Last week I had a customer send me an SEO checklist they use when reviewing the individual pages of their website. I added only a few items to their list but thought it an excellent idea to share that checklist with everyone else as well.
BUT FIRST...
Search engine optimization isn't an exact science (or art) and EVERYONE will agree or disagree on many different points when it comes to this topic. Following such a guide will not guarantee solid rankings, instead, it is designed purely to help make sure your website is structured in such a way that you give no reason why a search engine shouldn't like the different on page elements of your website. Also note that I've not included such things as robots.txt or xml sitemaps in this checklist.
You can download the SEO Checklist and continue reading for a breakdown of each category found in the file itself.
THE CATEGORIES EXPLAINED...
Page - The file includes a category for you to add the page name itself; this will help you keep track of what pages you've already reviewed and optimized. If at all possible and if practical, you will want to name your internal page names something relevant to identify it to what content is to be found on the page itself. For example if a page is relevant to the economy of Dr. Phillips the the page name could possibly be Dr-Phillips-Economy.html.
Meta Title & Meta Description - Most commonly used when Google and larger search engines display results within their SERPs. The link of the result is often the Meta Title while the text description within the results is the Meta Description
Typically you can get away with roughly 50 - 60 characters for the Meta Title and 150 - 160 characters for the Meta Description though if you go over or are under a little don't beat yourself up over it; Google will see it regardless, it just may not display it all which will result in the trailing ... as you can see in the example above.
When writing the Meta Title & Meta Description try to think about the content on the specific page and gear your title & description towards that content. Some will venture to argue that the first part of these have more value than the second half so keep that in mind with these and other parts we've yet to discuss.
Header Tags (H1, H2, ... H6) - Have you picked up a good book lately? The name of the book is Love and War. Here are some of the chapters I've read in this book so far:
- A Good Knight's Tale
- A Painter's Vision
- Hunting Destiny
- Hide and Go Seek
- By the Measure
- ...
The H1 of an individual page is nothing more than the name of the page (name of the book) while the H2's of an individual page is nothing more than sub categories of a page (chapters of a book). This applies all the way down to H6 which is where the header tags end.
In my opinion, every H1 should be followed by relevant content to that particular subject matter and every H2 should be somewhat relevant to the H1 topic but the content below it should be relevant to the spin off that the H2 creates. For example:
H1 - Dr. Phillips Florida
Introduction paragraph with general information about Dr. Phillips
H2 - Dr. Phillips Economy
Paragraph related to Dr. Phillips as is the Meta Title, Meta Description & H1 but takes a spin on a specific focus of Dr. Phillips by discussing the area economy.
Body Content - Simply put, once you have Meta Title, Meta Description and your H1 established, you now need to come up with body content to justify why you are using what your using for those three elements of your page. This is also true for when you add an H2, H3 and so on to the page.
If I gave this post the title I gave it and then didn't write anything in it, would you find it useful? probably not right? Same is true when it comes to your own website, blog and other online areas that you market in. Search engines and visitors expect relevant content to anything you publish online.
Images - Notice that I've used images on this post right? I have a few reasons for doing this; they are:
- Potential / Possibility to have my image found on image searches like Google's Image Search.
- Breaking up the content allows for easier reading. Not many people will read through such a large post like this without some kind of appreciated break and sometimes images do that for you.
- Visual appeal of an image may result in someone clicking on the image itself. This is great in the real estate field when highlighting a property or two directly on your home page or other pages of your website.
Image Alt / Title Text - While technology is making huge advancements in this arena, we still cannot teach a computer to realize that this is a photo of a purple cow with green eyes. So to make up for this we can add image alt / title text to an image. If you move your mouse over this image and the others in this post you'll see that I've done just that.
When utilizing this you want to be precise as possible. Don't stuff everything possible into the image alt / title text because you want to get one more word in. Saying, "Purple cow with green eyes named Shelia who has five calf's" is a little too much because you really don't know the cow's name and you certainly don't see her calf's anywhere do you?
One other thing, don't call a purple cow by any other name. If the photo is of a purple cow don't use, "Ferrari Enzo" for the image Alt / Title text.
Anchor Text Links
Within Body Content people like to constantly bold or perhaps Italicize things that really become annoying AFTER AWHILE. I'm not one to utilize bold, italics & underlines within content unless there is a purpose for it.
One thing that should be found, TASTEFULLY, within your content is the use of links. Links help search engines and visitors navigate through your website to pages that they are interested in. Without links, it isn't likely those pages would be found and therefore won't help you with your ranking efforts.
In this post alone I've linked to my
SEO Checklist and
Google's Image Search. Both links are relevant to this post and appear natural for anyone looking at them. However from a marketing point of view, I hope you download my SEO Checklist, use it and remember where you got it from. What wouldn't be natural within this entire post or within this paragraph alone is if I were to give credit to the agent that sells
Dr. Phillips real estate that gave me the idea for this post.
Within your own content you'll want to link to internal pages of your website and in some cases websites that are not in your own control. Sometimes it is better to send someone to weather.com instead of adding a weather widget on your home page for the sake of visual appeal.
Be tasteful when adding links within content. If you put too many links within body content you end up with visually hard to read content that might be useful to some of your visitors. With bolding, italics, underlines and links within content, it can quickly become a mess to the mind.
Internal Linking TO The Page
Ok so you've created a new page on your website and went through all of the checklist all the way up to this point. Now you need to make sure you have other pages of your website linking to your brand new page (Anchor Text Links) order for search engines and visitors to find it. "If you Build it they will NOT come" unless you promote it and that is done, in part, through linking to this new page.
If you are a Realtor® in Dr. Phillips and you have five different Dr. Phillips pages on your website, it might be a good idea to link some, if not all of those pages, to your new Dr. Phillips page that makes up page number six on that particular area. You can also turn around and link the new page to the other Dr. Phillips pages to cross promote and build relevancy to one another.
Uniqueness of Content
I guarantee you a good chunk of this post has been said in many different ways on countless number of websites over the years. Nothing I wrote today is rocket science or breaking news. What is unique though is that I wrote it and didn't simply copy what's been said from all of those other resources.
In this same way, your content needs to be written by you and not taken from Wikipedia, your local chamber of commerce, your competitors and so on. You should always have a goal of writing each new page of content yourself.
By doing this, search engines will identify that your saying something no one else is saying and that in itself may result in your website standing out above everyone else who is far too busy not spending time writing unique content and slipping into place with all the others who are not writing their own content.
IN CONCLUSION
WOW! I haven't written such a long post in a very long time. Gotta keep up my Rainmaker status right? I hope I'll get some reblog love and lots of comments. Feel free to ask questions, challenge what I've written, share, etc.
On page optimization really does simply require your time and a simple understanding of what you may not have known until now. While search engines will change the way they look at things on a regular basis, a lot of what I've written above could be looked at as a solid foundation.
So even though I can contact them and request that they refund me and set me up on the month to month plan, I've decided to make lemonade out of lemons by offering anyone that is interested in video property tours the opportunity to have me create one or more of them for you for a small donation for each video created.
Address: 123 McLaughlin Ave
The first thing that I noticed at our table before we sat down was a big glass jar with utensils in it. I had made a small statement to the Hostess right before I noticed this was to be found on every table. The Hostess asked if we had been to Sevilla before and we both said, "No". She then proceeded to tell us that the extra utensils are on the table because it is tradition that everyone shares their food with others at the table. The extra was so that we all got clean utensils to use each time.
My wife ordered this meal and I was able to grab a bite of the steak and the mash potatoes that came with the mean. The steak was absolutely tender and the sauce over it was delicious in my opinion. The mash potatoes came with a Shallot butter that I didn't get to try but wasn't a favorite of my wife's so she simply didn't use it.
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