Monday, January 25, 2010
Website Design Checklist IV - Structure
1. Does your website have a robots.txt file that correctly limits the access of search engine robots to say login, search results pages etc. Have you checked the robots.txt file using Google Webmaster Tools. Ensure that any pages you do not want index have the meta tag noindex.
2. How often do you update the website content? Try to update at least a part of the website on a weekly basis, diary this to ensure weeks do not pass without the website’s content being updated.
3. How many pages are there on your website, the more pages of useful updated content the better. Visitors and search engines robots will keep coming back for more.
4. Have you constructed a sitemap and submitted it to Google via Webmaster Tools. Check with Webmaster Tools that there are no problems with the sitemap and remedy any errors.
5. Does your website have either a search facility or, a user as opposed to search engine, sitemap?
6. Is it easy for visitors to contact you, do you have full contact details on your website offering a number of options eg online form, direct email, telephone number, address etc. Remember that all businesses in the UK are obliged to provide full contact details on their website. Providing contact details will help you appear in local searches.
7. If necessary does your website have details of your privacy policy, terms and conditions of business etc.
8. Does your website have testimonials from clients, examples of your work etc to increease visitor trust.
9. Check that you are not duplicating the same content over several pages of your website, if so remove it, and check that you do not have multiple urls pointing to the same page.
10. Check your website’s page loading time under labs in Webmaster Tools, if it is too slow take measures to decrease the load speed by compressing images, CSS etc and using gzip compression if allowed by your server.
11. Look at the popularity of your website pages, not just the home page. If there are few links to inner pages try and build links to those pages.
12. Ensure that your website has links to any social media websites you participate in for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and have icons that allow individual pages to be notified to Digg or saved as bookmarks etc.
There are other posts on this blog and our main SEO4all website dealing with many of these issues.
