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Need SEO, SEM, or Social Media help? Hire Squareoak!

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.

.htaccess File Generator
This is a neat little .htaccess file generator that pretty much covers everything you might need to include in your .htaccess file. As you fill in the details about your site’s domain, redirects needed, allow/deny particulars etc, this web app will write your .htaccess file for you at the bottom of the page. Once you’re done, simply copy and paste your new .htaccess data into a .txt file, save and upload to your root.

Duplicate Content Detection
Copyscape is a great duplicate content detector. Google has provided Copyscape with a high-capacity Web APIs key for use with Google Alerts. From the homepage you can enter your URL and Copyscape will scan the web searching for any instances of duplicate content. I haven’t used this recently but I think there’s a limit on how many searches you can perform per day. If you sign-up for their premium service, each search costs 5 cents. They also provide CopySentry which will automatically monitor the web searching for real-time instances of content duplication. This service is priced at $4.95/month.

Search for your term over multiple sites via one interface
Intelways allows you to search for your term through at least 100 different sites which include search engines, video, photo, social media, and popular commerce sites. If you’re looking for something niche or something that requires every informational resource, this is your spot.

Find out what your top ranking keywords are
SEOdigger is an interesting tool where you can enter your domain (or competitor’s) and find out which of your keywords rank high enough to be listed within Google’s top 20. It also compares keyword popularity with Wordtracker and Overture. Additionally, report data is CSV exportable. Site does require registration for complete use.

http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp
Robot.txt file generator and validation
Not that creating a robot.txt file requires a degree in aeronautical engineering but this app can be fun to use and helpful if you need to block some bots. There’s also a robots.txt validation checker on this site just in case you need a second opinion on your robots.txt markup.

Test everything…the mother load
There’s a very bright young man out there named Jonas John from Germany. This guy is a wiz and builds web apps, software, browser extensions and an array of other useful things. This one portal in particular allows you to utilize CSS and HTML checkers, SEO tools, social services, web proxies, network tools, text tools, image tools, and other miscellaneous tools all from one location. Good things to come from this guy. Make sure you check out his other projects on his homepage.