Written By: June Bachman ~
6/23/2018 9:00:00 AM
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?
