Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Checklist

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves a range of on-page, on-site and off-site elements.

Relevance is particularly influenced by the key words, phrase placement and meta-data associated with your web copy, all of which provide essential signals to the search engines regarding your website's topic and theme.

Google actually uses more than 200 signals to identify the focus of a page, but here is your checklist of many of the fundamental on-page search engine optimisation (SEO) items:

Title Tag - is each one descriptive, unique and the correct length?

A unique, descriptive title tag can help your site pages stand out better when users view search results. It should use no more than 60 characters to tell users and search engines about the focus of the page.

Description Meta Tags - will they encourage users to click through?

The content of the Description meta tags is often used in the snippet of the search results, particularly when they contain the search terms that a potential visitor has used.

It is important that the text provides an appealing call to click, encouraging the searcher to click on the result. Also, the upper limit length for the description is 156 characters.

Internal links - do you use the correct phrases to aid navigation?

For site visitors and search engine optimisation, you should use the key phrase for the destination page within the anchor text of the link to that page. This aids navigation while also providing a helpful signal to users and search engines.

Emphasis should be placed on the site links that lead to the most relevant and important content on your site (methods can also be used to reduce the “weight” of links to less appealing pages).

Heading Tags - are they concise and descriptive?

Heading tags tell the search engine how the page's content is structured and what it’s about.  They should contain concise phrases that accurately describe the content below the heading tag. The H1 Tag is the most important and usually describes the main focus of the page.

Body content - is the focus on a primary key phrase?

Each page of copy should focus on one main key phrase. Secondary phrases can be used to develop the theme of the website overall.

Stemming is the use of words relating to the base of the term, usually incorporating plurals and other tenses. i.e.

• policy stems policies
• go stems going, gone
• page stems pages, paged and paging
• run stems run, ran, running.

However, stemming should be used sparingly as it can detrimentally increase the density of the target phrase within the copy. If “policy” and “policies” are seen as equivalent by a search engine the prominent use of both would be likely to increase the phrase density to spam levels.

Alt Text - does each read like a short descriptive caption?

Alternative text is inserted in the code of pages to describe image content for users and search engine optimisation purposes.  You can liken it to a caption the browser displays when the reader does not want to or cannot see the pictures presented in a web page.

It also appears as a label when a mouse is rolled over an image on a web page and is treated like anchor text for linked images.

Comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation

As mentioned above, Google actually uses more than 200 signals to identify the focus of a page. However, by following the search engine optimisation checklist above, you will increase the likelihood of your web page content being found by searchers.

Please contact MediaCo, for more comprehensive search engine optimisation.