24 conseils SEO qu’un développeur ou référenceur ne peut ignorer
Although this will seem, to many of you, a very generic list of SEO on-site tips, you may be surprised to see how many SEO consultants and web developers overlook or forget these basic steps when launching a new site. These twenty- four On-site search engine optimisation checkups/tips can assure that any link building / link baiting efforts that will be made will give great results.
1. Run a $100 Adwords test campaign after your initial keyword research, helping you do the best themed/relevant keywords on-site optimisation.
2. Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive Title / Description tags on every page.
3. Verify that almost every single piece of relevant content on your site is somehow static to the page it was written for and is not a text image (double check that with a text browser).
4. Revise the On-page content to be sure there is a minimum presence of your themed keywords on every page. Don't try to go overboard, just think as if you'd be the user.
5. Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.
6. Verify that the any navigational element are text links and are not "click here" or "more info" type of links.
7. Make sure contextual links are widely spread and commonly used all across the website content to emphasize key pages.
8. If you plan on trading links, make sure there is small directory with themed categories, or at least get a "links/resources" page.
9. Verify that your robots.txt file exists and that you added the folders you want to prevent access from.
10. Be sure there is a sitemap.xml at the root of your site.
11. Make sure there is a breadcrumb to help the cross-linking of your site.
12. Verify that the static sitemap is easily reachable by your visitors.
13. Ensure that your 404 page contains links to your main categories and maybe a search box.
14. Check that important images are labeled properly with the alt tag (this should be automated somehow).
15. Make sure you installed generic analytics to ensure any kind of tracking (Google Analytics, Indextools).
16. Make sure that conversion/defined action tracking analytics are installed (Heatmap tracking, conversion trackers from PPC platforms, Indextools action trackers, etc).
17. Register / validate your site through Google Webmaster central to be able to analyze incoming links and validate a few things (like your robots.txt file).
18. Do a quick IP location test to make sure you're hosted near your main market.
19. Unless otherwise advised, get your company's signature at the bottom of the pages you create for clients, using one of your best keyword as anchor text. This is vital. You shouldn't be worried about promoting your services, especially if your clients are highly satisfied with your work!
20. Use all SEOmoz tools (I'm a bit biased here): Page Strength and Keyword Difficulty to measure the efforts required to achieve high SERPs (by comparing your actual site with the top competitors website), and the Crawl test to ensure your website will get properly indexed.
21. Get your website xhtml/w3c validated to cover the major issues you might not have thought of
And a few extras, if you're running a blog platform
22. Ping the major content aggregators (Google Blog Search, My Yahoo, Wikio, etc.)
23. Include links to major social platforms (digg, del.icio.us, blogmarks, technorati tags, etc.)
24. Use Feedburner to get stats and a universal RSS feed
With this basic checklist, any web development company that is building and marketing websites will give its customers a fairly good chance of achieving high SERPs while generating several leads with referrals and good SERPs for themselves. The extra time it takes to do this justifies the reward you get. As an example, our company currently employs 17 people: I can say that half of the business we've generated has been solely because we insist that our customers implement at least these basics steps before launching a site. And, let me tell you, nobody is unhappy with the traffic, and nearly all of them don’t mind that our signature's there!
I think Number 13, regarding 404s, is one of the most neglected practices out there. If they've arrived from an SE, ninety percent of people will hit "Back" when faced with a 404, rather than attempting to find something that works on the site. Creating a "good looking" 404 page isn't that hard and will save a site from so many missed opportunities.
There's also the other part, which is you set up a nice 404, telling people the page isn't there, and that they'll be redirected in 3 seconds to the main site. Then whack in a simple meta refresh set to 3.
Not only do they end up at your site, and are able to dig around and so on and so forth, but you've shown yourself as something a little bit different.
Customer service is all important. Even online.
I only disagree with #10.
As an SEO, using an XML sitemap to feed Google / Yahoo takes away one of my best tools. It gets them to index pages they might have not indexed without the xml sitemap.
If Google can't find the page to index on it's own or doesn't think it is valuable enough to index, then I want to know. This is one of the best ways to discover architectural flaws in a site.
I think this makes a lot of sense. I had never thought about it that way. Is it possible for you to explain a little bit more about how you do that, I think some of us would be glad to know :)
Totally agree with you Jeremy - I was going to write a post about this tonight.
I'm happy to say I do most of the things on this list and also ashamed to say I've neglected a few. I'm not sure I agree with the idea of creating a links/resources directory for the purpose of exchanging links, though I'm generally not someone who trades links for the sake of trading links.
I prefer to build relationships with other site owners and link to pages on their sites that I think my visitors will find useful. I prefer to place those links contextually instead of having them on a page devoted to links.
I agree. Placing contextual likns is much better tactic then a list of links.
I have to agree with you VanGogh... The directory is a bit overkill, and I actually have never done one myself, but it is a way to offer themed webpages in return and could be useful, although I do have to agree that it brings little value to the end user...
Thanks for your criticism, it's greatly appreciated!
I have to disagree with number 19. Unless you're offering your clients a discount on your services in exchange for advertising on their site, I don't think it's an SEO's place to stick a link on the sites they work on.
You don't see offline marketers doing anything like that. Moreover, I expect that the vast majority of my clients would be against any overt statement that their site had been optimized.
If you do a good job, you can hope for recommendations from your clients, but not in the form of a link that anyone can see.
Well Glad... I agree but disagree ;)
In fact, Rand talked about that in another post... Some of the companies we have do not allow that, but we bring incentives for them... like some free press releases or great links for our network...
It's a givers game... some won't buy in, some will. And, honestly, I'm proud of the work we do, and most of our customers are pleased with it, and it does bring me more business, which in the ends allows me to give better service to my customers because I get a bigger team...
It's just an opportunity that you can leave on the table. I don't!
What a brilliant post...
Like most people, I try to cover off all of these areas. It's difficult when optimising dynamic sites with thousands of pages, but I make sure I'm well covered on all of the static content pages.
It's especially tough when making sure all title and description tags are unique on a site with thousands and thousands of pages. Does anyone have any tips?
The sitemap xml is a bit of a contensous one, there was a lot of discussion about this at London SES last week. I agree with those who say you should not be relying on a sitemap to get your site indexed. However, I think the new link functionality and existing robot.txt and query stats data is extremely useful.
I would also recommend taking one last pass or at least screenshots with something like browsercam to verify the site works cross-platform/cross-browser, and hopefully at least the last 2 versions of the various browsers.
This is best done as an ongoing part of development, at the very least, checking throughout in IE and FF, which should give you a good heads up on most issues.
While this may not relate directly back to SEO, but SEO is more an element of marketing anyway and what's the point in driving tons of traffic to a site for them to find navigation that doesn't work or a layout that completely breaks. Most users aren't aware that things may be different at the browser level and will just assume that it's a bad site.
Likewise, are all email contacts setup and does the contact form work?
I do have to agree that SEO, to my eye, is alot more about focusing on the global concept of marketing a website with synergy between offline and online tactics.Our blog, Go-Ref, tries to define "Referencement" (which is the french word for SEO) more as a holistic approach to transmitting a message than just ranking on top of the SERPs for a few dozen keywords.That's where, as Rand said, that you draw a line between the expert and the novice, although I still consider myself far from being an expert!
I think you forgot two:
or aren't we all cloaking? :)
Have the no cache meta set-up? I've never seen that as hugely important - can you expand a bit?
I'd also add:
* Make sure that you have the auto discovery tag on your homepage if you have RSS Feeds - for engines and users (especially as IE 7 and Firefox now 'light-up' an RSS icon when they detect one of these)
I think I may print this off and pin it to the wall of our IT department!
25. Place a newsletter signup box everywhere. If a user submits the form, set a cookie to hide the text box from everywhere.
I totally agree with you.
Even if you don't have a newsletter right now, it's always a good idea to start collecting names/emails of people who are interested enough in your service to give you that info
Good points all. Will add the old adage "content is king". Now I need to carve out some time to do some of these things..
The checklist is great, because often we get so caught up in finishing the site and getting it up and running we forget about some of the details that really help us to succeed. Thanks for putting it together.
It's good to have clients, who has a developer, who understands your instructions and not argues every thing that is SEO.
Great post guys - there are a couple of bits and pieces I do not carry out... Does anyone know a good outsourcer who can help with this stuff?
Great post thx! I think canonical urls and proper redirects are key too
How important is Point 18?
18. Do a quick IP location test to make sure you're hosted near your main market.?
Hi there, Thanks for the constant reminder how we should be using SEO on our sites. I have just written about the same thing on my website.
Catherine
Thanks for the article Guillaume. I've put together a PDF version of the checklist over on my blog. I'm going to refine it some more so that I can use it as a checklist with clients.
Thanks again!
Way to find a way so we're not doing any duplicate content ;)
I like it: share it the most you can :)
A developer need SEO Checkups，To help him achieve marketing.
That is a rocker...!! Perhaps the most simple and one of most informative SEO checklist I have seen. Very nicley put up..!
This is a great checklist to keep handy and come back to. Sometimes it is impossible to remember everything you ought to know.
I am curious, what 3 basic steps are you referring to before one launches a website, are you referring to any three of these 24 tips ?
Hum, I am not sure as to what 3 steps you are referring in my post. Help me there, and I'll help you in return :)
I will be including this in my rockyfied roundups.
Looks like you put a lot of thought into this.
Thanks for the tip I will look into it!
Van Gogh brings up a good point. Share some link love to get the ball rolling. I would much rather have contextual links comming to my site instead of resource page links.
Great list!
I'm sorry but I don't really understand number 1. Could you please describe that? Why would I want to run an AdWords test campaign?
Basically, the quick steps to get the best idea of the number of searches for every keywords you generated through multiple keywords generators are:
1. Get a list of keywords from your customers and its clientele, from your competitors and from your head
2. Spin that in 3-4 keywords generators
3. Take all of those keywords and run a crappy Adwords campaign just to measure the number of impressions for each of your keywords in your targeted area
4. Build your themes of keywords considering the potential traffic each keyword, well optimized organically, could bring
5. Pick the toughest terms, usually the ones with the most impressions, on your keypages, and make sure there is attractive content for those pages
There you go! Hope it helps :)
This is so important and most people dont appreciate how much SEO intelligence can be gathered for relatively low cost with PPC. The big key is understanding that keyword research measure historic data.
Adwords, on the other hand, basically provides real time information (24 hour delay maybe) on what people are actually searching for.
If you are savvy with Broad, Phrase, and Exact match terms in your Adwords then you can easily determine the BEST phrases to optimize for based on Impressions ... thats only 1/2 the battle.
All too often sites optimize for the most traffic when they should be optimizing for the best conversions. Adwords can also measure conversions (to a certain degree). So if you want to really help a site make money you optimize for conversions (ie quality traffic) rather than high impressions (traffic in general).
All this information is basically only accessible by running a short PPC campaign and so well worth the cost ...
David Gordon-Smith
I think this is a great checklist to have. I too am proud to say that I have included most all of those. I will definitely be sure to make a few adjustments to our sites.
This is a very useful list to go by. I actually had to try and convince one of our web developers the other day that unique meta descriptions are needed on each page.
They actually were trying to use the same description across every page on the site and told me that it really made no difference. Needless to say this is a great list.
hi Clarke44, I can feel your frustration, in my opinion the meta description tag should NEVER be the same on every page (unless all the pages on your site is about the same thing. Which would be very rare.) It's like wasting the greatest FREE ad. I wrote a blogpost about the importance of the meta description tag a while ago. This is one of those things that I'm awlays pestering people about.
Spot on Lisa - there is evidence to suggest that Google will punish sites that get bad CTR, or lots of back button action.
And research by Cornell suggests that of the sections of the info displayed in the serps, the snippet (often taken from the description) plays the biggest part in the click decision...
This is a great post Guillaume.
It's nice to see some posts about web standards. Seems like sometimes people get so caught up in the marketing race that they forget about the fundamentals.
Kevgibbo:
Copyscape is always a good one to check out dup content,
https://copyscape.com/
Great post, I have to admit I'm guilty of using duplicate meta description tags quite frequently, do you see this a large problem?
Also what do you find is the best way of checking for duplicate content?
I have not seen any problems (someone correct me if I'm wrong) with using duped description tags, besides lower conversion on organic listings (you really should think about that, it's one of the few things you can impact organically, so you should plan it better than duping it). I have not seen this generate any "supplemental results".
Make sure your Title tag is unique, or your doomed... Actually, you can "dupe" a Title tag to try to create domains collapsing (2 results on the page)... I have done that quite a lot (often with just 1 word changed) and it works very well...
Great post, I have done the majority of the things on your list, I seriously lack web design skills though and I can't figure out how to change my main headers from H2 to H1 without messing up the style completely, I can't get the damm thing to validate either, I would get a designer to do it but I don't trust anyone enough to let them at my site!
Use a style sheet to define the size of your H tags.
Sounds like a CSS problem. Give me a shout, and whilst you're at it, read up on CSS. It's an amazingly powerful thing. :)
I'm still fairly new to this type of marketing and can honestly say that, despite many mnay hours of study, I probably havent covered half of your list. Feel free to visit and critique my site at:
- Casey Removed Link
Since you are new to this I think everyone will go easy on your for posting that link, just remember that each comment here has rel="nofollow" in the href tag so you get no search engine boost from it