage 4, and insures that the spider is only seeing “quality” code.
- Make sure every image has an alt tag
- Try to get a few external links a week… If you flood the market with to many links at once, that hurts your rank, so 1 to 2 a week.
- Add site to things like Stumble Upon, Digg, etc. Might be mini bursts of traffic, but the long term link is good. If possible, add promotional video to youtube and google.
- If the site has something updated regularly, add RSS.
- try to balance all your pages. The more content on a single page, sometimes the better… We generally recommend 2 (printable) pages of good content with headers if at all possible per page