By: Mae Demdam

WEBSITE SEO CHECKLIST
It’s always important to check your work prior to launching a website with implemented SEO strategy. Once the site goes live it’s accessible to your audience and you want to ensure that you’ve gotten most, if not all of the kinks fixed and your ducks in a row prior to launch. There are dozens of useful cheat sheets on the web, our favorites can be found at Moz and Dummies.com.

ON PAGE SEO STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION
We wanted to simplify these checklists even further and compile a quick one-sheet that covers the basics. We’re going to assume you’ve used the appropriate tools for Keyword Research, those which measure local search volume and provide a competitive analysis. We’re also going to assume you’ve done the proper link and traffic data analysis to see how people are finding you, which aids in narrowing down your top keywords. Once you’ve selected your keywords and phrases you’ll want to ensure that you’ve completed the following:

SEO HTML ELEMENTS
Title Tags – Approximately 70 characters and unique.
Meta Description Tags – Keywords should be as close to the beginning of the 160 character description as possible, use marketing copy, and close with a call to action.
Image Tags – Images should be Title Tagged with a keyword and brand dense description.
SEO FRIENDLY HYPERLINKS
Text Link or Anchor Text – Limit links, don’t stuff your content with links and make sure that keywords are related to the links where users will be directed.
target=”_blank” – Opens a new window for the user, these pages are usually additional pages on the site
rel=”nofollow” – Typically used when an anchor text links to an external site or page.
Image Link – Be sure to use Keywords in image links and link to related pages.
SEO FRIENDLY URLS SHOULD
Include Keywords
Be Clear, Concise and Correct
Create directories when necessary
SEO CONTENT
Content should be well written and free of grammatical errors.
User Header Tags H1, H2 and H3s to break up content and clearly display what each paragraph is about.
Use relevant anchor text and links within content.
Calculate at least a 3% keyword density.
Word Count should be approximately 500 words for proper density, depending on design.
Content should engage, inform and/or entertain.
Content should have a clear closing with a call to action or conversions.
LINK BUILDING FOR SEO
Easily create links with social media profiles; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google +, etc.
Submit content and site to Search Engines; Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Submit content and site to Directories.
Every page on your website should be subjected to this checklist and recorded so that you can assess keyword consistency. A helpful way to record all this information is the use of an SEO spreadsheet. We use this for all of our SEO projects, download our SEO Strategy Template to help you organize your SEO efforts.

We recommend starting with the SEO spreadsheet and recording all titles, urls, H1, image titles, etc. before actually adding any SEO to your website. It is much easier to make wholesale changes to a spreadsheet than to all the individual pages on a website.