SEO Example

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.

SEO Check List Example 2

Example 4

Another set of scores, based on the same SEO Checklist. This review is incomplete (it covers wording & formats (of content, for accessibility) only).

• Accessibility
  • Content
    • Wording
      • Validity
        • Basic sentence, paragraph & article formatting (8.25) – Generally, mostly good sentences, paragraphs & articles. But some sentences on this page – “x” – are cut off in the middle of words (this can be improved with a little bit of extra PHP programming). Some pages have a lack of good paragraph-based content, for example “y”.
        • Advanced spelling, grammar & vocabulary (8.5) – Excellent quality of spelling, grammar & vocabulary. Possible room for adding hyphens or additional punctuation to increase readability of some lengthy sentences.
      • Efficiency (8.25) – Some big words but generally straight to the point.
    • Formats
      • Variety (6) – A few interesting pictures and interactive forms, and different styles or linking, but very text-heavy and quite short of graphics in general. Could do with more pictures & videos, and maybe some downloadable summarisary DOC or PDF files.
      • Consistency (7.75) – A good house style, maintained throughout the site, with main content in the middle column (for visual users), supplimentary features in the right-hand column, and main menu in the left column…etc. But the main menu is very jumpy, with rather awkward-to-use popup links. And some pages have a lack of good paragraph content whereas others are good.

SEO Check List Example 1

SEO Check List Example 2

SEO Check List Example 3…

Example 2

Here’s another exemplary set of scores based on the same SEO Checklist framework, that was made for a real client (on 13th May 2010) who will remain anonymous here.

Again, the factors have been updated slightly since this review. See the top of this page for the latest version of the SEO Checklist.

• 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.
    • 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

Example 3

Another example set of scores based on the SEO Checklist, for a real client who will remain anonymous here. This review was conducted on 21st Feb 2011.

• Accessibility
  • Content
    • Wording
      • Validity
        • Basic sentence, paragraph & article formatting (6.5) – There’s some good paragraphs of text on half of the pages on the site, but half of the pages lack such meaty “spider food”. And the sidebars contain bits & bobs – single sentences or half sentences, which may be good for keeping the site easy to use, but isn’t great food for search engines.
        • Advanced spelling, grammar & vocabulary (9.5) – Excellent standard of spelling, grammar & vocabulary. This is great for disassociation with spam. Very hard to find a mistake. Perhaps there’s inconsistency in the use of full stops for sentences under the timetable on the right-hand column of the registration page, but this is really clutching at straws to find fault. There was also an issue with a typo in the homepage title tag, but this was quickly resolved.
      • Efficiency (8) – Sentences are generally short & sweet without lack of dynamics. Very concise. Not too many long winded sentences. Better use of emphasis on key phrases could improve efficiency of wording a little, but that’s no big deal beyond the scope of standard heading structures.
    • Formats
      • Variety (6) – Decent variety of text formatting between the pages, and good to see some use of imagery on small slideshows, and some audio content; but there’s a lack of embedded video, comprehensive social media widgets and any really large pictures (perhaps in a gallery), etc.
      • Consistency (7) – A fairly standard house-style throughout the site. This helps Google to understand the sitemap and helps users to navigate between pages quite instinctively. Interpage format could be made a little more consistent, for example, if the “x” page had a good little paragraph of introductory text like the “y” page has, and this would be good for increasing vital quantity of content too.
    • Stability
      • Theme (8) – A broad-ranging theme, construably vague from Google’s perspective; nonetheless, this wide theme has been quite consistent in style & subject matter for the many years that this site has been online.
      • Structure
        • Site-wide (3.5) – Page addresses have been changed with each site redesign, while redirections and error pages are not in place. This is a big shake-up as far as Google is concerned. 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 (3.5) – The latest site redesign turned each page upside down not just in terms of site wide navigation but also in terms of main content and structural page design, and Google doesn’t like these big shakeups.

• • • Quantity (5) – A few hundred pages, that’s not bad, but half of them are very thin on content, so there’s lots of room for improvement. News story pages should not simply be 1-liners like this page “x”, they should have at least a few sentences of unique content such as with this page “y”. Blog archive pages should also have plenty of proper sentences like that at the bottom of this page “x” rather than just title/link/title/link like in this page “y”. Each blog archive page could also have a paragraph to introduce the category/theme, and maybe a few links to other sections of the site that would be specifically relevant to the present category/theme (and in that case there could also be a sentence describing the significance of each of these links, rather than just a list of links).
    • Originality (8) – Very little duplication of content from other sites or between different pages on this site. Room for improvement includes report category pages like “x” where there main feature of each page is a checklist that is duplicated across all these pages, and there’s little unique content on each of these pages, so these pages could be worked on to improve duplicate:original content ratios. There’s not too much duplicated site-wide content in the sidebars or in the header though, so that’s good. It would help a little, however, in terms of page-content-originality as well as keyword-relevance and linkjuice-retention, to turn the sitewide design credits section of the footer into a single link to a “Credits” page.
  • Code
    • Validity
      • Critical elements (7.75) – Coding of critical elements is generally quite good. Potentially significant coding validity problems include