Intro Course

This PDF gives a fantastic overview. Also, Plain Simple SEO is a great, great primer on SEO. And another from LiveEdit.

Action Items

In an effort to rank your site as high as possible, the following activities should happen:

• Create meta robots on applicable pages.
• Create a sitemap.xml file.
• Fix canonicalization problems (if the server allows) via 301-redirects.
• Spell-check the site.
• Check for broken and orphaned files.
• Ensure page text is visible to search engines.
• Ensure site has a relatively flat page hierarchy.
• Every page has a good title.
  <title>Page Title</title>
• Every page has a good (and different on each page!) meta description
  <meta name="description" content="SEO Quick Hits">
• Every page has good meta keywords (not used by the search engines, but it will remind you what you were optimizing for)
  <meta name="Keywords" content="My keywords, go here, and more">
• Every page has a good alt text on images.
  <img alt="Image description" src="...">
• Convert <frames> to AJAX if applicable.
• Make sure links have a title attribute and the href is not obfusicated with Javascript.
  <a href="thisIsAGood/page.html" title="My Company - Home page">Home</a>
• Make AJAX content searchable using Google’s specification.
• Put canonical links on pages with a query string or perhaps PHP “results” pages.
  <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourDomain.com/targetPage.html">
• Add site to Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory

Performance Improvements

• Ensure images are compressed well and the appropriate format is used.
• Make sure there are no dead-links.

SEO Maintenance

Inspiration from this blog: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/08/fifteen-minute-seo-health-check/

1. Google Webmaster Tools: Check Crawl Errors, Index Status, and Messages.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools: Check Site Activity Screen, Crawl Information, and SEO Reports.
3. Google Analytics Reports: Review Keywords, Landing Pages, Sources, SEO traffic numbers and engagement.
4. Google Analytics Alerts: Review Custom Alerts and Automatic Alerts. Review other reports as needed.

Apache Settings for SEO

This came from HTML5 Boilerplate.

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Suppress or force the "www." at the beginning of URLs
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# The same content should never be available under two different URLs - especially not with and
# without "www." at the beginning, since this can cause SEO problems (duplicate content).
# That's why you should choose one of the alternatives and redirect the other one.
# By default option 1 (no "www.") is activated. Remember: Shorter URLs are sexier.
# no-www.org/faq.php?q=class_b
# If you rather want to use option 2, just comment out all option 1 lines
# and uncomment option 2.
# IMPORTANT: NEVER USE BOTH RULES AT THE SAME TIME!
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Option 1:
 	# Rewrite "www.example.com -> example.com" 
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 	RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
 	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
 	RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
 	</IfModule>
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Option 2:
 	# To rewrite "example.com -> www.example.com" uncomment the following lines.
 	# Be aware that the following rule might not be a good idea if you
 	# use "real" subdomains for certain parts of your website.
# <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 	#   RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
 	#   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\..+$ [NC]
 	#   RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
# </IfModule>