15 Point SEO Inspection Cheat Sheet For On Page Optimization

Here is a 15 point inspection list cheat sheet for optimizing your website to get better search engine rankings.

Proper on page search engine optimization starts with identifying your targeted keywords and keyword phrases through targeted keyword research. Once you have your keyword list with the phrases you want to target you can begin optimizing each page on your site.

The 15 Point SEO Checklist 

1. Each page on your site should focus on one single keyword phrase. You only want to target one main keyword per page. This will give your entire site the best chance of ranking quality pages for your chosen keywords.
2. All pages are lengthy, well written, grammatically correct and have lots of supporting information. It is better to have one long quality page than 3 short basic pages. Search engines reward pages that provide detailed answers to questions, have a low bounce rate and give the user what they want as fast as possible
3. The title tag starts with keyword phrase. Your title is the most important element on the page, so this is where you should spend the most time. An ideal title answers a question using your desired keyword phrase.
4. Your site is mobile friendly. You must either have a separate version of your site for mobile devises or a responsive site that will adapt to all screen sizes, and the latter is preferable.
5. Site speed. The faster your site loads the better changes it will have to be ranked.
6. Domain name or filename contains desired keyword phrase
7. Each content page or product has only one spiderable page – there is no duplicate content on the site and all pages have unique content
8. Each page has a heading element <h1> containing the targeted keyword phrase
9. Important site keywords should be linked to other internal pages. For example in this phrase ‘we have additional green lanterns in the gift section’ the keyword ‘green lanterns’ should link to a focused page on this keyword
10.  Your keyword phrase appears in the first paragraph.
11. Targeted keyphrases are proximate to each other. For example if your keyword was ‘auto parts’ and this  your sentence was ‘find auto parts in our Los Angeles stores’  the phrase ‘Los Angeles stores’ would become part of the secondary keyword phrase.
12.  Images should be links and use alt text. Alt text is indexed only if the image is hyperlinked.
13. Meta description tag contains keyword phrase. You can include the keyword phrase in your the meta keywords tag. This does not impact on website ranking but it does help with indexing, internal site search and categorizing
14. Title attribute is used in hyperlinks: <a href=”link.html” title=”additional keywords”></a>
15. Outbound links to major authority site or link to trusted resources, government documents, or third party verification sites. An example of linking out to an authority site would be a CPA business linking to IRS.gov

After you have completed these 15 items for all website pages to help you get rankings, the next task is off page search engine optimization. This is the process of acquiring backlinks, procuring citations and simply getting other quality websites to link to you.