At Flightpath, we create, redesign, refine and maintain dozens of websites every year. A core consideration that impacts all aspects of this work is ensuring that sites adhere to best practices for high search engine visibility (also known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO).
Throughout our planning, design, production, quality assurance and launch processes, SEO stays top of mind. When we’re getting ready for a release, we run everything through a checklist that assesses sites based on approximately 100 different criteria that all enter into the algorithms that reward (or penalize) sites.
Oftentimes we’re called upon to conduct a comprehensive SEO Site Audit. This may be for a site that’s been created by another agency or other 3rd party. Or it could be a site that’s had a lot of post-launch enhancement and is ready for a check up. Or it could be for an older site that may not have kept up with algorithmic changes over time. Either way, we return to our checklist and begin assessing the site based upon our all-important 100 criteria.
At a high level, here are some of the most important SEO optimization attributes that we’re assessing:
- UX: including mobile friendliness page speed
- Tags: including titles, meta descriptions
- Page Duplication and duplicate content
- URLs: including length, keyword usage and word separators
- Links: including click-depth, navigation and link location
- Page Architecture: including keyword location and content structure
- Site Architecture: including languages, 301 permanent redirects and sitemaps
- Social Media: including Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sharing
- Site Verification: including Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools set-up
While some of these attributes are more important than others, they should all be attended to and revisited and checked up on regularly.