On-Site SEO Checklist

To optimize your content for search engine you need to take both on-site and off-site SEO factors into consideration. On-site SEO factors are often a point of debate for many SEO professionals. Some SEO-people have different experience and results with some of the on-site factors. So one way to find out how these factors are affecting to your site is to try things yourself and check if it works. You may or may not benefit from some factors as search engine updates it's algorithm but there are some proven factors that can help. So let's take a look at on-site SEO factors check-list that can improve your site ranking.

On-Site SEO Checklist

301 Redirects
You can have either “domain.com” or “www.domain.com”. Some people will suggest you to use “domain.com” as it has more benefits than www.domain.com” as per their view. My view is that allowing both type of redirect-access to your site is beneficial than choosing either.

No-follow tags
When you link to your own pages in site then make sure you’ve do-follow enabled. When you link to non-relevant niche sites from your site then make sure you’ve no-follow enabled for those links. There is no PR bleed if you link to non-relevant sites. But if you link to spam-link-farms from your site then sure it will hurt your site.

H1 and H2/H3 tags
Using keyword in H1 tags is beneficial. You can use H2 and H3 tags for keywords. These tags allow search engines to get more from your site. Please note that having variation with these tags will benefit a lot. If those keywords appear in nested order then it becomes easier for search engines.

Title META tag
This is more important for on-site SEO. You need to have less keyword here in order to avoid stuffing. Keep it relevant to your site instead of pitching more competing keywords. Meta tags have lost their much weight on google because competition techniques used by people. But there are other search engines who give importance to it and we’re optimizing it for all search engines and not just google.

Image alt tag
Your image can’t be read by search engine bots so you need to show them what this image is all about. You can use alt tag to add some keywords which describes the image better and can benefit your site as well. Though alt tags have reduced its weight in google algorithm, relevant keywords will always help.

XML Site Map
If you’re using Wordpress then you have a lot of plugins for generating sitemap. Other content management platforms have their own ways of adding sitemaps. For static site you can use many auto-sitemap generator scripts out there, many of those scripts are free. Whenever you update your sitemap then don’t forget to ping Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Robots.txt
Make sure your robots.txt is allowing search engine bots to index your site. If you want to protect some areas of your site then you can use “disallow:” inside robots.txt to exclude those directories from crawling.

Content Frequency
Add fresh content regularly on your site. This forces search-crawlers to regularly index your new pages. You don’t have to publish daily in order to get more checkups from search-bots. Write your content for readers and stick to frequency if possible. Avoid auto-blogger content scrapping.

Keyword Density
Too much of keywords always look spammy. Use Moderate number of keywords in page, domain and wherever possible. Make sure you don’t overdo with keywords. There is no strict rule from any search engine for keyword density.

HTTP Compression & Design
Many sites use content encoding using gzip and this way of compression speeds up loading of sites. Here you need to make sure that your site has less external HTTP calls (say images from amazon aws, widgets, slideshows etc). Less HTTP request you make faster your site will load and help both bots and readers.

If possible use CSS formatting as much as you can. Avoid using JavaScript & images for drop down menus; make your navigation as simple as possible. If JavaScript is used then make sure you separate it with external linking.

Analysing your site for On-site SEO

There are many commercial tools for analysing your blog/site for the on-site SEO. I’ll pick free version of woorank just to show you some elements of on-site SEO. Follow these steps to analyse your on-site SEO factors:

• Go to woorank.com
• Enter your website address and wait till it generates complete information about your site.
• Scroll down to check the on-site SEO factors of your site.

At the end, all I can say is your blog or site needs to have content that can be optimized for better performance. If site has poor content and if you work hard for optimizing it then even if you achieve better optimization you’ll fail to get readers without quality content. Remember many on-site and off-site factors will get higher or lower their weight with each search-engine algorithm update, so you need to work on this check-list regularly by keeping in mind the factors that are weighing more.