Minimum Required SEO Pre-Launch Checklist.

This document assumes you have already done your keyword research, written valuable content, and selected relevant images/media for your site. The purpose of this article is to provide you with a basic checklist to make sure you are not missing many critical SEO building blocks.

Do all pages have a meta title set?

• 30-60 characters long.
• include critical keywords followed by brand/name.
• is the brand/name present and consistent at the end of every page?

Do all pages have a meta description set?

• 50-160 characters.
• include critical keywords and answers to customer need.

Consider this, someone just searched for something, what you entered here will be what’s displayed in the google search results. What about this text will make them choose to click YOUR site?

Are robots blocked? Is search indexing allowed? Many platforms have the ability to put a hand up to say NO to google while staging a new website. This is fine and good when building but can be the kiss of death for a live site. Make sure your site can be indexed by search engines!

Are your images optimized?

• File names that match content.
• Alt tags that tell clearly what the image is a picture of.
• Where possible and appropriate give images have titles.
• Save in the best possible file type.
• Size correctly and not resized with html.

Is your text optimized?

• Include at least one H1 that mentions the primary keyword, topic, service.
• Utilized H2 and H3 tags where possible.
• Avoid utilizing text embedded in images.
• Make your primary content visible “above the fold” (before having to scroll on a desktop)

Are your menus complete and easy to navigate?

• Easy to access on desktop, tablets and mobile devices.
• Include links to every page on the site directly.
• Avoid footer-only links.
• Consistent function across all pages.

Are your URL’s clean and easy to understand?

• Avoid gobily-gook like yourname.com/post=”49834″.html etc.
• You want to see yourname.com/category/content or yourname.com/section
• Name “slugs” based on most appropriate keyword to the individual page.

Is this a redo of an existing site? If so there are some specific considerations:

• Make efforts to preserve link structure, if you can’t be sure to implements 301 redirects from old content to the closest comparable new content.
• Consider preserving meta tag data for title and description from the old site to the new site if the site already ranks well.

This is an extremely basic checklist and only covers the absolute bare minimum building blocks of SEO. If you need more in-depth assistance we are here to help.