SEO Checklist

1. Page content and images

• The content of each page has been checked to ensure that there are no spelling / grammar errors
• The content of each page is simple to understand for the target audience
• The content of each page is relevant, engaging and fresh
• Each page uses adequate relevant images
• Each image has been legally purchased / licensed or created in-house
• The text is split into columns or grids to make it easy for readers
• None of the text blocks are greater than 60% of the width of a page
• The header contains: company name, logo, social media profile links, navigation menu, email address
• The content of each page is in inverted pyramid format with most important content on top and least important at the bottom
• All sentences are adequately short and the words used are simple to understand
• All paragraphs are adequately short
• Content focuses on the benefits to the users instead of the features
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content
• Dont embed important text inside images
• Give your images detailed, informative filenames e.g. my-new-black-kitten.jpg instead of IMG00023.JPG
• Create great alt text e.g. <img src="puppy.jpg" alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch">
• Place images near the relevant text
• Good-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear images
• Specify a width and height for all images
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links
• The Google crawler doesnt recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the ALT attribute to include a few words of descriptive text

2. Duplicate content

• Duplicate content does not exist on different sub-domains
• Duplicate content does not exist on different domains owned by the same organization
• Duplicate content does not exist on the "secure" version of the site
• Duplicate content does not exist on printer friendly version of the site?

3. Quality guidelines

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines
• Dont deceive your users
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether youd feel comfortable explaining what youve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didnt exist?"
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging
• Make your website stand out from others in your field

4. Page Design

• Each page has sufficient white space so that the page does not appear cluttered
• Each page is designed to maximize user attention
• Each page has 1 main heading and adequate subheading
• Where relevant, bulleted / numbered lists are used to make the content easy to read
• There is a clear distinction between the header, content and footer sections on each page
• The color scheme of all pages is consistent
• Each page is responsive and displays well on mobile devices
• The use of pop-ups is minimum
• It is easy for a visitor to share site content on social media
• Flash is not used
• Line spacing and paragraph spacing is adequate
• Padding in all the web pages, as well as tables, is adequate
• Menus and sub-menus are easy to navigate, especially on mobile devices
• Breadcrumbs are used to guide users, especially if the site has many categories and sub-categories
• Fonts are suitable and of ideal size
• All links, internal and external, are regularly checked to ensure the absence of dead-links
• Arrows or other icons are used to direct users towards call-to-action
• Call-to-actions are clear to understand. Words such as Submit are not used in call-to-actions
• Most web pages are designed to serve as good landing pages
• The color scheme of all pages is suitable and consistent
• Colors are used to organize information

5. Page Links

• Each page contains a link to the homepage
• Each page contains social media icons, which are linked to the relevant social media assets (Facebook page, Twitter, G+ page etc.)
• Each page contains a prominent call-to-action to subscribe for the mailing list
• If relevant, each page contains a link to the blog
• Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links
• Offer a sitemap to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the sitemap into multiple pages
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number

6. Page keyword

• Each page is optimized around 1 primary-keyword
• The title of each page is relevant, less than 70 characters and contains the primary-keyword
• The meta description contains the primary-keyword
• The primary-keyword is used adequately in the page content
• The primary-keyword is bold at least once in the page
• The primary-keyword is used in the main heading on the page
• At least one link uses the primary-keyword as its anchor text
• At least 1 image is named using the primary-keyword
• The alt text of at least 1 image includes the primary-keyword

7. The About us page

• The About page must contain:
  1. the organizations mission
  2. activities
  3. list of products / services
  4. achievements
  5. testimonials
  6. success stories
  7. links to other organizational websites
  8. details of key employees

8. The Contact page

• The Contact page contains at a minimum the:
  1. official email addresses
  2. physical addresses
  3. official phones numbers

9. Other pages

• The anti-spam policy page must be reachable from a static text link
• The terms of use page must be reachable from a static text link
• The privacy policy page must be reachable from a static text link
• The copyright policy page must be reachable from a static text link

10. Technical Guidelines

• Content shows properly even if the JavaScript, cookies, and CSS are turned off
• Navigation links work even if the JavaScript, cookies, and CSS are turned off
• Analytics tracking code is on every page
• To help Google fully understand your sites contents, allow all of your sites assets, such as CSS and JavaScript files, to be crawled
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure its current for your site so that you dont accidentally block the Googlebot crawler
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that dont add much value for users coming from search engines
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers
• Monitor your sites performance and optimize load times
• Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance
• Check for broken links and incorrect HTML

11. URLs

• No URL should contain excessive parameters or session IDs
• All URLs exposed to search engines should be static
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of the few