Top 10 SEO Questions You Should Ask About Your Website

Posted on Mar 15, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments

Your website is gorgeous. It shows your product and services beautifully. You’ve been clever and diligent and have invested untold hours and expense into getting everything finished and working.

So where’s the traffic? Whatever happened to “Build it and they will come”? Is your site even indexed yet?

Here are 10 questions you can ask to get yourself thinking about the most basic ways to optimize your website in order to be found, indexed, and ranked well by search engines.

1. What are the top keywords and key phrases you want to rank for? Do your page names, headlines, and content reflect your keywords?
2. Is your content well written, simple to navigate, and easy to read?
3. Is your content entirely original, or is it an exact duplicate of, or slightly altered from content that exists elsewhere?
4. How many inbound links have you built or gained? Are they from top-notch, trusted and relevant sources? Are your inlinks and crosslinks using good anchor text (related to your keywords and content)? Have you cleaned up all broken links?
5. Do you have solid, intuitive site structure and easy to understand slugs? (For example, your site should say in the URL bar http:yourflowersite.com/weddings/bridalbouquets rather than http://yourflowersite.com/2775%sedh/s477?.htm)
6. How frequently are you adding new, relevant content to your site?
7. Have you gotten rid of “doorway” (click here to enter) pages, pop-ups, or misleading navigation?
8. Has your site been around for a while? Did you register your URL for more than one year?
9. Are your images compressed and correctly sized? Is there anything else keeping your page from loading quickly?
10. Are your PDF and image descriptions relevant and inclusive of keywords? Did you include alt text?

Take an hour or so to give your top tier webpages a solid evaluation. Once you have a list of items to address, lay out a schedule and take it a little at a time. Eventually you’ll be getting much better search results!