the most important should be determined by your business needs.
Your SEO assessment should be a document that outlines the current standing of the main SEO
elements of each page. It should contain columns for the element of the site you’re assessing, the
current status of that element, what needs to be improved in that element, and the deadline for
improvement. It’s also helpful to put a check box next to each item, which can be marked when
improvements are completed, and a column for follow-up, because SEO is an ongoing process.
The elements that should be considered during an assessment include the following:
■ Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site are
essential to having that site listed properly in a search engine. Tags to which you should
pay specific attention are the title tags and the description tags, because these are the most
important to a search engine.
■ Page content: How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated?
How much content is there? Content is still important when it comes to search results.
After all, most people are looking for a specific piece of content, whether it’s information
or a product. If your content is stale, search engines might eventually begin to ignore
your site in favor of a site with fresher content. There are exceptions to this generalization,
however, and one exception is when your content is, by nature, very rich but not very
dynamic. Because of the usefulness of the content, such a site will probably continue to
rank well, but it’s a difficult case to determine. In general, fresh content is better.
■ Site links: Site links are essential in SEO. Crawlers and spiders look for the links into
and out of your site in order to traverse it and collect data on each URL. However, theyalso look for those links to be in context, meaning the link must come from or lead to a
site that is relevant to the page being indexed. Broken links tend to be a large problem
when it comes to search engine ranking, so ensure that links are still working during the
assessment process.
■ Site map: Believe it or not, a site map will help your web site be more accurately linked.
This is not the ordinary site map that you include to help users quickly navigate through
your site. This site map is an XML-based document, at the root of your HTML, that
contains information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on)
about each of the pages within the site. Using this XML site map helps to ensure that
even the deep pages within your site are indexed by search engines. If you don’t have
a site map, you should create one. If you do have one, make sure it’s accurate and up
to date.