Partner Article

The essential SEO checklist part 1

You’ve heard about Search engine optimisation SEO and online marketing, how they can boost rankings. You’ve read the claims that ‘killer SEO’ will quickly have the hungry hoards banging on your e-store window desperate to sample your wares. You’ve heard how web marketing can help win new business and lead your website to the Promised Land of fat and fast ROI.

Sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to focus resources on SEO if it can deliver all this?

But what exactly is SEO? What are the magical ingredients of an Search Engine Optimisation SEO campaign, the core components that together spell SEO and web marketing success? When you go to an SEO agency what can you expect to see for your money?

Here’s a checklist that covers the SEO essentials. The staple diet of any SEO agency and the kinds of things that they should be bringing to the table to deliver success to your business online.

Web Design and Architecture

Navigation, usability and a robust, well-organised architecture are the foundations of your SEO. Make it simple for the search bots to crawl your site with clean, lean and easily indexible code. It’s not only the search engine spiders who appreciate structured sites. User experience relies on well organised, logical experiences based on intuitive easy to follow navigation.

Keyword research

It’s your keyword research that defines your online presence and provides the building blocks of your web marketing. Use detailed keyword research to identify the kind of language used and search areas frequented by your target audience. With this information you can map out the semantic ground upon which your organisation will stand and fight.

As your site and online presence evolve it’s important to continually assess and revise keywords and keyword phrases to make sure that you keep up with new trends and themes in your market place.

On-page SEO

On-page optimisation covers all the SEO work that takes place (funnily enough) on the page. That doesn’t mean it’s visible to the end user, though. Whilst plenty of on-page SEO is obvious, things like headlines/headers and well written SEO copy, other factors such as titles, tags, architecture and usability are less noticeable to the user. Either way these signals are very important to search engines when it comes to search positioning.

Make sure you check out part two of our Essential SEO checklist for more information on how to make your SEO hit all the right notes.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .