Posted by Guillaume

Although this will seem, to many of you, a very generic list of SEO on-site tips, you may be surprised to see how many SEO consultants and web developers overlook or forget these basic steps when launching a new site. These twenty- four On-site search engine optimisation checkups/tips can assure that any link building / link baiting efforts that will be made will give great results.
 
1. Run a $100 Adwords test campaign after your initial keyword research, helping you do the best themed/relevant keywords on-site optimisation.

2. Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive Title / Description tags on every page.

3. Verify that almost every single piece of relevant content on your site is somehow static to the page it was written for and is not a text image (double check that with a text browser).

4. Revise the On-page content to be sure there is a minimum presence of your themed keywords on every page. Don't try to go overboard, just think as if you'd be the user.

5. Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

6. Verify that the any navigational element are text links and are not "click here" or "more info" type of links.

7. Make sure contextual links are widely spread and commonly used all across the website content to emphasize key pages.

8. If you plan on trading links, make sure there is small directory with themed categories, or at least get a "links/resources" page.

9. Verify that your robots.txt  file exists and that you added the folders you want to prevent access from.

10. Be sure there is a sitemap.xml at the root of your site.

11. Make sure there is a breadcrumb to help the cross-linking of your site.

12. Verify that the static sitemap is easily reachable by your visitors.

13. Ensure that your 404 page contains links to your main categories and maybe a search box.

14. Check that important images are labeled properly with the alt tag (this should be automated somehow).

15. Make sure you installed generic analytics to ensure any kind of tracking (Google Analytics, Indextools).

16. Make sure that conversion/defined action tracking analytics are installed (Heatmap tracking, conversion trackers from PPC platforms, Indextools action trackers, etc).

17. Register / validate your site through Google Webmaster central to be able to analyze incoming links and validate a few things (like your robots.txt file).

18. Do a quick IP location test to make sure you're hosted near your main market.

19. Unless otherwise advised, get your company's signature at the bottom of the pages you create for clients, using one of your best keyword as anchor text. This is vital. You shouldn't be worried about promoting your services, especially if your clients are highly satisfied with your work!

20. Use all SEOmoz tools (I'm a bit biased here): Page Strength and Keyword Difficulty to measure the efforts required to achieve high SERPs (by comparing your actual site with the top competitors website), and the Crawl test to ensure your website will get properly indexed.

21. Get your website xhtml/w3c validated to cover the major issues you might not have thought of

And a few extras, if you're running a blog platform

22. Ping the major content aggregators (Google Blog Search, My Yahoo, Wikio, etc.)

23. Include links to major social platforms (digg, del.icio.us, blogmarks, technorati tags, etc.)

24. Use Feedburner to get stats and a universal RSS feed

With this basic checklist, any web development company that is building and marketing websites will give its customers a fairly good chance of achieving high SERPs while generating several leads with referrals and good SERPs for themselves. The extra time it takes to do this justifies the reward you get. As an example, our company currently employs 17 people: I can say that half of the business we've generated has been solely because we insist that our customers implement at least these basics steps before launching a site. And, let me tell you, nobody is unhappy with the traffic, and nearly all of them don’t mind that our signature's there!