infaweb - mobile internet, search engine optimisation

The Most Important Onsite SEO Checks for a New Website

Article Publish Date: 13 September 2011

Author: Jon Harrison

This article is aimed at people with some knowledge about SEO and because of this there is some jargon. I have aimed this article at being a quick tick list for a new website before they start getting into the fine details. If you need help to understand any of this or would like your website checked then please contact us.

Please note this list does not contain everything that needs to be looked into and just the most common starting points. If I was to add every check for every scenario I would still be writing it. . .

The most important onsite SEO checks;

URL's - are they use full? For example www.mywebsite.com/how_to_cook.html rather than www.mywebsite.com/article2599.html
Do you have any duplicate content? If so remove it or stop the search engines from caching it
Do you use Frames? Is so remove them if possible
Do you have navigation and or links in JavaScript? Is so remove them and where possible use html
Do you have multiple addresses for the same page? For example www.mysite.com, mysite.com, mystie.com/index.html. if so 301 redirect them all to your chosen page
Have you optimised your content to keywords? This makes the content relevant to what people are searching for so your information can be found
Have you put meta descriptions and title tags on all your pages? This is your way of telling people what your pages are about when they display in the search engines
Is your content useful? If not make it useful, the search engines want to find useful content and so adjust their algorithms to try and eliminate bad content
Is your website navigation clear, can you access all your pages through links on your site?
Do you have a hierarchy to your site? Having the most important information closest to the home page
Is your website code valid (try it using the tool available on the W3C website, which is easily found using Google)
Have you optimised the alt tags on your images?
Is the website full of adverts? If so reduce them to a minimum to stop the website looking like a spam site
Do you use Flash? Ensure you have a HTML version for the search engines to read the content
Do you have more the 150 links on any pages? If so look are your website architecture and try to reduce this
Do you have lots of outbound links (links pointing from your website to other websites)? Is so try and reduce this number
Is your page formatted in a constructive manor? Header 1 tags at the top, content, header 2 tag, content and so on
Do you have an author page for each content/article author for your site? Each piece of content/article should be pointing to the author page and vice versa
Do you have a site map? If not get one
Do you have any content hidden in any way to try and fool the search engine? (for example white text on a white background crammed with keywords) if so remove this
Do you have anything that looks strange, out of the ordinary on your page or in your source code? Get this checked out, better safe than sorry
Does your website run slow? Look into the reasons and speed it up