Oftentimes we’re contacted by a potential client who’s really jazzed about starting a new campaign. In fact they are so pumped they’ve read all they can about search optimization and marketing, social media, viral content, digg, etc and they really want to get the ball rolling. Awesome! You get them signed up and everyone’s ready to roll. The site audit begins and their site is put through the checklist. Done! You report back with what you’ve found and their response is…”so what does this mean exactly?” Or, “we like what you’ve found but we LIKE the way our text looks as images”, or “what do you mean we can’t copy the text from all of our newspaper mentions and place them on our blog?”

Sigh…

This post is being written to help explain search engine optimization services, search engine marketing services, and the implemented tactics and strategies that go with them so we can hopefully put some of these reactions to bed. I want to help educate and make everyone’s lives a little easier. So here are a list of non-Wikipedia sites that have great glossaries on terms pertaining to search engine optimization, marketing, tactics, and general jargon. I did consider writing out these definitions here but why rehash what so many others have done so well. My favorite finds were:

SEOBook
Aaron continues to successfully build his mini-empire and I was not surprised to find this amazingly thorough glossary attached to his domain. He just about covers everything here. Quite a task and accomplishment.

SEMPO
SEMPO has a great glossary in their learning center. This one is a little more concise in terms of tech talk.

SEOmoz
Who doesn’t love these guys right? They have a page from their YOUmoz section that has a nice write-up of SEO jargon provided by David LaFerney

Webmaster World
Here is a nice user contributed list of various terms. The date range on the posts here is from July 2007 – August 2007 so it may be a little outdated. As you could imagine the total definition list isn’t really organized/alphabetized so you may have to browser search your sought phrase.

Besides Wikipedia these were the four best resources I could find. If you know of any others please submit them in the comments below.

Now let’s have a little fun. Let’s see how each glossary defines a certain term. How about social media?

SEOBook
Define: Social Media

“Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.”

SEMPO
Define: Social Media

“Sites where users actively participate to determine what is popular.”

SEOmoz
Define: Social Media

“Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.”

Webmaster World
Social Media not defined

I think I like David LaFerney’s from YOUmoz the best.

This post is an ode to Matt McGee’s post How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes. I found myself using this as a quick reference from time to time when first published. It was a great write-up that was very useful to many people. I always wanted to expand on this a bit and have the search community add to it so here’s my new and updated checklist for your review. If there’s anything I missed please add it in the comments below.

Contents
SEO Checklist
A: Homepage
B: Site
C: External

SEO Checklist
A1: Homepage - www.domain.com
1. Check for redirects and canonicalization issues
2. Choose http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com
3. Redirect domain.com/(index|main).(html|htm|php|cfm|asp) to domain.com

Apache redirects and editing .htaccess files:
domain.com to www.domain.com
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

www.domain.com/index.php to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

A2: Homepage – Navigation
1. Check for image, drop downs, javascript, image maps vs text navigation. Text is the best option.

A3: Homepage – Content
1. How much text is present? The more the better.
2. Check for keyword density in homepage content
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
3. Check for use of H2 tags and bold fonts (light/appropriate use is good on keywords)
4. There should be a sitemap present
5. Do a select all (ctrl + A) to find potentially hidden text
6. Check to see how search engines will view your site with SEO Browser. Make sure everything is crawlable.

B1: Site – Meta Tags
1. Check Title tags. Are they using keywords and are formatted correctly?

Brand authority formatting:
Brand Name or Domain | Keyword, Keyword & Keyword

Non brand authority formatting
Keyword, Keyword & Keyword | Brand Name or Domain

2. Check Descriptions for keywords and composition. Make sure the description gets to the point and speaks to the purpose/content on its respective page in the first couple sentences.

3. Make sure the keyword tag contains around 5 – 10 keywords. No more or less is really necessary.

4. Make sure there are no duplicate meta tags anywhere, site wide.

B2: Site – URL Formatting
1. Check url formatting. Dynamic URLs are bad. URLs that are too long will be truncated in Google SERPs.
2. URLs should contain keywords separated by hyphens.
3. Hyphens are more preferable than underscores
4. Keywords in URLs should match the content contained within the page they are leading to.

B3: Analytics
1. Make sure you have some sort of analytics installed. It doesn’t have to be Google analytics but do remember that every page within the site should contain the analytic tracking code.

B4: Site – Links
1. Links should contain keywords
2. Links should contain titles utilizing keywords
3. Anchor text, link keywords, link title, and page being linked to should be relevant to one another.
4. Site linking structure should be cyclical. There should be no dangling pages.
5. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links

B5: Site – nofollows (advanced)
1. nofollow TOS, Privacy Policy, or other pages that don’t contribute to your site’s ranking.
2. If you know how to link funnel correctly this should be done. I haven’t written anything on this yet but you can consult Slightly Shady SEO or Andy Beard

B6: Site – Robots.txt
1. Check for robots.txt file. Does one exist?
2. See what’s being blocked and what’s not.
3. Make sure it’s written correctly (consult Sebastian’s Pamphlets for best advice)

B7: Site – Duplicate Content
1. Make sure there is no duplicate content within your site
2. Make sure there is no duplicate content on other domains. You can use CopyScape to check for dupe content.

B8: Site – PDF files
1. Does this site contain PDF files? If so these can be optimized with new titles, keywords, and comments. Use Adobe Acrobat Professional to edit PDFs.

B9: Site – Images
1. Images can have ALT tags. Make sure to utilize these appropriately with keywords. When implemented, your site may gain traffic from image search engines like Google Image Search.

C1: External – Indexation
1. Perform a site:domain.com search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Compare what’s being indexed and what isn’t.
*Install FireFox Extension Search Status by Craig Raw
You’ll be able to easily perform this operative plus many other functions with the Search Status plugin.

C2: External – Backlinks
1. Perform a backlink count with the Search Status plugin.
2. You may also want to install Joost de Valk’s backlink checker plugin for FireFox to check the anchor text of your Backlinks within Yahoo Site Explorer or Google’s Webmaster tools.

So that’s about all I can think of for the time being. If I forgot anything please submit your additions to this checklist in the comments below.