Web Site SEO Check List

There are a number of processes to take care when putting a website on the Internet. Failure to go after these steps will usually mean that your site will either rank very poorly in the search engine results page or not at all, which pretty much defeats the purpose of creating a website. Collectively these steps are called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

This list will definitely help to remember all of the most essential SEO steps. Once these are completed you can move on to “Fine Tuning” your SEO by applying some of the more advanced Optimization methods.

Onsite SEO

1. Research Good keywords
2. Sufficient page text – Too little text on a web page will cause Google to turn it into a supplemental page.
3. Original Page Text – Pages that are too similar to other pages on your site may be filtered out by the search engines.
4. Unique Page Title – Each page on your site should have a unique title based on the pages content and the most important or targeted keywords.
5. Unique Meta Description – Each page on your site should have a unique meta description based on the pages content and your most important keywords.
6. Unique Meta Keywords (doesn’t do much good, but it doesn’t hurt either) – Each page on your site should have a unique meta keywords based on the pages content and your most important keywords.
7. Keyword repetition in page text. Keywords and keyword variations should be used frequently on the page. Don’t get carried away, make sure the page is still comfortable for your visitors to read.
8. Keyword emphasis in page text – Use heading html tags and bold to tell the search engines what you think are the most important words on your page.
9. Keyword placement in page text – Be sure the first and last paragraphs on your page include your major keywords.
10. Alt tags – Search engines cannot read an image. Tell them what the picture is about. Don’t repeat the some keywords over and over, if you put the image there than it must relate to your content, tell the search engine about that relation.
11. Page Size- Page Size should not be exceed 100MB
12. Using of JS files – Try to avoid using of java script in your coding part. If you are using it then create a .js file & then use it. (Same thing with .css files)

Offsite SEO

1. Incoming links
• Directories - General directories have some value; however, try to find as many niche directories that are devoted to your industry as you can. We suggest though that you do not get too wrapped up in this form of link acquisition. We recommend a slow, steady rate in adding these links. Don't spam Google
• Article Submission – This is a good way to establish yourself as an “Authority” in your field, as well as create a steady stream of new relevant links (and Traffic) to your site.
• Press Releases – Find “News Worthy” events to write about your company and your website. This can give you a large burst of new visitors, although these will normally reduce over time. Some of the sites that use your release may keep it on their site, which will give you a good quality link back to your site. Most of the links that you get will be short term, which will not provide link value. It’s the traffic that makes this worth while
• Link Trades – The search engines are reducing the values of these trades. Be picky; only add trades from quality related sites. These trades often will send you regular visitors. If one of your visitors are going to leave your site (you don’t always have what they want!), why not send them to one of your “friends”.
• One-way links – These come in many forms. You may pay for some, often sites will give you a link if you just ask and your site would be valuable to their clients.
• Look for opportunities, some additional sources are:
• Forums
• Blog Comments
• Review sites
• Classified sites
• Don’t spam these sites, if they give you the opportunity to write something and add your link, be sure to give them something back. Follow their rules and give quality thoughtful comments, reviews etc.
• Link Bait – This is a pretty new term. It means to add high quality content to your site that someone may want to link to.
2. Outgoing links - It has been suggested that Google uses the sites you link to in determining the subject of your site. Link to a few authority sites.
3. Statistics – Watch your Web Site statistics for trends. This will show you what is working in your SEO efforts and what is not. Statistics can also be used to see where people go when they visit your site. If people are leaving without visiting other pages, then you may have a problem with that page.
4. Web Master Tools – There are many tools you can use to check the health of your web site.
5. Google provided tools – Google provides a number of webmaster tools to help you to see if there are errors in your site, what the most common words are in your site (ie what your site is about), what words are most frequently used in link text pointing to your site (once again, what your site is about)

A Natural Way of Linkbuilding :-LINKBAITING

Link bait (or linkbait) refers to anything on a website that encourages links from other websites. It can include content, online tools, downloads, or anything else that another site owner might find compelling enough to link to. Link bait is important because most search engines use backlines as a major factor in determining ranking.

Link Baiting is just like fishing. You publish a new page on a topic and set it free on the web. Hopefully others pick up on the content as fresh and interesting and link to it. The article is the bait, and the link is the catch.

Some common Link baiting Techniques

• Talk about a specific community.
  
• Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important.
  
• Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community.
  
• Be provocative or controversial.
  
• Be a contrarian.
  
• Be thorough.

How effective is Linkbaiting?- Linkbaiting is the most effective form of linkbuilding. Generally links gained using this method only increase in value so you don’t have to worry about massive disvaluing. Sometimes small webmaster sites will link to your linkbait, at this point the link has only a small amount of value but as time passes that site grows and the link from it grows as well. In this case overtime your value from that specific site would increase which effects your rankings positively. Now not all links achieved through linkbaiting will increase like this. But overall most are not disvalued.

What forms of linkbaiting I use?
These are the most common methods: Writing a killing single article or series of articles (a series generally does much better), a controversial article or a tool. Is one better than another? Not necessarily. It depends on the article or tool. Depending on that either could perform best. Tools generally cost more to produce but if they are unique and in high demand they can become a massive linkbait. Especially if your offering it free while the competition charges.

What is LSI & How it Works

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is an algorithm used by search engines to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query. The LSI algorithm doesn't actually understand the meanings of words on the page but it can spot various patterns of related words. It may be possible that LSI return with relevant results that don't contain the keyword at all, but those pages contain related or relevant words.

In response to a query an LSI indexed database will return the pages it thinks will best fit the search terms. The LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean and does not require an exact match to return useful results.

Latent semantic indexing was initially used in Adsense to enable adverts targeted to the theme of a webpage to appear on the page. The algorithm checks the wording on the page and determines the theme of the page. It was only later that Google applied the algorithms to search engine placement, and it is used by search engines other than Google. It involves analysis of words used in natural language, the synonyms and closely related words used when discussing the general theme of a page. It complements, rather than replaces, keyword analysis.

How LSI Works....
The Search for Content in a document, Natural language is full of redundancies, and not every word that appears in a document carries semantic meaning.The first step in doing LSI is culling all those extraeous words from a document, leaving only content words likely to have semantic meaning. There are many ways to define a content word - here is one recipe for generating a list of content words from a document collection:

• Make a complete list of all the words that appear anywhere in the collection
  
• Discard articles, prepositions, and conjunctions
  
• Discard common verbs (know, see, do, be)
• Discard pronouns
  
• Discard common adjectives (big, late, high)
  
• Discard frilly words (therefore, thus, however, albeit, etc.)
  
• Discard any words that appear in every document
• Discard any words that appear in only one document
  

This process condenses our documents into sets of content words that we can then use to index our location. For more detail visit
1.http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml
2.http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-indexing-lsi-explained.php

Content & Keyword Optimisation

Search engines love content ie text, and if there isn't any meaningful text or relevant content on our web site then no one is going to find us. If our site is basically an e-commerce web site or it has only product information or it is a shopping cart, then this can cause a problem. In this case we have to provide all the information related to products. If we sell widgets, we can talk about how the widgets are made, what we can do with the widgets, free widget recipes, etc. A quality & informatics content is a really great way to keep the customers coming back as well as being a good search engine strategy.

Keyword Optimisation:
The basic theory to keyword optimization is that each web page should be as focused on one or two keyword phrases, so the search engine will think the page is highly relevant to those keywords. Preferably you would create one page for each of your keyword and devote that page just to that keyword.

When Google’s bot is going through out site it is looking to try to figure out what each page is about. It does this by looking at a) the title tag, b) the heading tag, c) other onpage elements like body text d) alt tag and e) incoming text links. So ideally you would to choose one keyword or phrase for each. So we have to provide our targeted keywords inside the tital tag and also inside the page if we provide keywords in h1 tag then the search engine crawler give this keyword more importance. Here some points we have to look after when we are going to optimize a webpage.

• Please write your title in a descriptive manner not as keyword1, keyword2, keyword3.
• Excessive uses of heading tag may be make your site an a spam
• Excessive uses of keywords also harmful to your site. (eg- Aim for 300-400 words on each page with 7 - 10% keyword density is generally treated as good —but this is a rough guide, as Google changes its algorithm often and there is much debate on what is ideal.)
• Using the keywords in the tag of an image is a good habit.
• Don’t use duplicate or copied content for your website. Always try to make your content updated & provide new fresh content to your website.

LATEST SEO TIPS

What is SEO :-

SEO is the lively practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from various search engines (Google, yahoo, msn etc..). The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.

If our site cannot be found by the search engines or the content provides by us cannot be put into their databases, we miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search. Whether our site provides content, services, products or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users. So our main goal is to focus of any search engine optimisation strategy is to achieve these high rankings for relevant search terms that will be used by prospective customers who may be looking for a particular product or service.

Top SEO Strategies

1. Content - Regular, frequent and high quality content always comes first in seo straties. Quality content is crucial both at the search engine algo level and the PPC campaign design level. And its not just a fresh article once a month. If you examine your log files you will see how often the robots comeback to visit. Once you are in good with them, they hit your site 1-3+ times a day. It will only do this if it sees fresh content, via your navigation. There is a point at which the bots will and won’t come back and crawl. They won’t if they don’t see fresh content. They will come back to your index (homepage) to find the fresh content, if they don’t find it they will leave. If they do find fresh content they will continue to navigate throughout your site. Fresh content throughout your entire site is costly and time-consuming, but will separate you and promote you from the rest.

2. Inbound links to your site from relevant and trusted sites – Links from trusted sites; links from pages with a higher PR(4+) and less than 50 outbound links; links from pages with a lower PR and less than 10-25 outbound links (Keyword-rich anchor text as well). Preferably forums and blogs (or Viral Marketing) are some of the strongest referrers. This needs to be a permanent, ongoing project, and the links should be in place for at least 12-18 months for optimal effect. Getting 50 or 1000 this month, then dropping to just a few next month is a huge red flag for all the SE’s. A steady link building scheme is required to earn top rankings. This means no link farm’s. Let me explain about link farms and the way that the SE's see them. If you are actively and voluntarily participating in a linking scheme you are trying to manipulate their results. They value natural linking in their algorithms highly so they do not look link farms kindly now, or anytime in the future. It is one of the possible methods they have to value a website. This is why you hear so many of the pros say "content is king". One way or the other you need to attract traffic natuarally or the least make it look like you have.
   

3. Individual Title and Descriptions - The argument is alive and well, and continuing as it has and will for several years. Title tags are how the SE’s identify the relevancy of your page (compared to the end-users search query), not just in Organic ranking but in Paid Placement as well. Descriptions are how (organically) the SE’s place a relevancy rating on your page.
   

4. Site Architecture/Navigation – This includes menus, all the way to how each section on a site’s pages are interlinked with each other.
   

5. Keyword Terminology - In your content, use 2 or 3 word keyword phrases that are likely to be searched for by users. Don’t over-do-it, but be sure everything is in line and included - Keyword Title; Keyword phrase in description (1st line); Internal navigation keyword links; Fresh keyword rich content.
   

6. Universal XML Sitemaps - Providing an XML sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to help search engines traverse your site. Google, Yahoo and MSN have all adopted this “standardized” tool. Having a sitemap and then submitting it through WEBMASTER Central will tell you not only when the crawl (usually 1-2 days) is complete, but also if there are any errors that the bots found.
   

7. Rich Media – Or concentrating on utilising video, image and audio search. Google is and I believe Yahoo and MSN will be offering big incentives to move into these areas, provided you can utilize this according to your current ad structure, demographics and product or service. Flash builders are a dime-a-dozen. Utilize them to create interactive ads.
   

8. Web 2.0 - Utilising blogs and forums more to improve search such as www.flickr.com , www.myspace.com , www.technorati.com, www.simpy.com, and others. Also put these “public bookmarks” buttons (AddMe to Google) in your site and your articles.
   

9. Mobile Web - Google, Yahoo and MSN mobile are nearing and making your site accessible to all mobile web browsers is increasingly important. Remember when Firefox and Opera came out and everything didn’t work or look right? (kinda like today on a much smaller scale). That’s all there is to becoming mobile compliant.
   

10. Content Relevancy - ensuring everything is neat and relevant across a site. Irrelevant links and content could be detrimental. Map your entire site in a hand-written tree and link them accordingly. Then use this to create a sitemap, and add a link to it to your homepage, and/or your navigation.
    

11. Constant Monitoring of Paid and Organic Analytical Information - Re-evaluation and improvements based on user stats and new industry changes. Having an expert in this field is vital. (e.g. If you have a PPC account with a few thousand keywords that are working for you that is proving successful, great job. If you want to double the traffic whilst cutting your costs in half, then you’ll need an expert to know what these analytics mean)

12. Become a More Trusted Site – Links are great but links from trusted sites are KING. If you need to work 10 times as long writing articles, creating Charitable Ebay auctions, endorsing a football team or a fraternity, do whatever you have to do to get links such as from a .edu or .gov. This will almost instantly boost your trust and especially your organic rankings. Other potential trust issues include GeoTrust and HackerSafe certifications or even going to a secure server.

13. Keywords in images tag: Fill the tag of your images with proper keywords. Search engines use this tag instead of the image description.

14. Outbound links: Many outgoing links will not give you any benefit. Keep outgoing links limited and possibly link to relevant sites only.

15. Use robots.txt file to ban pages that you don’t want to be indexed. Also do not ban most part of your site this will reduce crawler visits to your site.