Basic SEO Checklist for Developers Part 2

In my previous article, we have seen few topics regarding SEO Checklist basic guide.  Below I have mentioned the complete list for SEO guide check list.

SEO Checklist :

1. Meta
2. URL Structure & Canonicals
3. Navigation
4. Sitemaps
5. Structured Data
6. Image Optimization
7. Mobile Optimization
8. Social Network & integration
9. Open Graph
10. Twitter Card
11. Site Speed
12. Miscellaneous
13. Seo Checklist

In a first part of this article, i have provided the information for 1-7 topics. Now in this article, we will see the remain list of the topics.

8. Social Network Integration  :

The most dramatic way to share and marketing the content of your site in all over the world is social media. Social media help us to share our site content over the different popular site like facebook, twitter, tumbler, Pinterest, youtube, G+ etc where a lot of people are connected from all over the world.

How will it help ?

Suppose I have shared one of my post on my facebook account. So this shared post will visible to all my friends who are connected to me. The people who find interest on that specific page will click on the link for detail information. So if suppose 20 people see our site by that specific post then it will be beneficial for us which will increase the number of site visitors.

Quick Tips :

• The main homepage should have icons for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, G+, LinkedIn etc.
• Every Page/Post should have sharing options i.e. Like, Share, Tweet etc.
• The easier to share and like – Easier would be for the SEOs.

9. Open Graphs :

The Open Graph Protocol allow us to makes each page of our site as a social object.Facebook is using Open Graph which allows us to specify metadata which appears on user’s timeline. Most important benefit of using this data is that creating an “Edge” on Facebook we can obtain some fantastic data about users checking the same. If we don’t use Open Graph tags Facebook will use the list of standard metadata.

Tag List : 

Note :  Following are basic tags for Facebook Sharing.

• og:title
• og:type
• og:url
• og:image
• og:description

og:title : This tag should be appealing to the user. CTR is important, right?

og:type : This tag is used for defining a piece of content i.e. Blog, Article, Website etc.

og:image : This tag helps to provide the exact image that we want Facebook to use. Ensure a square image to make it look appealing.

og:url : This is simply URL of the page.

og:description : This is the description Facebook will show in the screenshot of the piece of content. If we want traffic from Facebook, ensure we’re focusing on a good appealing description here.

Note: Maximum 297 Characters can be used for description.

og:site_name :
This tag will represent the name of the site.

article:published_time : This tag is used for show the published_time for an article that we are going to share.

article:modified_time  : This tag is used for show the modified time for an article.

article:section : This tag specified the section of the article. E.g. Technology

article:tag  : Tag words associated with this article.

fb:admins : In this tag, we need to add our numeric facebook id numeric and give access to analytics about how our website content is shared on Facebook.

10. Twitter Card :

Similar to Facebook, twitter didn’t want to fall behind the race. With the use of Twitter Cards, we can attach rich photographs, recordings and media experience to Tweets that direct people to our site. To make this possible we need to write a couple of HTML lines in our page.

Tags : 

Note : Following are the basic tags for Twitter card.

• twitter:card
• twitter:site
• twitter:title
• twitter:description
• twitter:creator
• twitter:image

twitter:card : The type of card to be created: summary, photo, or video

twitter:url : The URL that should be used for the card.  This will likely be the same URL as the page’s canonical link.

twitter:title : The title as it should display in the Twitter Card.

twitter:description : A 200 character summary of the content at the given URL.

twitter:image  :

A representative image URL for the content.  In many cases, simply providing our logo’s URL will be just fine.

twitter:creator : username of content creator

Following are few example which we can use for data passing.

Below is the code which we can use for reference to add the Open Graph and Twitter Card.

Below are few testing and approval tools :

• Twitter Validation Tool
• Facebook Debugger
• Google Structured Data Testing Tool
• Pinterest Rich Pins Validator

11. Site Speed:

To rank our site, Google is considering the different factor of the site. The factors include following things.

• Content of the site  (the text, its URL, the titles and headers)
• Age of the domain name
• Number and Quality of inbound links
• Speed of the site

Impact of slow speed :

A website with the poor performance will make the user poor experience and the site with poor user experiences deserve less promotion in search results.

i.e if suppose one user will come to our site for any information and the internet speed of that user is slow. If our site will take too much time to render then the user will not wait to render and he/she will try to find another reference site for the same information. This is not good for our site.

How to increase the speed of the site ?

• Minify Code (CSS,javascript files)
• Avoid inline CSS
• The code for the site should be done in such manner that will render the page within 4 seconds.
• Image Optimization

Speed Checking Sites :

• GTMETRIX
• Pingdom
• Yslow (Browser Extension)

12. Miscellaneous :

Use H1 hierarchy H1, H2, H3 Etc.
Heading tags to be used properly, only 1 H1 tag per page.

The correct version of pages/sites being shown to a search engine.
We should not show one version to USER and a different version to search engines.

Meta Robots & Robots.txt file is correct.
i.e. <meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Proper Redirects (301, 302).
When renaming URLS, always do a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL .

Avoid Using Iframes:
It should be the last option to use Iframes.

Sub Directory Vs Subdomain :

Best practice is to have subdirectory rather than subdomain: Subdomain is considered to be different domain from the parent domain, to preserve the authority it is always recommended to use Sub-directory.

Not Suggested: http://blog.example.com
Recommended: http://www.example.com/blog/

Tip: We can Google “site:www.example.com”  i.e results – 1490
Now let’s try this: “site:blog.example.com” i.e results – 364

However, Its to be noted the option of sub directory or sub domain can be done in the primary stage and it is not recommended for later stages.

Http Status Code.

404 pages should return a status code of 404. If our 404 pages are returning a 200 status fix these ASAP. Tool we can use: https://httpstatus.io

404 Vs. Soft 404 solutions.

It’s very important to solve the soft 404 errors. We just need to return code i.e 404 (not found) or 410(gone) in response to a request for a non-existing page.

Don’t Use Underscores in URLS (HYPHEN is a must).

Avoid: www.example.com/file_name/
Best Practice: www.example.com/file-name/

URL etiquette.

Keywords in URL is important to tell search engines about the topic.
For example readmyviews.com/seo-guide-part-2
Is superior to readmyviews.com/?p=123

Favicon.

First and foremost, a favicon helps our website appear more professional and credible. Although it’s a small part of a website, the inclusion of a favicon shows attention to detail and also gives the impression of a complete site.

Next, a favicon provides an opportunity to further reinforce our brand. Branding is a challenge for many businesses, and a favicon gives us the opportunity to get our logo or our colors at an additional location on the web.

A tag title attribute.

The <a> tag defines a hyperlink, which is used to link from one page to another.
The most important attribute of the <a> element is the href attribute, which indicates the link’s destination.

Example: A link to readmyviews.com:

In the above example “Check Readmyviews.com!” is HTML title attribute.

W3C Validation.

Try to maintain W3C standards while coding.

Broken Links.

Check broken link, tool we may use: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk
Please ask for a license code.

Http & Https – SSL Certificate.

If our client uses SSL certificate for the domain, please ensure the http:// site gets redirected to the https version with 301 to avoid duplicate content issues.

Declare language attribute in the HTML element.

13. Quick Review on Article for SEO Checklist :

1.Meta tags are proper.

2 .Robots.txt is perfect.

3. Proper H1,H2 tags in Hierarchy – Only 1 heading tag per page.

4. Use Subdirectory, If needed rather than Sub Domain.

5. Proper Navigation Standard Maintained – Breadcrumbs, Internal Linking Structure.

6. No Broken Links – Proper Redirection Placed (301 & 302).

7. Custom 404 Page – Check response code of such page i.e No soft 404 errors persists.

8. Canonical tags placed appropriately.

9. Declare a doctype to Browsers.

10. Proper URL structure & Use HYPHENS instead of Underscores.

11. Same Version of Site showed to USER and Search engine.

12. Proper Sitemaps XML, HTML or Atom/RSS Feeds Added.

13. Image Optimized Optimally & Also add Favicon.

14. Only one version of site (Either WWW or non WWW version.)

15. Mobile Optimization is done even for small clients.

16. Social Network Integration & Open Graph Tags Used Properly.

17. Structure Data wherever required.

18. If SSL certificate used? HTTP:// should be redirected to HTTPS://.

19. Site SPEED : Page Size To be reduced as much as possible Recommended – 600KB or less – Loading speed of site should not go beyond 5 seconds.

20. Avoid I-FRAMES

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