Subscribe to this feed February 4, 2009

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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