From time to time we’re disappointed with the results achieved by self-proclaimed ‘SEO specialists’, website owners often decide to get down to optimizing and marketing their sites themselves.
Here’s some recommendations on what site aspects should be checked for mistakes impeding sites’ search engine visibility to grow.
First, check if your site is crawl able, i.e. if search engine spiders can access all the site pages that you want to be present in search engines’ indices.
Open robots.txt (http://www.yoursitedomain.com/robots.txt) and see if there are any wrong instructions for robots (for example: User agent: * Disallow /). If there is no robots.txt file, then it means that all robots are allowed to crawl your entire site, so it’s OK in case you have no specially protected site areas to hide from random visitors.
On all important pages of your site, check for the presence and content of a Meta robots tag. It should not have ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ commands.
On all important pages of your site, check for the presence of a Meta refresh tag.
Google doesn’t recommend it, so remove the Meta refresh tags and redirect visitors to a different URL with the help of a server-side 301.
Check if your site has a valid Sitemap.
Typically, you can find it at http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml although it can be placed in a different location. If there is no Sitemap, create it – see more details in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
If you have a pure Flash-based site, you can’t hope for good rankings unless you have enough descriptive keyword-rich texts in your video. Find more information about flash sites optimization on Adobe Site. You can also think of creating keyword-rich static alternatives of your most important pages.
Second, make sure there are no technical mistakes that may cost you good rankings.
Ensure all your links have a consistent URL syntax, i.e. your links always begin only with http://www.yoursitedomain.com/ and never with http://yoursitedomain.com/.
Take care that your server correctly translates requests of http://yoursitedomain.com or yoursitedomain.com to http://www.yoursitedomain.com (Google names it ‘a canonical URL’) with a help of a server-side redirect 301.
You can also create a Google Webmaster account and use its tools to tell the preferred domain syntax specifically for Google.
Check all important pages for repetitive Titles. The content of the title tags should be unique and contain the key phrase that the page is optimized for. It’s especially important if you have a CMS-based website. The same check can be performed to detect the repetitive content in the Meta description tags, although this is not so critical these days.
If your site pages are dynamically generated, take care to use a solution for creating the SEO-friendly page URLs that contain keywords. Typically, the task is done by using .htaccess file, mod_rewrite or product/article/book/any meaningful name variables in the URL structure.
If you have no idea about the substitution of a dynamic URL by a more readable static alternative, you can get a general understanding by reading a Wikipedia article. With a static site, it is even easier for you to create keyword-rich page URLs.
