Someone recently asked me to review a consultant’s SEO work on a new site they were launching. At first I thought, why’d you hire the person if you didn’t think they were doing the job correctly? Then I realized sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.
I told her she could hire me to do a review, then offered her these SEO quick tips to help ease the stress she was feeling about the launch.
- The page title needs to be different on each page and should contain the brand name and page title, e.g., Home |Brand Name
- Include Alt tags on all images, the images should have keywords in them, e.g., Brand name logo
- There should be a slug format for each page as well, e.g., home, about-us, our-services, etc.
- The meta description should reflect the information that’s on the page and should be specific to that page’s content, especially for blogs and resources. Also, keep the description between 50–160 characters, and include the keyword/keyword phrase in the meta description, URL, in an alt tag, and in the meta keywords tag, e.g., website SEO checklist
- There should be at least one heading tag on the page. <h1> is usually the title on the page. But there may be others, such as <h2> and <h3>, which are commonly used as subheadings.
Tip: The meta description is what searchers see in search engines just below the link to your page or content. So, it should be compelling enough to cause the searcher to click.
Avoid These Traps
Some novices believe that simply putting the same meta description and tags on all page is simply good form. Well, it’s not. It’s downright detrimental to your search ranking. In fact, here are several things you should avoid when developing pages and/or content for your site.
- Using the same meta description tag on all pages.
- Not using alt tags with keywords phrases on images.
- Writing meta descriptions that are too long (see #5 above) and/or that contain the keywords phrase at the end of the description.
- Don’t use quotation marks in your meta description. Search engines will cut off the description at the quote mark.
- Avoid using the same images on several content pages, especially if the alt tag is the same and is irrelevant to the content, e.g., woman sitting at desk, man smiling at camera, group of friends, etc.
- Not using links to other’s people content. Backlinking is important. But, don’t just link to anyone. Check the source and make sure it’s reputable.
Now that you have this down-and-dirty checklist, go clean up that website. Give me a call if you’d like a website SEO audit.