Photo Credit: Steven Depolo on Flicker
Congratulations on your spanking new website!
Maybe you’ve spent a fortune getting a web designer to come up with a great-looking website equipped with an SEO-friendly content management system. You further invested a lot of time writing and editing the content, making sure it presents your company in the best light.
Before you say your hello to the world, it wouldn’t hurt to check if all your ducks are in a neat row with this SEO Checklist:
Check if your website is built for Accessibility
Is your website architecture built for easy access by online spiders? These are the robots that search engines like Google, Yahoo/Bing and MSN Search regularly send out to crawl the known online universe and to index your content for easy retrieval when someone types in an inquiry online.
If, during development, your website has been shifted from one publishing platform to another, (eg. Joomla to Word Press), chances are you may have altered the permalinks in the process which leads to broken links. This makes the search engine robots’ job difficult and will adversely impact your website’s searchability online. Simply moving content around may sometime result to broken links too. You may also inadvertently duplicate content which may get you penalized, or miss a title tag which lead to errors.
To check for accessibility issues Google has a free Webmasters Tool to check on whether all your pages are properly working with no broken links or expired pages.
Check Keywords for Volume, Relevance and Rankability
You’ve made sure you’ve done a thorough keyword research before finalizing your content, didn’t you?
If not, you need to take note of the related search volumes and make sure your keyword matches or is relevant to your users search intent. What you want is a term that has a significant number of searches but not too high as to render it too difficult to rank for due to keyword competition (unless you have the resources to embark on a long-term on-going SEO campaign).
If you find yourself in a tight spot, you may want to consider long tail keyword strategy. It is when you add more descriptive terms onto an existing keyword that will further focus the search to more specific attributes that your website is pointing to.
Check Your Content for Real-world Value
If you’ve done your keyword research right, you will also find what your competitors are saying about their product or topic. Consider how your website is unique compared to the millions of similarly-themed web content throughout the worldwide web (hint: you don’t have to do a million searches, the top SERP results will do).
How valuable is you content compared to these similarly-themed sites? What do you offer that is of great value to which kind of people? Can offer better information for FREE? Better price? Or maybe what you can offer is a comprehensive perspective? Differentiation works magic. And the difference between getting your website visited or ignored is in the level of detail and quality of content that you offer. What you have to say and how you say it can make or break your website.
But Wait, There’s More…
Even how you structure content can help increase your chances of getting your audience coming back for more.
Depending on the level of detail you choose to provide and your audience’s interest and attention span, you may want to provide your content into easy-to-digest bits or very detailed and in-depth installments.
As a rule, you don’t want to overwhelm or underwhelm your audience for that matter. So encourage feedback and adjust content structure accordingly to just the right size.
Stay tuned for next Monday’s Pre-Launch SEO Checklist Part 2 post for more website rank-boosting tips!
