You should do one of these at the start of a new SEO effort, and then follow that up with a more extensive review. This can help smoke out the major issues most affecting development.

Login to Google Webmaster Tools and the Web analytics package for the site and you’re ready to go.

1.) Determine When the Site Underwent Its Last Major Redesign

This includes anything that resulted in significant changes in URLs, navigation, or content. All of these can have a major impact on SEO.

As part of this, check the historical Web analytics data for non-branded search traffic. Have there been any unusual shifts in traffic? These are clues to potential problems for future exploration.

2.) Check the Number of Indexed Pages

Use the “site: command” in Google and record that data. Then check the indexing stats available within Google Webmaster Tools (the results are often quite different than what you see with the “site: command”). Compare these numbers to how many pages you think you have. This is another flag of a potential problem.

Given that the indexed pages data from Google is quite inaccurate, don’t expect these to be anywhere near equal to each other. You’re looking for situations where you have 3,000 quality pages on your site and Google is reporting that it has indexed 117.

3.) Review the Information Architecture

To do this, take off your SEO hat for a moment and review the way the site works for you as a user. Is the structure logical? Does it flow from higher level topics to more detailed ones in way that makes sense?

The architecture (and the internal links) communicate context from page to page. The more well structured this is, the better it is for users and search engines.

4.) Use a Tool to Walk Through the Site

A tool like SEO Browser allows you to see the pages the way a spider does. Are all the navigation links crawlable? Are the important content elements visible? If our first and second checks flagged a problem, you may end up diagnosing it here.

5.) Look for Duplicate Content

See if the non-www versions of your pages redirect to the www version of your pages (or vice-versa). Next, look for pages that are referred to by more than one URL. For example, the home page on many sites is linked to using multiple URLs (for example: http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html).

Some sites have thousands of pages across the site that are referred to by more than one URL (e.g., http://www.example.com/category/product37.html and http://www.example.com/product37.html). This can lead to Google reporting highly inflated numbers for indexed pages.

6.) Check the Amount of Content on Every Page

E-commerce sites often have a major problem with this. Handwriting copy for 20,000 products is a non-trivial exercise.

The problem is that pages with images and navigation, and little HTML text content, are seen as low-quality pages by the search engines. They may even be seen as duplicates of one another. If you were a search engine, how would you treat a site that looked like it had 20,000 pages without any unique content?

7.) Look for Pages With “Template Content”

The classic example of this is a site with thousands of city pages where the text is the same on every page except the city name has been substituted.

Guess what? You might as well leave the pages blank with this structure. The search engines quickly recognize that there’s no unique content (in the HTML text at least) on these pages.

8.) Intelligent Use of Title Tags and H1 Tags

Google Webmaster Tools can give a quick report on duplicate title tags, missing title tags, short title tags, and similar data for your meta descriptions. Go to Diagnostics, and then pick HTML Suggestions.

Duplicate title tags can lead to “keyword cannibalization” where more than one page on your site compete for ranking on the same search term. This is closely related to the problem of duplicate content.

In addition to looking for duplicate title tags, make sure that your keywords are the first words in the title tag (and H1 tag). Don’t lead with your brand name.

9.) Check the XML Sitemap File

Look for signs that major sections of the site aren’t included. Also make sure the file is using the canonical version of a URL. If you link to a page on the site using one URL and a different URL for that page shows up in the sitemap file, you’ve just created duplicate content.

10.) Review the Robots.txt File

Make sure important sections of content aren’t excluded. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and use the built-in robots.txt checker (you can find this in the Crawler Access section under Site Configuration). This will show you pages that Google thinks are blocked off by the robots.txt file.

11.) Perform a Quick Redirect Check

Use a tool such as Live HTTP Headers. For example, go to http://example.com and see if it redirects to http://www.example.com. Then check Live HTTP Headers to make sure the redirect used was a 301 instead of something else.

Wrap Up

This quick check isn’t meant to substitute for a complete and thorough site audit. However, it’s good to do this at the beginning of an audit because it will find a good portion of a site’s major problems. This can allow you to provide critical input to the developers on what they should work on while you move onto a more detailed audit.

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1.) You can’t be a great SEO and only wear a white hat. Part of what makes SEOs good at what we do is our constant desire to tinker and test things. Occasionally, testing stuff involves crossing the line and seeing how much we can get away with. The big difference though is that good, ethical SEOs don’t do this type of tinkering and testing with client accounts. We create small test sites (that may or may not be monetized or contain affiliate links) to do our tinkering on. It’s only by knowing what works and what doesn’t can we truly offer best in class advice to clients while still maintaining our in-depth knowledge of the search landscape.

2.) Black Hats don’t talk about their techniques. There’s a whole industry cropping up in SEO blogging – SEOs who travel the country speaking about SEO and blogging about it, but who don’t actually have a personal stake in the game. Sure, they may take on some clients or have had clients in the past, but they don’t have any personal gains or losses on their own sites at stake. The black hat SEO tricks these people talk about aren’t really black hat – by the time they get blogged about they’re old hat.
Let me give an example. Last week there was a blog post talking about how you could get do-follow links from Twitter by creating your own application using their OAuth and a fake Twitter appilcation. Basically it let you get a nice link with whatever text you wanted at the bottom of every tweet. The day after this blog post got mentioned in the SEO blogs Twitter slapped a rel=nofollow tag on those links. That’s the difference between real black hat SEOs and people who just blog about SEO. Real black hats use the tricks to their advantage without feeling the desire to share them on a blog. Many of us were using that technique long before it was announced. In fact, a few of us had even forgotten about the tactic because it didn’t really work that well. Most Twitter profiles didn’t pass enough link juice for it to be worthwhile, and we figured it wouldn’t be long before Twitter got out their link condoms.

The same holds true for the stuff like hidden keywords, text way off the scrollable part of a page, noscripts, cloaking, etc. These things aren’t black hat, they’re old hat. Sure a lot of people are still using them, but not many actual SEOs. Google has long learned to protect against this stuff and we’ve long stopped testing it. Only idiots still do this stuff.

3.) The black hat mentality isn’t just about search. The black hat mentality is about doing whatever you can to drive revenue. That could mean getting temporary rankings in Google or stuffing cookies to gain extra affiliate program revenues. The goal of a black hat isn’t to rank well, it’s to sell well. In fact, most black hat SEOs know they’re going to get banned for what they do – and that’s fine. The goal is to get the ranking (even for 1 day) and then sign those people up for affiliate programs or mailing lists (where we can continue to market to them.)

4.) Many black hat techniques aren’t applicable to legit businesses. Since black hats go into their project knowing they’re going to get banned, they don’t care what they do. The goal is to drive as much short term sales as possible and move on to something else. Minimum work, maximum payout. That’s not the model your brick and mortar business is in, so applying these techniques is akin to shooting yourself in the leg at a nightclub during football season. It’s not something you want to do.

5.) Most SEOs don’t understand black hat vs white hat.At least once a month I talk to somebody who brags about having some “secret black hat seo success formula” that turns out to be nothing more than an actual best practice or good recommendation. They bring up things like alt and title tags, or using noscript tags to show text versions of javascript content. These are things most good SEOs suggest to do anyway. Of course, you also get the ones who say stuff like “use the keyword in the first sentence, last word of first paragraph, first word of 3rd paragraph, and 4th word from the end.”

6.) Most black hats use their own tools. Sure, there’s a ton of tools out there that claim they’re for black hat SEO. You’ll see things like SEOnuke and Xrumer out there, but they’re not as effective as you’d think. Since most black hats don’t discuss their methods, they certainly don’t make tools for other black hats to use. In my experiments, I’ve always made my own custom tools to do what I want – or I’ve abused other tools out there in ways they weren’t meant to be used. Sure, you can buy stuff like Bookmark Demon and AutoPligg, but these tools really aren’t worth any money. The sites they submit to offer little to no value in links.

7.) Black hat SEO isn’t just about search engines. Huh? How can it be SEO if it doesn’t involve search engines? That’s because black hat isn’t just SEO, it’s about making money. In many cases the black hat can be more successful by spamming Twitter or Myspace than he can by trying to rank high on search engines. Sending tweets and bulletins to idiots who’ve auto re-followed you takes a lot less work and is often times more profitable than trying to game the search engines.

When it comes to business though, you should probably worry more about what your customers think and what they find useful.

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Usually the first thing you do when you are preparing to cut your lawn is to gather all your equipment and make sure it is in full working order. Does the mower have gas? Is the blade sharp? Are you out of weed whacker string? SEO is similar since you should gather all your equipment before beginning work. Is your computer ready to go? Do you have internet access? What about all the login information for your keyword tools?

Landscapers recommend mowing your grass in a different direction each time you mow your lawn so your grass gets cut evenly and grows straight. Which way are you cutting it this time? How could you optimize for search engines without a plan? Where would you even start? Having a plan before you mow can make the difference between your grass looking professionally cut or like a ten-year-old did it. Likewise, knowing what your goals are before you begin SEO work can make that same difference.

After your plan and tools come together you can begin the actual work. The straight, clean lines of a freshly cut lawn is a huge contrast to the jungle-like, scraggly yard of a few hours earlier. A well-written, fully-linked site is a stark difference to the un-optimized, faulty site of before as well. Good technique and skillful work is apparent whether you are cutting grass or building an optimized website.

Now that the hard work is over, you can focus on the details that set apart a good job from a great one. Weed whacking, edging, and pulling weeds in the mulch beds really go the extra mile toward making your yard look first-rate. Ensuring all the keywords are effective in drawing traffic and modifying ones that aren’t can make SEO work really stand out. Is the keyword specific enough? Is there enough definition to support the keyword tools? The fine-tuning is the more enjoyable work of search engine optimization.

Just like a green, award-winning yard takes time and skill to cultivate, a thriving SEO operation takes tweaking to bring to fruition. The remuneration of each is undeniable though.

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There is some truth to the old adage that “it takes money to make money” especially when it comes to operating a successful website business. The good news is that it doesn’t cost as much as you might think and nowhere near the amount of money needed to make an impact in a brick and mortar business. When you think about it, investing in a few little things such as SEO articles, article marketing, social bookmarking and website optimization is not a big sacrifice especially considering how huge the potential return on your investment really is. The bad news is that failing to take these small steps can cost you big in the end.

Each day more and more people are losing their jobs and even their homes to this troubled economy and the internet is one of the few places left that you can turn for a way to make a good living, especially since there are fewer and fewer jobs available. Your number one priority should be increasing your website’s search engine optimization right now. Each day you wait is another day that the competition is increasing their position in the market and you are not.

Using the correct SEO strategies will move your site to the top of the search engine rankings. You will also be able to better brand yourself so that you will stay on top when the masses start to figure out what is going on and try to take over your niche. Utilizing the correct SEO practices is how every wealthy internet entrepreneur got where they are. Your product is significant, no doubt, but it is the internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques that help you make more money.

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In a broader sense, there are 3 kinds of SEO specialist. First, the Beginner, one who has the basic skills of keyword optimization and search friendly copywriting ability. The Intermediate and the Advance SEO specialists can also handle programming and coding.

Of the many functions of an SEO specialist are article writing, web content writing, search engine optimization and link building.

• A lot of SEO specialists concentrate on the whole copywriting part of the optimization process with special emphasis on the keywords and their density. Any search engine will produce unique content faster and easier in its searches thereby making the site that has these articles and write up more reputable in a short span of time.

• Most of the SEO specialists also have a wide knowledge of programming and coding .Most of them are called SEO generalists that look at the bigger picture of proper programming with suitable optimization processes to meet search engine requests thereby generating a large amount of traffic for the sites.

• An SEO specialist is also adept at internet marketing also known as I-marketing,  web marketing or digital marketing. He will know where exactly to advertise your site and give it the required boost and business.

• Of the many functions of an SEO specialist, the most prominent are article submissions to directories, social bookmarking, directory submissions, RSS feeds, forum postings, blog commenting and search engine submissions.

• Other SEO specialist services could be search-friendly web designing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, link building and mobile marketing optimization.

• Meta data: the titles, keyword and descriptions: An SEO specialist will also handle the title tags, robots, keywords and GOOGLEBOT to produce effective results.

• A good SEO web design will include a nice web architecture, sitemaps, and internal links. Theme organization is what is required to boost your search engine page rank, so the search bots understand what your site is all about and enable it to present it in front of millions of visitors that are searching for it.

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There are a lot of benefits of having your own domain name. Listed below are a few of the most important ones:

• Having a personal domain name will enable having an address like http://www.yourcompany.com. On the other hand, a free domain name comes with http://www.freewebsite.com/yoursite; this is longer and harder for your customers to remember.
• Having your own domain name also builds up trust and credibility amongst your clients as they feel more comfortable and secure in the fact that it is an established company.
• With your own domain names come multiple emails at your domain that can be assigned to various functions of the site thus enabling flexibility and easy handling of customer requests.
• The home pages of a particular domain come up easily in internet searches as against those that are hosted on a free server. The index.html should be your own domain name to come up when a key word strikes!
• Some search engines will not be able to crawl down the sites that are hosted with free services. More often than not error messages like, ‘too many pages submitted’, ‘your URL is submitted for processing’ and other error crop up when you are trying to access these sites.

Other considerations before you decide upon a good domain name are as listed below:

• Size of Your Domain Name: Size is a very important factor in deciding your domain name – the smaller the better. Your visitors will easily remember a website name that is shorter and difficult to misspell.
• Easy to Remember Names: Most successful websites have easy to remember names like the ones you come across in your day to day life. Pick and choose the simplest one.
• Domain Names Need to Be Business Related: Domain names that are related to the product you are selling are always very useful. Try getting the product name as your domain name. An example would if you are selling arthritis shoes get a domain name like xyzarthritishoes.com.
• Competitors Domains: Always avoid picking names that are closely related to your competitors’ sites. Lest you lose your customers to them due to the confusing and similar names.
• Go For the .com! : People are used to the .com version much more than any thing else. Make .com your first choice of address. It is simple and more natural and people might just be able to find you on the net by typing in your brand’s name followed by the inevitable .com.

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1. As soon as possible, complete, optimize, and make available the smallest portion of the site which is useful. For example, upload just the home page and ordering page first, but include a notice that more information is under construction. This way, search engines will find and index the site earlier, but your non-SEO promotional efforts can wait until all construction has been finished. Then you can have a “grand opening” (perhaps using a press release) to show users all that your site has to offer. Keep in mind that it typically takes months after a website is first indexed in Google before it has a chance of gaining high search result positions there.

2. Work on SEO keyword targeting, META tag creation, and search engine “spider” accessibility while the site is under construction, not later. This will save time when you don’t have to rewrite or update pages for SEO in the future. Be sure to incorporate a Site Map into your design. It is also good to learn about proper internet promotional techniques during this process, so you aren’t deceived into applying any detrimental practices like posting to FFA pages or trading links with completely unrelated web sites. Don’t hurry to finish all of the pages immediately or to start promoting the site in any way possible.

3. Don’t submit the incomplete site to directories or try reciprocal linking until it has been finished. Otherwise, the operators of directories or other sites will be less likely to find your site impressive enough to link to, and your chance to be listed will probably be lost. However, it is generally acceptable to send free link submissions to major directories which take months to approve them, as long as the construction process is expected to finish in under a month. Make a list of any directories you submit to, as it can be difficult to remember, and it’s best not to submit to the same directory more than once.

Following these SEO tips will help your site attain higher rankings in search results at an earlier date, with fewer changes needed when it is no longer under construction. This will also prevent mistakes which could undermine the site’s success.

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Here are a few potential reasons why your SEO isn’t working.

1. Outdated Methods – The effectiveness of different techniques changes from year to year, and some are no longer useful. You should consider researching newer methods of conducting SEO if your techniques include things like putting a hundred different words in the “keywords” META tag, purchasing links on pages that aren’t related to your site in any way, or commenting on blogs that now use the “nofollow” attribute. Certain outdated techniques, like putting a long list of keywords at the end of the page (typically in a very small font) or posting to FFA (Free For All) link pages, can actually worsen a site’s position in search results instead of improving it.

2. Not Enough Time -Even if your techniques are correct, another one of the reasons why your SEO campaign may not be working is because you don’t spend enough time on it. SEO shouldn’t be viewed as an afterthought; efforts to design and create content for a web site are wasted if it receives little or no traffic. There are numerous important tasks associated with SEO; optimizing URLs and META tags, obtaining inbound links, researching keywords, improving keyword density, submitting to directories, creating a site map, and so on. Many companies pay marketing firms to carry out SEO work, thus saving time and ensuring that effective techniques are applied.

3. Too Impatient – One of the reasons why your SEO efforts might seem not to be working is that you haven’t waited long enough to see an effect. Search engines need to index pages, find new links, update rankings, and so on – which doesn’t happen immediately. It typically takes longer (especially for new web sites) to see results from SEO on Google than MSN, Live.com, or GigaBlast. Submitting a new site to the major engines can help expedite the results a bit. If it is your goal to start receiving traffic immediately, consider using a different promotional method like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or paid inclusion until your SEO campaign starts working effectively.

After identifying and responding to the reasons why your SEO isn’t working, you will have a better chance of achieving high rankings in search results and gaining more traffic to your web site.  If you would like a professional review of your website, check out our Website SEO Audit service.

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ALT Tag: Usually applied to graphics; text-only browsers and search engine spiders/robots see these tags instead of the images they are associated with.

Backlinks: These are simply external links from other web sites and blogs that link to the site in question. Some sites have free backlink-checking features.

Black Hat: Manipulative SEO techniques which try to cheat search engines and competitors by artificially making pages appear relevant to certain unrelated keywords.

Blogroll: This is a list of links to other blogs/sites which appears in the left or right sidebar of many blogs. Getting listed is good for SEO.

CTR: Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of internet users who click on a particular link or another type of online advertisement.

FFA: Free For All link pages. Although these may have had some SEO benefit many years ago, using them can severely harm search engine rankings.

Keyword Density: How often keywords appear throughout a page. Search engines may penalize attempts to cheat, such as putting a long list of keywords at the end.

Link Bait: Such “bait” is a web page that uses a title and/or content which “baits” other sites to link to it. It is very desirable for SEO.

META Tags: This refers to the keyword, description, and title tags used by many web pages. They affect how search engine results appear.

NoFollow: The “nofollow” tag/attribute, when added to a link, prevents the site being linked to from receiving (or losing) any SEO benefit.

PageRank (PR): A ranking system used by Google, which affects how close to the top of Google search and directory results a web site will appear.

Robots/Spiders: Automated computers which explore the WWW, looking for new pages and collecting information for the search engines to index.

Sandbox: A theory that Google puts new web sites at a significant disadvantage in search results for months after they are indexed.

SEM: This acronym refers to Search Engine Marketing, which encompasses SEO, paid inclusion, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Site Map: A page on a web site which links to all of the other pages. This makes it easier for “spiders” to find and index them.

See our other entries for more details on each of the terms listed in this SEO Cheat Sheet, and consider printing out this page for future reference.

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