SEO Secrets Revealed

Very, very often Wendy and I are asked by small business owners what they need to do to be listed first on the Google search engine results pages.  Believe you me – I wish there was a simple answer to that question.  Many of you have heard Wendy say, “There are over 200 variables that are considered when determining where to rank a webpage.  And, Google doesn’t tell us all of them!”  Here is a list of just a few of the things we consider when working to optimize a website.  This will probably shed some light as to why Search Engine Optimization can be so pricy.

Remember, this is just a short sample of the list.  Let us know if you have any questions!

• How many website pages are indexed by the search engine?
• Is the homepage showing up as the first result?
• Does the website listing have the "mobile friendly" label?
• Are the website landing pages mobile friendly?
• Are the title tags optimized and unique?
• Is the brand name included in the title tag?
• How long is the title tag?
• Are their website pages missing page titles and meta descriptions?
• Does the website page content include the primary keyword phrase multiple times as well as variations and alternate keyword phrases?
• Is there a significant amount of optimized, unique content on key pages?
• Is the primary keyword phrase contained in the H1 tag?
• Are image file names and alt text optimized to include the primary keyword phrase associated with the page?
• Are the URLs descriptive and optimized?
• Are the URLS 115 characters or shorter?
• Is the homepage content optimized?
• Does the homepage have at least one paragraph?
• Is there over 500 words of content on website pages?
• Is the content text completely unique?
• Is there real content on the site or is the "content" simply a list of links?
• Does the intent behind the keyword match the intent of the website page?
• Are there website pages that target head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords?
• Is there duplicate content on the website pages?
• Is the content formatted well and easy to read quickly?
• Are H tags used?
• Are images used?
• Is the text broken down into easy to read paragraphs?
• Does the blog use good headlines?
• Does the webpage have more ads than unique content?
• Is there one URL for each piece of content ?
• Does the same content exist on different sub-domains?
• Does the content exist on a secure version of the site?
• Is the content replicated on other domains owned by the company?
• Are there are "printer friendly" versions of pages?
• Does the website have a robots.txt
• Do the navigation links work?
• Does the site have an XML sitemap?
• Are there less than 100 links on any website page?
• Is the navigation and vertical linking structure in place?
• Are the links within the content?
• Are there good internal anchor text?
• Does the site contain broken links?
• Are 301s being used for all redirects?
• Is content being served in JavaScript?
• Are links being served in JavaScript?
• Is content being pulled in via iFrames?
• Is the entire site done in Flash, or is Flash used sparingly?
• Are XML sitemaps in place?
• Are XML sitemaps covering for poor site architecture?
• Do the sitemaps follow proper XML protocols?
• Is the canonical version of the site established through 301s? 
• Is the Rel canonical link tag properly implemented across the website pages?
• Does the site use absolute URLs instead of relative URLs?
• Is site load time significant for users or search engines?
• Is compression is enabled?
• Is caching enabled?
• Are all images optimized for the web?
• Is all CSS/JS/HTML minified?
• Is the mobile site responsive design or dynamic serving?
• Are Google analytics set up if separate mobile content exists?
• Do your mobile visitors have a different intent than desktop based visitors?
• Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
• Is analytics tracking code on every page?
• Are there pages that should be blocked?

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