SEO Checklist: 60 essential checks before launching a website

Launching a brand new website or publishing a new site version is typically a straight forward process given that it is well planned and well organized. Failing to take into account all the known ranking factors or failing to build an SEO-friendly website can lead to low rankings in Search Results. As a result before publishing a website, the Webmasters and the SEO professionals should validate that they are aligned with the best current practices and that they have not made important mistakes in their SEO campaigns. In this article we provide a detailed SEO checklist in which we have the most essential checks that one should make before publishing a website online.

 

 

 Keyword Optimization

 

Having well written/optimized texts and using the right keywords right is extremely important in SEO. Make sure that before launching your website, you can give a positive answer to all the questions below:

1. Did I conductive an extensive keyword research? Did I find all the popular terms that are relevant to my industry/niche/website?

2. Did I choose the targeted keywords wisely? Have I made sure that I can compete for the selected terms?

3. Did I write unique, high quality texts that will be considered useful both by the Users and by the Search Engines? Have I performed a spelling check to all of my texts?

4. Do I have unique titles and descriptions in all the pages of the website?

5. Did I add all the important keywords in the page Titles, the Meta-Descriptions and the HTML Headings (H1-H6)? Have I optimized my texts for those keywords?

6. Are the Titles and Meta-Descriptions compelling for the users? Will they click on my page if it appears on Search Engine Results?

7. Did I use keyword combinations that are likely to be searched by users? Have I optimized my pages for those keyword combinations? Did I incorporate in the text synonyms that are likely to be used in the queries?

8. Do I have a descriptive alt text in all the images of my website?

9. Have I ensured that the content is not over-optimized, that there is no hidden text in the pages and that no Keyword Stuffing techniques are used?

10. Did I keep my pages targeted by focusing on a small number of keywords per page?

11. Have I kept the content of my pages relevant to my website’s theme? Am I sure that I have not optimized my pages for irrelevant terms?

12. Are the most important keywords of my page in the beginning of the document?

13. Did I make sure that my pages will not compete each other on SERPs and that I do not have lots of different pages optimized for exactly the same keywords?

Note that by using SEO Tools you can speed up your checks. Analyze your pages by using the Keyword Analyzerin order to ensure that your pages are targeted and optimized for your selected keywords. Additionally theSERP Analysis tool can help you analyze and evaluate the competition and see if it is possible to compete for the selected terms.

 

 

Website Development

 

 

The techniques that are used in order to develop a website are extremely important and they affect the SEO. So ask yourself the following questions and make sure you have done everything properly.

14. Is my website well coded? Is it cross-browser? Have I made sure that my pages contain no broken HTML that is likely to affect the analysis of the site?

15. Have I developed my website by using Search Engine friendly technologies? Is someone able to access my website without requiring him to use Flash, Silverlight, JavaScript/AJAX, Java applets, frames etc?

16. Is my menu visible from all the pages and is it developed in HTML so that the search engines can find the rest of the pages?

17. Is my site easy to be crawled? Do I provide text links for all the pages of my website?

18. Do I use properly the meta-robots tags?

19. Did I take steps to eliminate duplicate content by focusing on the Link Architecture, by doing 301 redirects when required and by using proper canonical tags?

20. Did I make sure that I don’t use unnecessary or incorrect HTTP redirections?

21. Do I redirect the non-www version of my website to the www version or vise versa?

22. What is the loading time of my website? Have I done everything I can to reduce it?

23. Am I certain that I do not do Cloaking and that I have no Doorway pages?

Note that you can check several of the above (HTML Validation, Meta-Robots usage, Spider View, Page Analysis etc) by using the Web SEO Analysis tool. Additionally you can check the similarity percentage between two pages by using the Duplicate Content Tool.

More info at Official Source