Quick 12 Point "1st steps" SEO Checklist

Been seeing a few posts getting some pretty crazy answers so I threw this list together really quick (with a juicy tip at the end for those that knew all of this already).

This is a checklist you need to run your site or any clients website through that will possibly identify issues and make it easier to eliminate a few common things before throwing yourselves and your site to the wolves. Use bookmarks and select "open all in tabs" and check a site very quickly for what I have come to find is 90% of the typical issues that hurt or prevent success in the SERP's

1. Run Xenu Link Sleuth - This will identify broken links (external and internal), internal redirects (302's) which will cause penalties if left unattended, resulting 404's and a whole host of related problems; http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. Check the IP for bad neighbours here; http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/ or here; http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/class-c-checker.php. You want to find out if you are in a bad neighbourhood, such as one with a spammer or porn neighbour that may draw a penalty. You could be open to potential negative influence if you are even in just a range as these types of sites.

3. Go to Webmaster Tools and canonicalise your domains if you haven't. If you have links to different domains (http and non http), you may be wasting link juice because of the way someone is linking back to you.

4. Check how much code you have v. text on any low ranking page and see if you need to consolidate or move some js off page - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/

5. Check your page size here; http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/ You really don't want higher than 90k page size. Otherwise you may time-out the bots and they may miss content or important navigation

6. Run a spider simulator on your website here; http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/ and make sure nothing is breaking it and it is pulling in the important stuff

7. Check the content on low ranking pages at www.copyscape.com - duplication of content may cause penalties. There is also a good supplemental calculator here; http://www.mapelli.info/tools/supplemental-index-ratio-calculator
You may not be in here because of duplicate content, but its the next step if copyscape comes back negative

8. Run your site through W3C validation. This may cause minor issues if your site doesn't validate and your competitor does. http://validator.w3.org/ - They have also released a few new things in the past couple weeks for those of you that aren't watching them by the way

9. Run your site through linkdiagnosis. http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/ This will give you all sorts of good information on what your competition is doing and identify what you need to be doing, and maybe where you are going wrong (Nasty inbound links) (Spend some time with this tool. Its a wealth of information!)

10. Install Google webmaster tools verification code to see if they say there is anything wrong

11. Post your site in Site Review and track a few members with rep down to take a look...after you have done all of the above

12. Run your problem pages through this LSI evaluator to check for theme continuity (along with the link diagnosis tool above) and be sure you have set up your internal link navigation and your internal link sculpting (using nofollows) the best way possible. - http://www.keywordexcavator.com/lsi-seo-blog/semantic-article-cleaner/

Lastly, here's a little gem for those that already knew the above; Have you got a link from a high ranking or high PR site? Record your rankings and then place a sitewide link to their front page (as long as its related). I heard about this awhile back and did some testing and I've seen it increase rankings exponentially. Its always been speculated that reciprocal links are worth less than one-way. If you do it this way you will DEFINITELY see a difference.

I am going to try some of those Gary, thank you ! Nice post, do you actually use those yourself ?

As 1st steps...yes.

I do 50-100+ Geek Critiques after every conference for free and this is an excerpt from my teams process list. There are many other checks we run but mostly with bespoke inhouse tools that I can't release until we open up the tools section of our site.

Right now I'm fighting with the Heads to make them free and not subscription based like seomoz and a few others do.

GaryTheScubaGuy

yep

Hi,
the last statement is very true regrding linking back to a high PR site

excellent checklist and recip link tip Gary, thank you.

Just working through Gary's post and have just run link sleuth, I think I may have a few problems and would value some advice on just how important certain things are.

First question (possibly of many ) - I have forum members who left or deleted the photobucket accounts they used to post images onto the forum. The result is broken links. Do I need to go right through my forum and remove all such broken links ??

Great post, Gary. Let's hope people read it.

Very cool avatar BERG. I had to watch it a few times to be sure I wasn't seeing things.

I always look forward to these posts Gary - forever pushing the bar higher.

Xenu Sleuth is an excellent tool, I have been using it for a little while now and cant believe its free...maybe for not much longer

3. Go to Webmaster Tools and canonicalise your domains if you haven't. If you have links to different domains (http and non http), you may be wasting link juice because of the way someone is linking back to you.


Whats does it mean to canonicalise your domains ?

4. Check how much code you have v. text on any low ranking page and see if you need to consolidate or move some js off page - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/

What is a good code to text ratio ?

examples please .

http://domain.com

and

http://www.domain.com

The above is a canonical domain issue.

You can set a preference in Google Web Master tools to display either a non www. version or the www. version of your sit ein the SERPs.

NOTE: You should address the canonicalisation issue in your .htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the non www. verison to the www.version. of your site.

There is no magic number. Don't waste your time searching for one either.

Personally I don't feel that this is a major issue.

I would just say that if you have lots of CSS and javascript code iny our document you should move it to external files.