The Lucky Thirteen:
The Critical SEO Checklist
By Mike Tekula (c) 2007
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 líst, 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. Chëck 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
JavaScrípt 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 JavaScrípt 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 JavaScrípt 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 JavaScrípt
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 traffíc
at all within this valuable tag. Run a search on a competitive keyword
of your choice on Google - clíck 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 nevër happen unless you include your target keywords
in the page content. This means creating well-optimized content that
mentions these keywords frequently without triggering sp@m 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 scrípt that allows a webmaster to add
a calendar to one of his pages. Now, any programmer worth his salt would
base this scrípt 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 scrípt, 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 scrípt 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.
About The Author
Mike Tekula handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance for
NewSunGraphics, a Long Island, New York firm offering Search Engine
Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using
full CSS layouts and all things web design/development.
