SEO Checkliste & Referenzen
A helpful checklist / collection of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips and techniques.
Table of Contents
- URL
- Accessibility
- Meta Information
- Keywords
- Content
- Images
- Videos
- Links
- Mobile
- Sitemap
- Social Media
- Tools & Services
- Books
- Courses
URL
- Descriptive URLs: use a descriptive page url, which should reflect your targeted keyword
- Subdomain or subfolder: subdomains are seen as separate domains
- Hyphens: split words using hyphens
- www or no-www: provide both domains, but set a prefered version in Google Webmaster Tools
- Localisation: choose a country-specific domain, for better local search results
- HTTPS: Security is a top priority for Google
- URL builder: Use this tool to add custom campaign parameters to your URLs
- File extension: do not strip out the file extension on URLs
Accessibility
- 403: provide a 403 - Access denied page
- 404: provide a 404 - Page not found page
- Robots: block pages which should not be indexed via the
robots.txtfile or<meta name="robots" content=""> - File not found: avoid
404 FILE_NOT_FOUNDerrors - Redirects: avoid redirects if possible. Use 301 redirect instead of 302
- Pagination: implement the
rel="next"andrel="prev"attributes to links - Moving a website: redirect all your links to the new location via
.htaccess - Performance: performance and loading time is important
- Validation: write valid code (HTML Validator CSS Validator)
- WAI-Aria: use WAI-Aria tags to help machines understand your code
- RichSnippets: markup your code with rich snippets, they show up on the search results page
- Custom Search: with Google Sitelink search box, people can reach your content more quickly
- Layout: use
divsinstead oftablesfor layout. Usingtablesis not semantically correct.
Meta Information
- Title: each page should have a unique speaking title (60 - 100 characters)
<title>Website Title</title> - Description: each page should have a unique description (max. 160 characters)
<meta name="description" content=""> - Meta Robots: Standardmäßig ist die Einstellung INDEX, FOLLOW aktiv. Auch ohne das ein Robots Meta Tag gesetzt ist. Das ist auch gut so
<meta name="robots" content="Wert" - GEO Meta Tag: Geo-Tags sind HTML-Meta-Tags, die eine Aussage über die geografische Lokation einer Webseite oder der ganzen Site machen.
Keywords
- Single: every page should have a single unique targeted keyword
- Research: rank for keywords with high traffic and less competition
- URL: keyword should appear in URL name
- Title: keyword should appear in page title
- Heading: keyword should appear in headings
- Content: keyword should appear in ~3% of article length
- Meta Tag: you can ommit the
<meta name="keywords" content="">, search engines do not use this meta tag
Content
- Content: content matters the most in SEO
- Headings: clear structure
H1-H6max. 70 characters long - Strong: use
strongtag to highlight your targeted keyword - Uniqueness: do not provide duplicated content, use unique content types
- Length: article should be at least 300 words
- Freshness: new content is important. Updating pages or posting regularly is recommended
- Flash: avoid Flash content and Flash pages. They are not accessible on mobile phones and will be ranked lower
Images
- File name: use a short descriptive name
- Alt tag: add an alt-tag this a description of the image (60 - 70 characters)
- Dimensions: add the
width=""andheight=""attributes to the image - Responsive Images: serve the most optimized image corresponding to the window size
- Size: keep the filesize as low as possible
- Optimization: Optimize images by removing some meta information
Videos
- Controls: add controls to playback and control your video
- Embed: allow others to embed your videos
- Transcriptions: use transcriptions for indexing, usability & content
- Unplayable content: avoid unplayable video content. Use HTML5
<video>tag instead of Flash
Links
- Title: add the title attribute to links
- Backlinks: only add external links if you got a backlink to your site
- nofollow: add
rel="nofollow"attribute to external links only to prevent spam and bad links - Internal links: add ~3 internal links to your content
- Languages: the hreflang tag tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language
<link rel="alternate" href="example.com/fr/" hreflang="fr-fr" /> - Naming: use a descriptive link name: “Click here” or “Read more” are bad link text. Better “Read more about SEO and Web Accessibility”
Mobile
- Viewport: tell browsers how to adjust the page’s dimensions and scaling to suit the device
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> - mobile friendly: mobile optimized sites are marked in search results. Test for mobile friendly site
- AppLinks: apps that link to your content can then use this metadata to deep-link into your app
- Tap targets: clickable links should not be too small
- Smart App Banner: Safari has a Smart App Banner feature that provides a standardized method of promoting apps on the App Store from a website
Sitemap
- HTML sitemap: an HTML sitemap allows site visitors to easily navigate a website
- XML sitemap: help search engines to index your pages
- Image sitemap: increase that your images can be found in Image Search results
- Video sitemap: make sure, search engines know about all the video content on your site
- Mobile sitemap: for feature phones, you can create a mobile sitemap
Social Media
- Social Shares: provide sharing options for your site
- Social Profiles: add social profiles to your Google search results
- OpenGraph: the Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
- Facebook: sharing Best Practices for Websites & Mobile Apps
- Twitter: with Twitter cards, you can attach photos, videos and media experience to you Tweets
- Authorship information
- Google+ Authorship: add Google+ authorship information to your page
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]">or<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]" rel=author">Google+ Profile</a>or<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]" rel=me">Google+ Profile</a>or<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]" rel=publisher">Google+ Profile</a>
Tools & Services
Webmasters
- Bing Webmasters: allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler.
- Google Search Console (GWT): allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites
- Google Tag Manager: learn about Google Analytics Tag Manager and how it can help simplify your life and need for IT requests. Launch new tags with a few clicks.
Analytics
- Ahrefs: analyze websites, track social media, build backlinks - Ahrefs has you covered. Try our marketing and SEO tools Site Explorer and Content Explorer today!
- BuzzSumo: find the most shared content for any topic or domain.
- Followerwonk: tools for Twitter Analytics, Bio Search and More
- Google Analytics: generate detailed statistics about a website’s traffic
- Open Site Explorer: use Open Site Explorer to identify link building opportunities. Research backlinks, identify top pages, view social activity, and analyze anchor text.
- Piwik: an open analytics platform
- SEMrush: SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.
- SEOstats: SEOstats is a powerful open source PHP library to request a bunch of SEO relevant metrics.
- SimilarWeb: compare website traffic with SimilarWeb.com’s advanced traffic estimator tool. See any website’s traffic sources & uncover their online marketing strategies.
- Twitter Analytics: measure and boost your impact on Twitter.
Optimization
- PageSpeed Insights: Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices.
- Varvy Seo tool: displays: domain strength, links, image seo, social counts & mentions, page/technical seo, pagespeed and more.
- Webpagetest.org: Web Page Test gives you an overall performance waterfall as well as rendering timeline for sites. It also provides critical insight into time to first byte and what could be holding back web page performance
- WooRank: WooRank will help you to address issues on your site & identify opportunities to push you ahead of the competition.
Keywords
- AdWords Keyword Tool: plan your Search Network campaigns and learn what your customers are looking for
- Google Trends: explore Google trending search topics with Google Trends.
- Keyword Tool: best FREE alternative to Google Keyword Tool for SEO & PPC keyword research! Get 750+ relevant long-tail keywords from Google Suggest in seconds!
- Rankscanner: easily track your keyword positions (SERPs) on Google for free. Unlimited websites and 100 % ranking accuracy. The best SEO tool and SERP monitor online.
Links
- OpenLinkProfiler: get an in-depth analysis of the freshest live backlinks.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool & Crawler Software: the Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program (PC or Mac) which crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective.
- Search Engine Spider Simulator: this tool simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a web page in exactly the way the search engine bot would see it when it crawls the page: See most prominent or inaccessible page elements.
Structured Data
- Google+ Snippet Creator: customize the snippet that will be seen on social media when your page is shared
- Structured Data Testing Tool: paste in your rich snippets or url to test it
- Twitter card validator: enter the URL of the page with the meta tags to validate
- Facebook Debugger: enter the URL you want to scrape to see how the page’s markup appears to Facebook
- Pinterest: validate your Rich Pins and apply to get them on Pinterest
Bookmarklets
- OuiSEO: an open-source bookmarklet that shows you on-page SEO and social meta data information.
- SEO Bookmarklet: a One-Stop SEO Bookmarklet to Quickly Review On-Site SEO