Getting your web site listed at the top of the major search engines’ listings can sometimes seem like a full-time job. Many web developers spend more time promoting their web site than they do building it in the first place, or even handling their own product or service. But, by creating a SEO checklist, you can make easier work of building your web site while still making sure that you have hit all the important points that will get your site listed at the top:
1. Validate your HTML! This should be at the top of your SEO checklist and means that you need to run all of your pages through an HTML and CSS Validation tool. There are many of these online that will evaluate your website for free, making sure that there are no problems with your code. This is vitally important, otherwise search engines may abort crawling your site if they find too many errors.
2. Use “alt” tags. The use of “alt” tags was originally meant for people who had slow connections and chose to surf the web without the use of graphics. Now, however, they are used so that the search engines can read the graphics and evaluate them, especially when they are used as navigation tools. Without “alt” tags, a search engine crawler may also abort crawling your site.
3. Keep your content fresh. If you don’t update your website on a daily or at least weekly basis, then at least go in and change the date. There are ways you can do this automatically so that both the search engines and your visitors will think that all of the information is new. However, the most effective method is to create new and up-to-date content for your site.
Finally, don’t forget to submit your website to all of the search engines, and not just the big two. Your SEO checklist should contain a list of search engines, perhaps as long several hundred that you regularly submit to.
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