June 13th, 2007
The Lucky Thirteen The Critical SEO Checklist By Mike Tekula
When it comes to SEO not all of us have the time to be experts.
At some point the real "gurus" of SEO and other topics are the
people with a whole lot of time on their hands. This list, put
together with the everyday webmaster in mind, drives home some
absolutely crucial points that you should keep in mind when
optimizing your pages for valuable search rankings.
1. Check Search Engine Crawl Error Pages
It's important to monitor search engine crawl error reports to
keep on top of how your site and its pages are performing.
Monitoring error reports can help you determine when and where
Googlebot or another crawler is having trouble indexing your
content - which can help you find a solution to the problem.
2. Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files
These files are supported by major search engines and are
incredibly useful tools for ensuring that crawlers index your
important site content while avoiding those sections/files that
you deem to be either unimportant or cause problems in the crawl
process. In many cases we've seen the proper use of these files
make all the difference between a total crawl failure for a site
and a full index of content pages which makes them crucial from
an SEO standpoint.
3. Check Googlebot activity reports
These reports allow you to monitor how long it's taking
Googlebot to access your pages. This information can be very
important if you are worried that you may be on a slow network
or experiencing web server problems. If it is taking search
engine crawlers a long time to index your pages it may be the
case that there are times when they "time out" and stop
trying. Additionally, if the crawlers are unable to call your
pages up quickly there is a good chance users are experiencing
the same lag in load times, and we all know how impatient
internet users can be.
4. Check how your site looks to browsers without image and
JavaScript support
One of the best ways to determine just what your site looks like
to a search engine crawler is to view your pages in a browser
with image and JavaScript support disabled. Mozilla's Firefox
browser has a plug-in available called the "Web Developer
Toolbar" that adds this functionality and a lot more to the
popular standards-compliant browser. If after turning off image
and JavaScript support you aren't able to make sense of your
pages at all, it is a good sign that your site is not
well-optimized for search. While images and JavaScript can add a
lot to the user experience they should always be viewed as a
"luxury" - or simply an improvement upon an already-solid
textual content base.
5. Ensure that all navigation is in HTML, not images
One of the most common mistakes in web design is to use images
for site navigation. While for some companies and webmasters SEO
is not a concern and therefore they can get away with this, for
anyone worried about having well-optimized pages this should be
the first thing to go. Not only will it render your site
navigation basically valueless for search engine crawlers, but
within reason very similar effects can usually be achieved with
CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic impact while still
providing valuable and relevant link text to search engines.
6. Check that all images include ALT text
Failing to include descriptive ALT text with images is to miss
out on another place to optimize your pages. Not only is this
important for accessibility for vision-impaired users, but
search engines simply can't "take a look" at your images and
decipher the content there. They can only see your ALT text, if
you've provided it, and the association they'll make with the
image and your relevant content will be based exclusively on
this attribute.
7. Use Flash content sparingly
Several years ago Flash hit the scene and spread like wild fire.
It was neat looking, quick to download and brought interactivity
and animation on the web to a new height. However, from an SEO
standpoint, Flash files might as well be spacer GIFs - they're
empty. Search engines are not able to index text/content within
a Flash file. For this reason, while Flash can do a lot for
presentation, from an accessibility and SEO standpoint it should
be used very sparingly and only on non-crucial content.
8. Ensure that each page has a unique <title> and meta
description tag
Optimization of <title> tags is one of the most important
on-page SEO points. Many webmasters are apparently unaware and
use either duplicate <title> tags for multiple pages or do not
target search traffic at all within this valuable tag. Run a
search on a competitive keyword of your choice on Google - click
on the first few links that show up and see what text appears in
the title bar for the window. You should see right away that
this is a key place to include target keywords for your pages.
9. Make sure that important page elements are HTML
The simple fact to keep in mind when optimizing a page is that
the crawlers are basically only looking at your source code.
Anything you've put together in a Flash movie, an image or any
other multimedia component is likely to be invisible to search
engines. With that in mind it should be clear that the most
important elements of your page, where the heart of your content
will lie, should be presented in clean, standards-compliant and
optimized HTML source code.
10. Be sure to target keywords in your page content
Some webmasters publish their pages in hopes that they will rank
well for competitive keywords within their topic or niche.
However, this will simply never happen unless you include your
target keywords in the page content. This means creating
well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently
without triggering spam filters. Any way you cut it you're
going to need to do some writing - if you don't like doing it
yourself it's a good idea to hire a professional copy writer.
Simply put: without relevant content that mentions your target
keywords you will not rank well.
11. Don't use frames
There is still some debate as to whether frames are absolutely
horrible for SEO or whether they are simply just not the best
choice. Is there really a difference? Either way, you probably
don't want to use frames. Crawlers can have trouble getting
through to your content and effectively indexing individual
pages, for one thing. For another, most functionality that the
use of frames allows is easily duplicated using proper CSS
coding. There is still some use for a frames-based layout, but
it is still better to avoid it if at all possible.
12. Make sure that your server is returning a 404 error code for
unfound pages
We've all seen it. We're browsing around at a new or familiar
site, clicking links and reading content, when we get the
infamous blank screen that reads "404 page not found" error.
While broken links that point to these pages should definitely
be avoided you also don't want to create a "custom error
page" to replace this page. Why? Well, it's simple: if you
generate a custom error page, crawlers can spend time following
broken links that they won't know are broken. A 404 error page
is easily recognizable, and search engine crawlers are
programmed to stop following links that generate this page. If
crawlers end up in a section of your site that is down through
an old link that you missed, they might not spend the time to
index the rest of your site.
13. Ensure that crawlers will not fall into infinite loops
Many webmasters see fit to include scripting languages, such as
PERL, PHP and ASP to add interactive functionality to their web
pages. Whether for a calendar system, a forum, eCommerce
functionality for an online store, etc. scripting is used quite
frequently on the internet. However, what some webmasters don't
realize is that unless they use robots.txt files or take other
preventative measures search engine crawlers can fall into what
are called "infinite loops" in their pages. Imagine, if you
will, a script that allows a webmaster to add a calendar to one
of his pages. Now, any programmer worth his salt would base this
script on calculations - it would auto-generate each page based
on the previous month and a formula to determine how the days
and dates would fall. That script, depending on sophistication,
could plausibly extend infinitely into the past or future. Now
think of the way a crawler works - it follows links, indexes
what it finds, and follows more links. What's to stop a crawler
from clicking "next month" in a calendar script an infinite
number of times? Nothing - well, almost nothing. Crawlers are
well-built programs that need to run efficiently. As such they
are built to recognize when they've run into an "infinite
loop" situation like this, and they will simply stop indexing
pages at a site that is flagged for this error.
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Mike Tekula handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance
for NewSunGraphics (http://www.newsungraphics.com/), a Long
Island, New York firm offering Search Engine Optimization
(http://www.newsungraphics.com/search-engine-optimization.htm),
Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using full CSS
layouts and all things web design/development.
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