October 10, 2007

SEO Checklist

Is your CMS SEO-friendly? The following checklist will help you determine the capabilities of your content management system (CMS) with respect to search engine optimization (SEO):

Page Titles

• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the page title tag to whatever you want (i.e., any combination of keywords to accurately describe the page)?
• Can you ensure that there is a different title for each page of your site?

Page URLs

• Are your URLs human-readable?
• Do your URLs simulate an easy to navigate directory structure?
• Are your URLs free from irrelevant server querystrings, special characters, question marks, numbers, etc?
• Do you separate keyword spaces in your URLs with hyphens?
• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the keywords in your URL to more accurately describe the page?
• Is the URL for your index page "/" (instead of "index.htm" or "index.php")?

Meta Tags

• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the entire content of your meta description and meta keyword tags?
• Can you ensure that these tags are different on each page of your site
• Do you have the ability to leave them blank if necessary?

H Tags

• Does each page of your site have an H1 heading?
• Does the main body content of each page follow immediately after the H1?
• For any given page, do you have subordinate header tags (H2, H3...) to further outline your body content?
• Do you have the ability to modify these tags to whatever you want?

Image Tags

• For any given image on your site, do you have the ability to customize the ALT tag and image title tag to whatever you want?
• Are your images properly optimized for the web?

Body Text

• For any given page, do you have the ability to easily modify the body content to whatever you want?
• For any given paragraph or content element, do you have the ability to easily re-locate its position on the page with respect to other content elements?

Links

• For any given internal or external link, do you have the ability to add custom keywords to the anchor text and title parameter?
• Do you have the ability to quickly validate all links to all pages on your site or external sites?
• When pages on your site are relocated, does your CMS "remember" internal link locations (so that internal links don't need to be manually updated)?

Page Structure

• Are you structuring your HTML page templates using CSS (instead of tables)?
• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the content or organization of the CMS-generated HTML?

Site Organization

• Can search engines easily crawl your site?
• If your main navigation is Flash, javascript, image, frame, or AJAX based, do you serve up a simple text or CSS-based alternative for search engines? If not, do you have the ability to add text based footer navigation to every page of your site?
• Do you have the ability to easily modify and re-organize your site structure (to achieve clear organization and distributed link authority)?

Site Maps

• Do you have the ability to add a simple text-based sitemap page containing a link to every page on your site?
• Is it easy for you to publish a separate XML-based sitemap for submission to Google and Yahoo.

301 Redirects

• Are you using 301 redirects for any page which has been permanentely moved or deleted?
• For the non-www version of your site (domain.com), are you  301 redirecting to www.domain.com?

For a PDF version of the above SEO checklist, click here.

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