Explanation for GoDaddy’s Top 10 SEO Checklist

We already know it’s important to add meaningful and unique meta tags onto the website, but how they look and perform on the search result list? Is there anything else we should pay attention to when doing internal optimization? Well, GoDaddy nowadays provides a Top 10 SEO Checklist on which it lists the most important 10 internal elements that should be optimized, here I would like to show you in a more detailed way of how to implement internal optimization based on GoDaddy’s instruction.

1. Proper Title Tags

The page title tag is one of the most important attributes on the page. It is the first thing that search engines show site visitors about your site, and it is the text of the link that site visitors click on when they visit your site from search engines. Most search engines place much more weight on the page title tag text than any other on page element.

• Page Title Length

Google shows the first 65 to 70 characters from your page title in their search results. You should be able to get your entire page title or almost your entire page title in 70 characters. If you run slightly past that you are fine, but the words near the start of your page title get more weighing placed on them than keywords at the end of the page title.

• Stop Words

Words that are common do not help search engines understand documents. Exceptionally common terms, such as the, are called stop words. While search engines index stop words, they are not typically used or weighted heavily to determine relevancy in search algorithms.

2. Proper Description Tags

Many search engines will use the meta description as part of the page abstract if the exact search term that was searched for is found in the meta description tag. Additionally, it sometimes appears in search results if the search engine cannot extract meaningful content from the page copy or if the algorithm feels the meta description will provide a more useful presentation.

• Page Description Length

This tag should be between a sentence to a paragraph and should not appear keyword-stuffed. The text should read well to the human eye since this tag is still used in many search results pages. A good or bad description can be the difference between a click and being ignored. Google shows ~ 160 characters from the meta description tag in their search results.

3. Proper Keywords Tags

The meta keywords tag is not supported by many major search engines. While it is important to choose the correct keywords for your page, the meta keywords tag itself is not used by many top SEO experts. Compared with adding meta keywords tags onto your page, we usually suggest that you focus more on the content of the page.

4. Proper Heading Tags

We usually suggest that people use heading tags to break the page into subgroups, only use one h1 tag per page and do not bold or emphasize it. It probably works best if it is slightly different than your page title.

Examples of subheadings can be as follows:

h2 (similar subtopic idea with some related keyword phrases in it)

h2 (another subtopic with some semantically related words)

h2 (Many subtopics do not have the same keywords as the page title and main headings)

Descriptive, reader-focused subheadings improve the usability of your website, both for search engines and human visitors.

5. Page Content

Page content is the major part of your website, after you structure your page into different subgroups, it’s time to add descriptive content. Usually, you should make your content interesting, just focus more on the visitors’ experience, at the same, you should make sure that your keywords should appear in the content, as for the keyword density, we don’t think good content would lack content, however, you should not make your content keyword-stuffed.

6. Proper Navigation

Again, visitors’ experience is one of the most important factors to increase your conversion rate, in order to achieve this goal, your website should firstly have a friendly navigation system. Do check if any of your web pages has dead internal or outbound links.

Some sites use JaveScript and other client-side navigation. Search engines struggle to follow things that happen on the client side (or in the browser). You can tell if a site’s navigation is client-side by viewing the source or by turning off JavaScript and active scripting and then reloading the document. We generally recommend staying away from JavaScript and client-side navigation. If you feel you must use it, make sure you add static text links to the bottom of your pages.

7. Proper Sitemap

It is also good idea to have a site map linked to from the home page that links to all major internal pages. The idea is to give search engine spider another route through your site and to give users a basic way to flow through your site if your navigation is broken or confusing. You can also use the sitemap to channel link authority and promote seasonal specials. The sitemap should be:

• Quick loading
• Light on graphics
• Overly simplistic

Search engines also creates an xml based sitemap protocol that could be used to help alert search engines to new content on your site and the relative importance of each page. However, it is important to note that actively linking within your main site structure and building inbound linkage data will carry far more weight in helping engines find and rank your content.

8. Controlled Crawling

You do not need to use a robots.txt file. By default, search engines will index your site. If you do create a robots.txt file, it goes in the root level of your domain using robots.txt as the file name.

This allows all robots to index everything:

• User-agent: *
• Disallow:

This disallow all robots to your site:

• User-agent: *
• Disallow: /

You can also disallow a folder or a single file in the robots. txt file. This disallows a folder:

• User-agent: *
• Disallow: /projects/

This disallows a file:

• User-agent: *
• Disallow: /cheese/please.html

9. Duplicate Content/Tags

Well, I think we have been aware of this point, this article tells you something about it.

10. Word Density

First of all, you should keep you your content at a certain length, we think 300 to 700 words is a good option. Then, after you writing it, look back to see if there are any keywords in it. If you find 5 keywords in your 300-word article, it’s OK, if you find 50, you need to delete some of them because you content is keyword-stuffed. Write in a natural and reader-based way, just imagine you are going to write something about say trees, if you put 50 trees in your 300-word article, your teacher must don’t like it.

This is an article written for Yvonne, one of BPOVIA virtual assistants, she just has a client who received a Top 10 SEO Checklist from GoDaddy and wanted some explanation from our end.

Tagged as: BPOVIA, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization