SEO is now a critical requirement for any website. Without consideration for SEO, a site cannot expect to compete for vital search traffic. While important for any webmaster, SEO is also a minefield of information, some good and some bad. Not to mention that the things you need to know are hardly ever all in one place.

The following is a list of the 60 key things you should consider. Most are built into any modern content management tool, but some are not. Any SEO consultant will only go through a list much like this one and investigate to what extent your site meets these obligations, there is no other mystery to it.

1 – Images should have appropriate alternative text – For example, images often have the ALT text “image”. Where possible, the ALT text should contain a brief explanation of the image

2 – Make sure page sections have their own headings – The page content should be visually separated into sections for ease of reading, but if each section is not introduced in markup by an <h2> or <h3> tag as appropriate, screen readers will not recognise that a new section is starting.

3 – Ensure headings are correctly nested – In HTML markup of page and section headings, <h2> should follow <h1>, <h3> should follow <h2> etc.

4 – Make sure link text makes sense when read out of context – Common link texts like “click here” do not provide enough information. “Click here to view shopping cart” provides contextual information for a screen reader

5 – Make sure the file name of the image itself provides a description of the image

6 – Breadcrumbs – Include breadcrumb trails as they provide a method of back-linking to a page and provide some form of structural hierarchy of where a page sits within a site

7 – Link to related pages on the site to improve the user experience and add to the number of internal links. Strategically linking within a site can lend credibility to page

8 – Title Attribute – Provides a way to describe the link much the same way as alt text does for images. The text attribute should describe and include keywords of the destination page.

9 – Sitemap – A site map lists important Web pages of a site and links to them directly, where possible. It also visually represents the website design hierarchy, either in a topological (or outline) view or as a chart

10 – XML Sitemap – It is also advisable to created an XML index of main content inventory such as articles and picture galleries for example and generate updates to this frequently so that Google has an up to date index of all site content. Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface. For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap
A Sitemap does not replace the crawl-based mechanisms that already operate to discover URLs, but will help the crawlers do a better job of indexing the site. Sitemaps should be explicitly submitted to search engines to ensure that they know about the content sooner and there is no ambiguity regarding how the site is structured by pointing to a file submitted by a webmaster

11 – Broken links can be defined as any link that takes a user to a page not found or that does not load. Broken links not only prevent the visitor from navigating cleanly through a website but also hinder the search engine spider from moving deeper into a site to index its pages

12 – A good housekeeping habit is to try to follow the links within your pages, and remove any which is broken

13 – 404 Page – Always capture broken links by returning a user to a 404 error page. This page can contain links to help the user find the content they were looking for to ensure they are recirculated into the site. Search engines may index a page that later turns out to be removed. In this case, the 404 page is key to capture users clicking on that link

14 – Use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robot

15 – For example, the User-agent: * means this section applies to all robots. The Disallow: / tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site…
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

16 – If duplicate content exists on multiple domains, robots.txt should be used to ensure the web robot only indexes one instance. Otherwise the duplicate content will effect PageRank

17 – A DOCTYPE can be used to enforce coding standards on a page to ensure that it is well formed and therefore more accessible for search engines to spider

18 – Search engines are more likely to favour well structured HTML documents which adhere to W3C standards since it is easier to extract the key content and keywords from a document that is well formed and structured

19 – Use a validator to ensure you HTML is syntactically correct and identify problems: http://validator.w3.org/

20 – All content that needs to be indexed must be available without the need for cookies, since spiders do not support these. They will only index the default content available without cookies

21 – Designing for as many different browsers and operating systems as possible will ensure that the page is viewable by as many people as possible. Although this does not directly impact SEO, the wider the access to page, the more likely people are to visit regularly

22 – The heading tags provide different levels of emphasis on the content. For example, H1 content will be considered more important by search engines, and will be given more weighting.

23 – Ensure the H1 tag appears only once per page and is as descriptive of site content as possible

24 – Title Tag should be included on every page and describe its content, including any keywords which match up with the page meta keyword tag

25 – Title tag is similar to the description meta tag, but it is given more weighting when calculating search result relevance

26 – Title Tag should be optimised to between 60 and 64 characters – any longer and the relevance becomes diluted

27 – Although page meta data is of less significance to determining search engine rankings, it is still important to include it within the head of an HTML document

28 – Use keywords which describe the content and match the main headings and URLs of a page. The order of the keywords is also important, and so best practice dictates that the more suitable keywords should be listed first. For example, Description is often displayed in organic search results

29 – Each page should have one “targeted” keyword phrase with “secondary” keyword phrases associated with it. This “targeted” keyword phrase should be relevant to the page it is mapped to, and should be a term highly searched by Internet users

30 – All of the major search engines place emphasis on the Web page title, visible HTML text, text placed above the fold, and text placed in and around hypertext links. Search engines do not use meta-tag content to determine relevancy, but they are encouraged for other reasons.

31 – Link Popularity (the number web pages linking to a website or another web page) is a key component in SEO success. A link from page A to page B or C is a vote or recommendation by the author of page A for page B or page C. The greater the number, and the higher the quality of the links pointing to page A, the more “authority” page A has on the web.

32 – Search engines utilise targeted keyword phrases in the body copy on an individual page to help determine relevancy

33 – For any site to be visible in search engines, it is necessary to have static pages of relevant content. Put simply, textual content on a website is what feeds the search engine spiders. If there is little or no content on a page, the spider has no theme to associate with the page.
More content translates directly into more real estate on the Web, more opportunities for rankings, and therefore, more visibility and traffic

34 – Use a variety of keywords and key phrases, which describe the main themes of the content

35 – Consider which words the audience is most likely to use to access the content

36 – Include keywords within the page content and links – approximately 2% of total word count

37 – Include keywords near to the top of the page, at worst in the first half of the content

38 – Do not syntactically re-order or over repeat keyword phrases otherwise their relevance will be diluted

39 – Create vanity URLs which match the content of the destination page. Examples such as: http://www.domain.com/article/liverpool-inspired-to-victory-against-united/14387087

40 – The URL should contain the headline of the page, however this is not the physical location of the content but the id appended to the end of the URL is used to identify the content within the CMS and displays the relevant page to the user.

41 – Words can be joined with either – or _ but should be separately to improve readability

42 – URLs should ideally be consistently in lowercase. Using a mixture of cases could mean a page is indexed twice under different URLs, confusing analytics figures

43 – Improving the quality of the site and its content will encourage others to link to it

44 – Links from other sites that have a high PageRank are weighted more than those that may be deemed spam sites that have no real content but just lists of links

45 – Paid ads do not count towards your PageRank since Google wants to avoid people paying their way to a higher position within organic results

46 – When using external links of the site use the rel=“nofollow” attribute if you are unsure of the site’s content. This will tell the google spider not to follow the link. Good use of the nofollow attribute can ensure that only quality links are included in your PageRank

47 – The extent of duplicate content that exists will determine its impact on your visibility
Usually created to capitalise on ownership of many domain names, essentially increases Internet real estate (i.e., mycompany.com and mycompany.net)

48 – Spiders finding duplicate content will penalise the sites. The form of penalisation is constantly changing, with a shift towards complete exclusion of sites for such practices. It is not good for your online presence and can have a drastic impact on your traffic from search

49 – If there has been an HTML page names change, ensure that the old name is removed

50 – Make sure your pages contain substantively unique content. For example be weary of including content from feeds that could be ingested by multiple different places

51 – Some search engines also determine the relevance of content based on the last updated date of a page. It is therefore important to try to keep content up to date and revisit and update older content to make the timestamp more up to date

52 – Cloaking: Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users

53 – Splash pages / Entry pages – These do not typically have very much descriptive content and may be flash or image based
It is more intuitive to display your home page first to help users get to your content as quickly as possible

54 – While Web browsers can display Flash with the addition of a simple plug-in, search engine spiders cannot fully extract, and therefore index, content from Flash files

55 – Even if Flash provides a better user experience, Flash-heavy design often works against the Search Engine Optimisation goals of the website

56 – Ensure there are elements on the page that are not contained in the Flash file that the spider may crawl and index
In some cases it may be better to convert Flash to DHTML

57 – Search engine spiders do not support JavaScript. Therefore, most links and content housed in JavaScript are not crawled or indexed in search engines and are ignored

58 – Where JavaScript is a required feature, non JavaScript methods of rendering content (i.e. <NOSCRIPT>) should be employed to enable visibility to search engines and improve accessibility

59 – Syndicated content from third party providers should be ingested on the server side to avoid using JavaScript techniques which are not SEO compatible

60 – Visit the Google Webmaster site for further SEO information and support: http://www.google.com/webmasters/