Links and Other Details: Completing Your SEO Checklist - Some Final Details
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While you’re checking everything else, don’t lose track of the content. Do you have at least 250 words of content on every page? If you’re not sure how many words that is, it’s about as many as you see on one page of an average paperback novel. Check your key word density (again) while you’re at it; make sure it is between three and seven percent for each key word on each page.
Do you have any broken links? If so, fix them. This is something that you’ll have to check on an ongoing basis, because the Internet is always changing.
You’ll want to help your visitors and the search engines find their way around your site. To that end, you’ll want to have XML and HTML sitemaps. You’ll also want to have a robots.txt file. If you have flash or frames, you’ll want to offer alternative forms of navigation. Search engine spiders can’t handle flash or frames, and many human visitors have little or no patience for them.
Finally, let’s look at browser compatibility issues. There was a time just after Microsoft won the first set of browser wars that this wasn’t quite as important; many web designers simply made sure their pages looked good in Internet Explorer and left it at that. You can’t do that anymore, if you ever really could. Most browsers have at least a few quirks, with Internet Explorer still a little quirkier than the rest. If you want to be comprehensive, you need to make sure your pages are compatible with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, FireFox, Mosaic and Safari. Your visitors will be much happier, even if your web designers aren’t. There are ways to tell what browsers your visitors use when they arrive at your site; that should help guide you. Here at the Shed, we check our articles in both Internet Explorer and FireFox before they go live.
Between this article and the previous one, you should now have a fairly comprehensive understanding of everything you need to check and work on to perform a complete search engine optimization of a web site. As with many things, the devil is in the details. But it’s a small price to pay for the rewards of increased traffic – and conversions – that you can hope to achieve from an organic climb to the top of the search engine results pages. Good luck!
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