SEO starts with your website dev and design. Building a website that is search engine friendly in the first place is going to help you with your offsite SEO strategies more than you can imagine. Too often a website gets built that is missing so many vital onsite factors that are going to help you as the site owner to rank much better in the search engines. Because of this I have put together a checklist of things that you will want to consider when building your website.

1. Page Titles — each page should have its own unique Title that included your targeted keywords for that page.

2. Meta Description & Keywords — each page should have its own unique Meta Description and Keywords the include your targeted keywords for that page.

3. Use a domain rewrite to make your URLs search engine friendly.

4. Each image used on the site should have an Alt Tag completed.

5. Include an HTML sitemap that is linked to from your footer. Reference each page on your site from it.

6. Create an XML sitemap for submission to Google.

7. Create a site footer with relevant footer navigation.

8. Make sure you are using 301 redirects for all non www. domains that redirect to your www.domain.com.

9. Avoid duplicate content as a whole on your site, but especially don’t forget about it on your blog. Get rid of your archives duplicate content issues.

10. Emphasize your pages targeted keywords in an “H” tag.

11. Avoid “click here” links. Instead link up relevant keywords on that page.

12. Register your domain for 5 years or longer.

13. Remove or fix any and all broken internal and external links.

14. Make sure your robots.txt file is correct. Don’t make the mistake of including a /.

15. Name images on the page after your targeted keywords for that page.

16. Keep your directory structure as simple as possible and as high level as possible. Try to keep as many pages as you can in your root directory.

17. Use hyphens in your URL instead of underscores.

18. Make sure you have good relevant content on each page.

19. Add internal links from different pieces of content on your site.

20. Make sure your source code is valid and fix anything that has errors.

There you have it!