SEO Checklist

The Checklist

Our SEO checklist is unique... It's very comprehensive and still easy-to-use; helping professionals worldwide to understand & explain all the major factors of modern & futureproof SEO.

The respective weight of each factor is indicated in brackets (w:1 is heaviest, then w:2) and by colours (red is heaviest, then orange, in the order of a rainbow).

This SEO Checklist can be a great point of reference when working to optimise websites in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Yandex, Baidu, etc.

Example 1

Here's a full example of how the SEO Checklist could be used as the basis for conducting a comprehensive SEO assessment of a website. In this case, we've assessed our own site (seoexample.co.uk).

Note, the factors involved in this example need updating.

• Accessibility
  • Content
    • Wording

      • Validity (9) – We are well-spoken.

      • Efficiency (7.25) – We are trying to drag it out a little bit, waffling about some stuff that's not strictly relevant, and we're a bit posh at times.

    • Formats

      • Variety (7) – Some good vids, but could do better with bold, emotive imagery.

      • Consistency (7.75) – Some good house style framework, with consistent main menu & link icons, but messy incorporation of vids.

    • Stability

      • Theme (9) – Very consistent maintenance of relevance.

      • Structure

        • Site-wide (6.75) – Sitemap gets shaken up from time to time.

        • Page-wide (7.25) – Homepage often gets shaken up a bit, as do many internal pages from time to time.

    • Relevance

      • General content (8.75) – This site is through & through very relevant to targeted keywords, but a bit thin on content so struggles to be as relevant as a much bigger site.

      • Linking

        • Inlinks (5) – Linked to mainly from a fairly respectable UK web development related site (BWDP), and some inlinks from SEO-related posts in UK Business Forums.

        • Outlinks (8) – Linking out to highly respectable & authoritative sites, all closely associated with the theme of the site & page where each link is placed.

    • Quantity (3.5)

      • Depth (7.75) – We're quite good at getting deep into certain subjects, but don't do this very often.

      • Breadth (3) – We cover various different aspects of SEO.

    • Originality (8.5) – We come up with nearly all of our own unique stuff (except the videos), but we do waffle on about things that other people waffle on about in similar ways.

  • Code

    • Validity (9.5) – Only niggle is non-fixed width floats (CSS warning).

    • Efficiency (8)

      • Simplicity (8.25) – Quite some white space & unnecessary HTML comments, and a few nested divs for styling.

      • Semanticity (7.75) – Great heading structures & paras, but lacking variation in element types, eg, could add data tables, definition lists, forms, XML feeds, RDF links, meta description tag, more internal linking if there were more pages on site, more significant images with info-rich alt tags...etc. Some paragraphs are a bit long & monotonous.

  • Connection (8.75)

    • Speed (9) – Great, popular hosting. Nearly always lightening fast.

    • Stability (8.5) – Good host, but low budget hosting package on heavily-loaded shared server, with lots of sites on same IP.

• Authority
  • Age (3.75)
    • URLs (x)

      • Domain (4) – 1 or 2 years old

      • Internal pages

    • Onsite Content (3.5) – Most content on the site is not many months or years old, and there's not a lot of content anyway.

    • Inlinks (3.75) – Existing inlinks have been securely in place for a few months or years now

  • Link Juice (2.5)

    • Quantity of Inlinks (2) – We have very few inlinks.

    • Significance of average inlink (3) – From very small to lower-medium significance.

Example 2

Here's another exemplary set of scores based on the same SEO Checklist framework, that was made for a real client who will remain anonymous here.

• Accessibility
  • Content
    • Wording
      • Validity

        • Basic sentence, paragraph & article formatting (8.5) – There's bits & bobs, possibly lacking context, especially on the homepage, but generally the wording is based within good sentence, paragraph & article structure.

        • Advanced spelling, grammar & vocabulary (9) – Excellent quality of spelling, grammar & vocabulary. Possible room for adding semi-colons & ellipses to break up lengthy sentences.

      • Efficiency (7.75) – Plenty of ambiguous policy-style wording where maybe not necessary, and subject matter that doesn't often mention the main keywords.

    • Formats

      • Variety (6) – Very much text-based, with some small graphical items, downloads, and plenty of linking. Could do with a video and the occasional large picture within some main pages.

      • Consistency (7.75) – A quite consistent house-style; but with room for further sorting of content into more expectable & appreciable locations on pages, especially for non-visual users, as markup code is a bit messy.

    • Stability

      • Theme (8) – Multi-disciplinary theme, construably vague; but within the domain, while this modistly wide theme appears to have been expanding, it's been quite consistent in style & subject matter for the 10 years it's been online.

      • Structure

        • Site-wide (3.5) – Page addresses change every couple of years as the site gets redesigned, and the most recent one was a big shake-up. Old URLs should be 301 (permanently) redirected to equivalent new URLs in order to present search engines and visitors with a good sense of site-wide structural stability of content.

        • Page-wide (4) – There's not a lot of pages which retain their content, as pages are often updated with fresh information. A better strategy might be to have portal pages that get updated with introductory text and links, alongside deeper article pages which give the full story about each piece of news and can be archived for people to look back on. Not only may this be interesting to some visitors, it will mean there's more content to feed search engines with generally, and also better retention of content which is another thing that search engines like to see.

    • Quantity (3) – A few good pages, but far from a new article every day like many large sites have.

      • Depth

      • Breadth

    • Originality (8.5) – Very little duplication of content from other sites or between different pages on this site.

  • Code
    • Validity

      • Critical elements (5.5) – html, head, body & h1 tags are used quite appropriately. But the odd empty h2 tag and repeated link & meta tags within body is an issue of priority concern. And considering the doctype is xhtml strict, the validity of noncritical elements is more critical than would otherwise be.

      • Noncritical elements (4.5) – Markup errors include improperly coded ampersand entities, lots of empty tags and missing attributes, attributes that shouldn't be present under strict DTD, and some generally misplaced elements.

    • Efficiency

      • Simplicity (7) – Lots of inline styling which could be moved to external CSS to clean up markup code, but could be a lot worse.

      • Semanticity (5) – The odd issue with heading structure markup code and empty elements, combined with lack of validity under strict DTD, on top of heavy inline styling, brings this score down fast, but still the site is generally based on the incorporation of good semantic elements. Just needs to come together more harmoniously. This could be a CMS issue.

  • Server connection

    • Basic accessibility (8) – Generally a good connection these days.

    • Speed & stability (4) – With a recent sitewide robots exclusion issue, the site has a history of zero access for search engines. This score will improve by itself if there are no more similar problems.

• Association
  • Language & Territory

    • Wording (10) – Thoroughly & accurately, British-English wording, ideal for a British-English oriented organisation.

    • Domain name extention (10) – Spot on. An English, UK domain to perform ideal for UK-based & English-speaking Googlers.

    • Server location (10) – UK based server.

    • Inlinks (9) – Predominantly British, English organisations link in but very few small bloggers & grass-roots groups. Indeed, most inlinks are schewed as academia-related or government-authorised.

    • Outlinks (8) – Linking out mainly to British & English-language based sites.

    • HTML LANG attribution (7.75) – English language declaration present, but should be "en-GB" for extra relevance to the UK.

  • Keyword density
    • Onsite

      • Exact matches & synonyms (6) – Many words in the organisation's own name appear very rarely if ever within the homepage's main paragraph text.

      • Thematically associated wording (9) – Great variety of related wording to encompass the general theme of the site, even if the main keywords are not often mentioned explicitly.

    • Offsite (9) – Inlinking sites are mostly full of wording that's relevant to this site. A bit more variation in the types of sites that link in, and a greater quantity of inlinks, would be even better.

• Authority
  • Age
    • URLs

      • Domain homepage (9) – Very old (& therefore trusted) website domain. Can't get much better. Registered since 1999 and with archives dating back to 2000.

      • Internal pages (3) – With website redesigned every couple of years to return missing-file errors on old page addresses, combined with the recent robots exclusion issue, the internal pages have far from matured enough to be trusted by search engines as much as the homepage.

    • Content within URLs (5) – Some catchphrases, including the organisation's name and some introductory text, has existed on the site for years, but most of it has been moved around between different pages & URLs a lot over the last decade, leaving search engines concerned that content may disappear from current pages again before long.

    • Inlinks (7) – Many of the major inlinking sites have been linking in for several years.

  • Link Juice (7) – Great link juice from plenty of authoritative sites. Can get more link juice but doing very well already, and this is always a difficult factor to improve on.

    • Quantity of Inlinks

    • Significance of average inlink