The Comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation Checklist

@KunalKripalani
Search Engine Optimisation & Visibility
Strategy & Checklist

Google is the search engine of choice by a very wide margin, so concentrate your efforts here and
attend to Yahoo, Bing and the minor search engines if resources permit. http://gs.statcounter.com/

Search Relevance Visibility
SEO Uniqueness Engine Freshness
Authority Optimisation Quality
The Facts:

♦ 92 percent of all search-driven clicks come from organic results.
♦ 95% of clicks come from page 1 of search engine results.i
♦ Most of those clicks go to the Top 3 rankingsii
♦ It’s clear that if you don't rank on the first page, then you may as
well not be there at all. You will miss out on business.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is improving your website's
visibility and ranking on the first page of Search Engine Result
Pages (SERPs.)

You are free to use, distribute and transmit this work, but please attribute the work to:
Kryptonite.co.nz | @kunalkripalani

@KunalKripalani
1. SEO should form part of a strategy to achieve business goals like,
• An increase in brand awareness
• An increase in sales / market share
• A reduction in customer acquisition costs.
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Reducing customer service queries

2. The business benefits of high organic search rankings are the result of
a well formulated and sustained SEO effort.

"SEO needs to be iterative and evolutionary. It should learn from itself and
its PPC sister to become more targeted and relevant to the intended
audience."@RyanDeShazer

So it follows that SEO does not deliver free traffic, because it requires time to first
implement your strategy and then also to sustain it. That's human resources working
with an analytics package. There are ofcourse opportunities to reduce the financial
investment by using automation tools like Wordstream, but let's not get sidetracked.

By optimizing your search engine presence, you can make sure people who need what
you have are able to find us more easily than they can find your competitors. This is
successfully achieved through:

1. Relevance: determined by contextual keywords, volume of traffic, volume &
quality of backlinks from credible (authoritative) websites and internal linking
2. Uniqueness: Original content, with unique meta titles (But don't waste your time
on Meta keywords.) Meta description, author, robots etc. are important for human
navigation and for search engines to properly index your websites, but they are
insignificant when it comes to your rankings.
3. Freshness: Update your content frequently
We want them to visit our website, to place orders, fill out applications and subscribe
to our mailing lists. You need to know what keywords are driving tangible results and
we need to measure our progress month to month and quarter to quarter.
If you are an SEO newbie, you need to read Google's Search Engine Optimisation
Starter Guide. For the rest of us i've created a 35 point Search Engine Optimisation
Checklist to increase your visibility and rankings.

I also suggest you understand Conversion Optimisation to ensure continuity and
relevance between your search engine results and your landing pages.


@KunalKripalani

Contents
1. Step 1: Keyword Discovery
2. Off-site SEO: Things that don’t require modifications to your website.
3. Onsite SEO: Things that do require modifications to your website.
4. Social Media for SEO

1. Keyword Discovery
What are people searching for? Are you catering to their needs? Your first step
towards search engine optimisation mastery is to identify the search behaviour of your
target audience. From this information, create your Keyword Glossary, which will in
effect become your SEO bible. As a part of this process, create a list of your brand,
product and most popular industry terms. All the content you submit to third party
websites that links back to you should contain some of these keywords (anchor text.)
Over time, these backlinks will help you secure higher SERP positions.

After we know what prospects are searching for, we have to ensure that the pages on
our website cater to these needs. This is where onsite optimisation comes into play.

It’s very important to address the competition factor when creating your keyword
glossary. By identifying high traffic keywords with few competitors (the long tail),
you can increase the chances of boosting your visibility and seeing tangible returns.
You can identify these keywords and phrases using these tools:

♦ Google Trends
♦ Google Insights for Search
♦ The Adwords Keyword Tool

Always benchmark where you currently rank for your chosen keywords. You ca view
a listing in Google Webmaster Tools. You can also make use of tools like SEOMOZ’s
Rank Tracker which shows you changes over time. They even have a Firefox Plugin
so you can view SEO metrics for any website as you surf.

Webmaster Tools for the Big 3 Search Engines:
Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Bing http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Your Keyword Glossary should contain.
1. Your brand and product names.
2. Generic industry terms that people are searching for.
3. Best selling products / services in your industry


@KunalKripalani
Benchmarking: Track the ROI of your SEO efforts
Here’s an example dashboard to use for a monthly report:

Keyword Rank Impressions Clickthrough Clickthrough % $ Value
A
B
C

Offsite Optimisation

2. Referring sites (link building): .High authority sites in your industry niche and
also from .edu and .gov sites are what you want. Content links from related sites pass
quality link juice. Get your backlinks through:

♦ A simple email request, in the case of your supplier websites
♦ Paying for a listing on relevant directories or sites looking to earn some
advertising revenue.
♦ Providing them with content like a guest-blog-post through which they link
back to you

Try to direct 20% of inbound links to your homepage and 80% to deeper pages
(landing pages.) Sending traffic to your homepage usually leads to a disconnect due to
the lack of immediate relevance to the referring link and the lack of continuity with
regard to the product or service displayed on your homepage.

Linking best practices include (see image):
♦ The clickable link text contains your keywords, not the company name
♦ This is a one-way link from another website pointing back to your website
♦ Descriptive text surrounding the link also contains keywords

3. Unique IP addresses. The referring sites should not be hosted on the same shared
IP address and your website.

4. Commenting typically offers no link juice because of the ‘No Follow’ attribution.
This means crawlers will ignore the link that you leave with your comment. However,
other people may still read your comments and find them insightful enough to want to
clickthrough to your website.

5. Code optimization: Eliminate any junk code. A website with a page heavy on the
backend that doesn’t display content on the front-end appears unprofessional at best
and deceptive at worst. If nothing else, clean it up to speed up your site – a proven
conversion optimisation tactic.


@KunalKripalani
Onsite Optimisation

What search results do your prospects see?

Do they answer the search query that was entered?

Does the landing page meet the prospect’s expectations? / Is
their continuity between the snippet and the landing page?
6. Avoid keyword stuffing: Repeating a keyword or phase too often will mean bad
juju from crawlers. How much is too much? It might be 10% of the content or it
might be 3 instances. This is unclear. If you write in a fluent conversational style
rather than make attempts at a hard sell, then you will probably end up with the right
balance.

7. Domain Names: Pick a unique and memorable domain name that ideally contains
your most popular keywords.

8. Domain Extension: If you are building a country specific site, ensure you pick up
the relevant country extension like: .UK, .AU, .NZ

9. Page Names: Use human readable URLS. Dynamic query strings are not user or
search engine friendly. It’s common for legacy CMS systems to run on dynamic page
naming conventions. If this is you, it’s time to upgrade to a modern CMS that has
been built with human-interaction in mind.

Meta Tags
53% of UK online shoppers say retailers return generic, one-size-fits-all content in
external searches, (Retail Bulletin, September 2009)

This statistic is evidence that there is room for improvement. Meta data should be
unique on every page of your website.

11. & 12. Meta Title and Meta description should be specific to the information
found on that page. A good Ecommerce platform or CMS should have these features
built in, together with good folder and URL naming conventions.

13. Meta Keywords do not influence your search engine rankings. This tag is wide
open to abuse and is therefore ignored by crawlers.

14. Internal Linking: Refer back to your keyword glossary and use these for anchor
text as you cross-pollinate your website. A good internal linking structure will gain
you big points. It’s evidence of a proper website rather than a brochure website with
just a handful of pages – typical of sales and affiliate type pages. Think about why
Wikipedia.org is so successful. You can view a list of internal links that have been
crawled in Webmaster Tools or simply type: link: in front of the URL in question.


@KunalKripalani
Sitemaps

Create HTML XML, Video and KML sitemaps. The HTML version helps real
people navigate your website and the XML file helps crawlers more better
understand and index your website. Submit using Google Webmaster Tools.

15. The HTML sitemap: Helps your users navigate your website.

16. The XML sitemap: More indexed pages, means a higher chance that one of them
will hit the first page.

17. The KML file is a geographic identifier to be used with Google Maps and local
search directory listing.iii

18. The Video Site Map helps you improve your site's appearance in video search
results Include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, family-
friendly?). Your URL must be less than 60 characters to appear in Google Search and
the video will only show up if it is family-friendly.iv

19. Images: Don’t underestimate to value of images in driving traffic to your site.
Images commonly display on the main SERP page of Google and images.google.com
is also a heavily used search engine. Size your images so they load quickly and name
them descriptively. "CoffeCup" is too generic.
"BuyAStarbucksSanFranciscoCoffeeCup" is well targeted.

20. Folder Structure: Use your keywords to name your folders and page names
wherever possible.

21. Domain Name Registration: for at least 2 years. Spam and affiliate sites
typically have only one year registrations.

22. Domain Age: Domains newly registered (under 1 year) have lower authority.
However, new sites typically get decent search rankings immediately after launch, but
this can quickly fade if the search engines determine that your site is not meeting
searcher needs. This can be identified by the ‘bounce rate’ metric in your analytics
package.

23. URL & File Structure: Dynamically generated URLs filled with question marks
and ampersands are generally disliked by search engines. Use a clear directory
structure and a URL that correctly describes the contents of the page. This serves as a
navigation source for your visitors when they are on your site and also provides clear
information in search engine results.

24. Clear Hierarchy: Categories, subcategories etc, but also with particular pieces of
content. Using header tags like <H1> is good for human navigation, but is indicated
as an ineffective SEO tool.v

25. Server Location: Should match your geographic target market in order to
maximise site speed and increase reliability (in case an international communications


@KunalKripalani
link goes down.) If you happen to be using an overseas web host, jump onto Google
Webmaster Tools and the equivalents on Yahoo and Bing and manually set the
geographic target.

26. Unique IP Address: Your website should ideally be hosted on its own, unique IP
address. If you’re on a shared hosting plan (most people are) then the credibility of
your website comes into question.

27. Robots.txt file: Use this to say what pages you do not want to be indexed. This
is good to prevent crawling of similar pages that could be seen as duplicate content.
Submit the file through Webmaster Central.

28. Security: If you collect information from visitors or are selling products, ensure
you have SSL certification (HTTPS). It's best to also to obtain a Verisign, McAfee or
THAWTE secure-site certification. Verisign secured sites are now identified on
SERPs and act to distinguish your website from competitors.

29. National Pride: Examples include Made in the USA, 100% Australian, 100% NZ
Owned and Operated As well as providing good link juice from an authority site,
these symbols can also act to increase a prospects level of comfort when considering a
transaction on your website.

30. Who Are You? About Us, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use and Contact Us. are
standard pieces of information that you need to provide on your website. As well as
being important to convey the professionalism and trustworthiness of your site, they
also serve to improve your credibility with search engines.

31. Niche and Local Directories: Find directories and reference websites related to
your business and list your site with them. Focus on credible websites (they appear
within the first 100 results of Google for related keywords.) Some of them will be
paid directory listings. The rule of thumb is to focus on quality not quantity in your
link building efforts. If your content is good enough, your backlinks will grow
organically.

32. Local Business Directories: Get yourself on Google’s Local Search Directory so
your business pops up right at the top of SERPs together with a location map.
Yahoo’s directory is a paid for service, but authoritive enough to pass good link juice.

33. List with DMOZ. This is the 'Open Directory Project' that aims to catalog and
categorise everything of value on the internet. Once approved, your site information
gets propagated and indexed by pretty much every search engine around.

34. Frames, Flash and Javascript: Search engines have historically ha difficulty
crawling content in these formats, but they are learning quickly. Frames are an
archaic and user-unfriendly option in any case.


@KunalKripalani
35. Social Media for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is always changing and its latest evolution is inseparably
connected to social media. Let's explore why and how we can integrate social media
into a search marketing strategy:

1. Real Time Search: The latest press releases, blogs, tweets, YouTube videos,
images and fan page updates are almost instantly indexed by the major search engines.
But because it's real time search, the benefits quickly fade so it's important to do two
things:

1. Quite simply, make regular updates that are relevant, unique and timely -
discussing current and future events. Demonstrate thought leadership.
2. Repurpose your real time content into topic related pages on your website.
This is your unique content and makes for valuable SEO mortar. It also means
your content is not lost in social media archives.

2. Content Accesibility: Repurposing your content and making it accessible through
Scribd,Youtube,Slideshare,Vimeo,Twitter and Facebook increases the odds that your
content will be seen and spread.

3. The Google Honeymoon Period: When a new site launches, it ranks highly for the
first few weeks and then SERP rankings can drop dramatically if Google thinks that it
doesn't meet peoples’ needs for what it appears to offer. So measure your bounce rates.
SM can help keep your content sticky & fresh by facilitating the crowdsourcing
process.

4. The popularity of Social Bookmarks including Facebook "Likes" Facebook
Like is similar to social bookmarks like Digg,Stumbleupon and Delicious, but offers
greater viral spread through you’re your Facebook friend network. It works because
Facebook is a much stickier offering than stand alone social bookmark sites.
Indications are strong that more and more websites will continue to integrate with
Facebook, making its Open Graph a valid measure of content relevance on the
internet. The Levi's Store is a good example.

Here are 5 easy ways to use Social Media for SEO.


@KunalKripalani
Remember that search engine algorithms continuously change and so you need to
tweak your tactics over time. Further, there are quirks in the system that make things
trickier, as demonstrated by this Patent Extract:

“It may be possible for search engine (125) to make exceptions for documents that are
determined to be authoritative in some respect, such as government documents, web
directories (e.g., Yahoo), and documents that have shown a relatively steady and high
rank over time. For example, if an unusual spike in the number or rate of increase of
links to an authoritative document occurs, then search engine 125 may consider such a
document not to be spam and, thus, allow a relatively high or even no threshold for
(growth of) its rank (over time).” - Google Patent Extract)

Congratulations! Your website is now on its way to number 1.

Kryptonite creates digital marketing strategies that integrate new and social media.

Client Testimonials
“Kunal's approach was refreshing. From the outset he was results oriented, and his
ability to quickly understand our business (www.firstin.co.nz), allowed us to prioritise
the improvement of the crucial components of our offer. The result: The
implementation was quick, and Kunal's recommendations represent a significant part
of the 250% growth we have experienced over the last 5 months. Kunal's
involvement, was a great investment - he has implemented a new approach in how we
relate to our customers, and it has paid off.”
Mathew Duder, Director, Firstin.co.nz

“Kunal is highly Internet savvy. He has an excellent understanding of web trends
which is very valuable to many companies in today's market.”
Daniel Robertson, CEO, Fishpond.co.nz / Fishpond.com.au

kunal@kryptonite.co.nz

Twitter @KunalKripalani

NZ: +649 889 3792


@KunalKripalani
References
i
95% of clicks come from page 1 of search engine results.
ii
Most of those clicks going to the Top 3 spots
iii
http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/
iv
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80471
v
But is indicated as an ineffective SEO tool.
vi Steps to B2b SEO Accountability

Resources
_______________________

http://www.seomoz.org/tools

http://tools.seobook.com/

Top 5 SEO Ranking Factors

Keyword Rank Tracker
♦ http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
♦ http://www.wordtracker.com/
♦ http://www.ranks.nl

Keyword selection tools:
♦ http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
♦ http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
♦ http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
♦ https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Market Data
♦ Gs.statcounter.com: Determine browser usage / social media market share in almost any
geographic market: Graphs and Tables.
♦ http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/stats Online Marketing Statistics.
♦ https://www.google.com/adplanner


The Comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation Checklist

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Featured

Featured (20)

The Comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation Checklist