Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something every website can use. After spending hundreds, or more likely thousands of dollars to have your website developed, you want to make sure your potential customers can find it easily!
Not applying basic SEO practices to your website would be like designing a sales brochure, having thousands of them printed up, then leaving them down in the basement of your store. The only people who are going to find your brochures are those who already know about your business.
The same is true for your website. If it is not properly optimized, the only people who will ever find it are those who already know it exists.
If you couldn’t already tell, at LongerDays.com we feel that SEO is pretty important and we wanted to be able to help our clients with it. So we set out to learn as much as we could, and then put together a checklist of items that we feel every website should have.
Longerdays.com SEO Evaluation Checklist:
1. Unique HTML page titles are present, with a targeted keyword and call-to-action
2. Headline tags are used properly throughout the content
3. Images & Videos are optimized with ALT and Title tags
4. Meta Descriptions are in use
5. Meta Keywords are in use
6. Content is unique and relevant
7. No duplicate content (use of 301 redirects)
8. Literal URLs (when applicable)
9. Address tags used on all pages (Geographic SEO)
10. Good use of internal linking
11. Navigation is text, not image based
12. Keywords used in tagline at bottom of page
13. XML Sitemap
14. CSS and Javascript files are installed in proper locations.
15. ‘robots.txt’ is in use
16. Analytics software is installed on the website
Take a look at this Sample SEO Evaluation that we put together for one of our clients using our SEO checklist.
In addition to our SEO checklist, we also preform keyword optimization. The purpose is to learn what keywords people are searching for, and then compare it to the number of sites that are optimized for those keywords.
We first preform a keyword search to find three peices of information:
1. What keywords people are searching for
2. How many times they search for them a month
3. How many websites are optimized for those keywords.
Once we have this information, we narrow the list down to keywords that have high search volumes but a low number of websites optimized for those keywords. We then optimize your website for the keywords that your competitors have overlooked. Viola! Your websites odds of attracting visitors through organic SEO increases.
Imagine it like two different lottery games:
In the high competition game you are playing against 10 thousand competitors – for 2 thousand dollars
In the low competition game you are playing against 2 thousand competitors – for 8 thousand dollars.
which game would you rather be playing?
To see a real world sample, take a look at this basic Keyword Research that we preformed for “plastic surgery”.
