texts and using the right keywords right is extremely important in SEO. Make sure that before launching your website, you can give a positive answer to all the questions below:
your checks. Analyze your pages by using the Keyword Analyzer in order to ensure that your pages are
for your selected keywords. Additionally the SERP Analysis tool can help you
the competition and see if it is possible to compete for the selected terms.
and they affect the SEO. So ask yourself the following questions and make sure you have done everything properly.
14. Is my website well coded? Is it cross-browser? Have I made sure that my pages contain no broken HTML that is likely to affect the
analysis of the site?
15. Have I developed my website by using Search Engine friendly technologies? Is someone able to access my website
without requiring him to use Flash, Silverlight, JavaScript/AJAX, Java applets, frames etc?
16. Is my menu visible from all the pages and is it developed in HTML so that the search engines can find the rest of the pages?
17. Is my site
easy to be crawled? Do I provide
text links for all the pages of my website?
18. Do I use properly the meta-robots tags?
19. Did I take steps to eliminate duplicate content by focusing on the Link Architecture, by doing 301 redirects when required and by using proper canonical tags?
20. Did I make sure that I don’t use
unnecessary or incorrect HTTP redirections?
21. Do I redirect the non-www version of my website to the www version or vise versa?
22. What is the loading time of my website? Have I done everything I can to reduce it?
23. Am I certain that I do not do Cloaking and that I have no Doorway pages?
Link Structure, URLs and Links
In several articles in the past we have discussed how important it is to develop a
solid link structure. Below we list the most essential checks that are related to the link structure, the URLs and the links:

24. Did I incorporate the important keywords in my URLs? 25. Have I ensured that my URLs are not too lengthy or too spammy?
26. Am I sure that no Session IDs (or other unnecessary variables) appear in my URLs?
27. Are my URLs static and SEO friendly (they do not include the “?” char)?
28. Do I use dashes instead of underscores in my URLs?
29. Have I ensured that I do not have too many outgoing links per page?
30. Do the anchor texts of my internal links contain important keywords? Are their text short but descriptive? Are these keywords the same with the ones that I selected during keyword optimization?
31. Do I have an optimized Link Structure? Do I use a tree-like architecture where the top level pages are the most important pages of my website?
32. Have I linked the most important pages directly from homepage or from the top categories?
33. Have I ensured that most of my PageRank/Link Juice passes to my internal pages and that there are not too many links pointing to external sites or dangling pages?
34. Have I eliminated all the links that point to different versions of the same page, causing duplicate content problems?
35. Have I eliminated all the broken links?
36. Do I use meaningful internal anchors when necessary?
37. Am I 100% sure that I do not have any hidden, spammy or paid links in my site?
38. Do I usually use text links instead of image links, when I point to an internal page?
39. Have I nofollowed the links that I do not trust? Have I decided on whether I will do PageRank sculpting?
In order get a detailed view of how the PageRank
flows within your site and what is the link structure of your webpages, make sure you use the Link Structure Tool. It will provide you with
detailed statistics and
graphs along with all the data you require to evaluate your current link architecture.
Domains & Hosting
Both domain names and hosting can
heavily affect the performance of your website and your SEO campaign, so make sure you check the followings:

40. Have I checked that my domain has no
previous bans from search engines?
41. Does the domain name contain any
useful/relevant keywords?
42. Have I selected the TLD of the domain wisely? Am I certain of why I want to use a generic or a country specific TLD?
43. Do I understand what are the
benefits and the
tradeoffs of using subdomains?
44. Do I know in which
country my website is hosted? Am I certain that the website should be hosted in that country? (Given that the server location is a signal)
45. Is my hosting company reliable? Do they update/patch their servers
regularly? Do they offer the necessary modules that will help me build an SEO Friendly Website? What is the
uptime percentage? What are the loading times? How many sites are hosted under the same IP?
Off Page and other Checks
After checking your webpages you need to ensure that all the necessary files have been built, that all of the necessary accounts are created and that you are ready to go live. Check out the followings and make sure you have not forgotten any of the basics:

46. Did I create XML and/or HTML sitemaps? Have I submitted them to the search engines? 47. Have I created a robots.txt file? Do I know exactly which pages I have to block? Am I certain that I want to block those pages?
48. Have I created an account on Google, Bing and Yahoo Webmaster Tools? (Yes you should still use Yahoo tools until they are fully integrated with Bing).
49. Have I created a Google Analytics account (or use a similar Web Analytics service)? Have I added the tracking code in all the pages of my website? Am I sure? Am I 100% sure?
50. Have I set up an RSS feed (mainly for blogs and news websites)? Do I use the RSS autodiscovery technique? Have I added the RSS URL on the HTML Header of my pages?
51. Do I understand what are the benefits and the tradeoffs of using Geo location? Have I decided on whether I should use it on my website?
52. Have I evaluated the design on my website? Have I set up the call to actions?
53. Have I setup the scripts to monitor user’s activity?
54. Have I decided on whether I will do A/B testing?
55. Have I developed a solid Link Building strategy? Have I gathered all the relevant high traffic directories of my industry and the search engine’s local listings where I can submit my business? Do I know which websites link to my competitors? Do I have a plan on how to acquire high quality links?
56. Have I decided on whether I should use Social Media to promote my brand? Have I developed a solid Social Media strategy? Did I add the social media buttons in my website? Have I created the profiles?
57. Have I tested my website by using the Web SEO Analytics Toolbox? How can I improve the site based on the SEO reports?
58. Am I positive that I use no blackhat techniques and that I do not violate Google ‘s Guidelines?
59. Have I created the Email accounts, the FTP accounts etc? Have I set up everything?
60. Have I tested thoroughly my website? Am I ready to go live?
I strongly believe that if you complete all of the checks that are described above and if you use this SEO checklist you will be able to detect most of the
flaws that can damage your SEO campaign. I wish you the best of luck and I am looking forward to your suggestions and comments.