Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | PageRank

Checking the List: SEO Details


When you’re new to SEO, or even if you’ve been optimizing web sites for a few years, it can be a bit overwhelming. There is so much to remember to make your site climb to the top of the search engine results pages. What’s worse is that the search engines keep modifying their algorithms, so you need to change your tactics regularly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone came up with a checklist?
Fortunately, someone has. I can’t take the credit for this; that belongs to Gary Beal, who you may know as longtime SEO Chat poster and moderator GaryTheScubaGuy. Gary has been an SEO for ten years, specializing in search, pay per click, affiliate management and email marketing. He's currently affiliated with Stickyeyes.com. He focuses on competitive industries such as online gaming, banking and finance, insurance, travel and investments, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Feel free to read the basic list as well as the comments on the forum thread. I’m going to expand on the list a little by trying to explain why some of these items are important. Since the list is a little too long for me to fit into one article along with all the explanations, I’m going to cover it in two parts.

Gary divides the list into four separate areas:

Meta tags and on-page optimization.
Technical issues.
Linking.
Other issues.



I’d like to note that he doesn’t discuss how to determine what key words you should be using for your web site; that’s an entirely separate topic, and worth an article (or several!) in its own right. Once you have decided what key words you want to use on your web site, however, the meta tags and on-page optimization category (perhaps the largest of the four) explains exactly how to use them.

The technical issues category deals with the kinds of things that are easy to check with a computer, (usually) easy to fix, and probably don’t affect your users on a conscious level. Even so, they’ll affect whether a web surfer is likely to find your site in the search engines and follow a link to become a visitor. Once the visitor arrives, some of these factors will also affect whether or not he or she wants to stay.

As to the linking area, there are a variety of issues connected with finding out how many back links you have, to say nothing of getting those back links in the first place. The area of “other issues” simply deals with points that didn’t seem to fit neatly into one of the other three categories. That doesn’t make them any less important however. Without further ado, then, let’s start discussing the things you need to make sure you’ve done with your meta tags and on-page optimization when performing SEO on a web site.