SEO Check List

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something that we should each be aware of and work toward — obsessively not — toward yes.

Here are a list of things that help, and a list of things that hurt:

Things that help:

  • Keywords in your website address (URL)
  • Keywords in all your page <title> tags
  • Keywords in link text of internal links.
  • Keywords in link text of inbound links (external links leading to your site.)
  • Keywords in link text of outbound links (your links to other people’s webpages.
  • Keywords in <h1> & <h2> headings
  • Keywords at the top of the page (in the beginning of your text)
  • Keywords in image <alt> tags
  • Where inbound links come from.
  • Links from sites similar to yours
  • Description Metatag
  • Unique content for each page of your website
  • Frequent change or addition of content
  • Site Accessibility
  • Sitemap (html or xml)

Things that do NOT help:

  • Keyword spamming & stuffing
  • Keyword dilution (optimizing too many keywords)
  • Hidden links (such as 1px image links)
  • Deliberate Cross-linking
  • Duplicate content (10 pages of the same stuff does not make your site look bigger)
  • Doorway pages (
  • Serving search engine different page than public
  • Invisible text (too small to read or color same as background)
  • Stolen Content
  • Flash
  • Frames
  • Redirects (301 and 302)
  • Telling robots to go jump in the lake (robots.txt bans)
  • Dynamic pages with session IDs