Wednesday, February 4, 2009

SEO Checklist

The WebConfs website has a very useful list of “Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website.” Basically they collected all the major factors that might affect the search optimization of your site, attributing a score to them. The score ranges from -3, which is very bad for your site, to +3, which is very good. Below you will find a summary of the most important factors:

Keywords

  • Keyword in title tag (+3)
  • Keyword in URL (+3)
  • Keyword density in document (+3)
  • Keyword in H1 and H2 headings (+3)
  • Keyword in the beginning of document (+2)
  • Keyword in ALT tags (+2)
  • Keyword in Meta tags (+1)
  • Keyword stuffing (-3)

Links

  • Anchor text of inbound links (+3)
  • Origin of inbound links (+3)
  • Links from similar sites (+3)
  • Links from .edu and .gov sites (+3)
  • Anchor text of internal links (+2)
  • Many outgoing links (-1)
  • Outbound links to bad neighbors (-3)
  • Cross-linking (-3)

Meta Tags

  • Description Meta Tag (+1)
  • Keywords Meta Tag (+1)
  • Refresh Meta Tag (-1)

Content

  • Unique content (+3)
  • Frequent updates (+3)
  • Age of content (+2)
  • Poor coding or design (-2)
  • Invisible text (-3)
  • Doorway pages (-3)
  • Duplicate content (-3)

Other factors

  • Site accessibility (+3)
  • Sitemap (+2)
  • Site size (+2)
  • Site age (+2)
  • Top-level domain (+1)
  • URL length (0)
  • Hosting downtime (-1)
  • Flash (-2)
  • Misused Redirects (-3)

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