If you are building a web site on an Agile team, you need to find ways to save time.  These two checklists will help you with that.  The first checklist, for on-page optimization, is helpful when building a new page or significantly modifying an existing one.  This is a good set-up for success criteria for a user story or sprint.  The second checklist, for on-site optimization, is good for regression testing or stabilization, and is a good baseline for success criteria for the release.

Do you have any feedback?  Things you disagree with?  Anything I missed?  Please leave feedback.

On-Page Optimization

1. URLs
   • Readable by a human
   • 115 characters or shorter
   • shorter URLs are better for usability
2. Head Section Order
   • Meta tags are in the right order: Title > Description > Keywords.
   • these tags are used to render the title and description in the search engine results pages
3. Title Tag
   • 6 to 12 words , 70 characters or less
   • Unique across the site
4. Description Tag
   • include the most important info and  keywords before the SERP cutoff
   • approximately 160 characters including spaces.
   • make it compelling – don’t want to waste your prime real estate
   • Unique across the site
5. Keywords Tag
   • Even with the controversy of their value, include it as a best practice
   • List keywords in order of importance, separated by commas.
6. Meta Robots tag
   • <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
7. NoFollow prop on anchor tags
   • <a href=”http://www.examplesite.com/&#8221; rel=”nofollow”>this is the link text</a>
8. View State tag
9. Heading Tags
   • make sure your first heading tag is an <h1>,and that there is only one on the page.
10. Canonical tag
    • rel=canonical
    • Helps prevent duplicate content within your site
11. Hreflang
    • rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”
    • Tells Google what language to target for search purposes
12. Images
    • Use page level keywords in your image alt attributes
    • Ensure your images have proper descriptions for Accessibility Standards
    • Alt attributes are also required to validate your HTML code.
    • Ensure file names reflect the content of the image
13. Geo Meta Tags
14. Overall Word Count
    • More than 250 words is recommended,
    • Quality content is key.
    • avoid duplicate content and thin content
15. Dashes vs. Underscores in URLs
    • Underscores are alpha characters and do not separate words.
    • Dashes (i.e. hyphens) are word separators, but not too many or things could look like spam
16. Links
    • use fully qualified links, i.e. http://www.URL.com
    • 100-200 links on a page is a good high end target
    • Make sure your link text uses keywords and is relevant
17. Make JavaScript/CSS External
    • Ensure the most important part of your page is the first thing the  bots crawl.
    • externalize code to ensure there aren’t unnecessary lines above the body text.
18. Make sure there are no misspellings or grammar mistakes
19. Make sure your page is W3C valid HTML
20. Last but not least, make sure it is relevant content

On-Site Optimization

1. Site Map
   • Have an HTML sitemap with every page on it,
   • Every page should link to that sitemap page
   • Have an XML Sitemap to submit to search engines
   • The site map should always have fully qualified URLs.
2. Text Navigation
   • Use text navigation, not JavaScript or Flash navigation that spiders can’t see.
3. Pagination
   • rel=next and rel=prev
4. Fully qualified domain
   • 301 redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com
   • Make your site available over http and https
5. Robots.txt File
   • tells the search engine spiders what to index and what not to index.
   • Ensure XML sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt file
6. Social Sharing
   • Make sure they are all set up and working properly
7. Web Analytics
   • make sure you have it – GA, Omniture, etc.
   • Make sure you have only one of each analytics tag on your page
   • Ensure your analytics are set up properly – test with Fiddler, firebug, etc.
   • Monitor them regularly
8. Server Configuration
   • Regularly check your server logs, looking for 404 errors, 301 redirects and other errors.
9. Privacy Statement
   • An important element to Bing. It’s best practices to include one anyway
10. Static Pages
    • Do not use more than two query string parameters
    • use mod_rewrite or ISAPI_rewrite to simplify URLs
    • use the Canonical tag.
11. Check for Duplicate Content
    • check out CopyScape.com . Use it regularly.
12. Find and Fix Broken Links
13. Google Search
    • site:www.prnewswire.com
    • Home page should appear first
    • Track how many pages are indexed
14. 301 redirects
    • Do not use multiple 301 redirects
15. Site wide Uptime
16. Cache your site
17. Improve Site Speed
    • https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
18. Improve Site Performance
    • Compress images
    • Minify CSS and JS files
19. Set Up a Google Webmaster Tools Account and check it regularly
    1. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
    2. Register all versions of your domains and subdomains
    3. Check Health ad Crawl Errors Reported
    4. Review Mobile Usability Issues
    5. Check for Manual Penalties Reported
    6. Check blocked content
    7. Ensure CSS and JS is not blocked
20. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools as well

SEO Checklist Source URLs

• http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/seo-checklist/
• http://localseochecklist.org/
• http://altitudemarketing.com/seo-checklist/
• https://www.dynamicyield.com/2015/03/on-page-seo-checklist/
• http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/learn-seo/technical-guides/seo-technical-checklist
• http://backlinko.com/on-page-seo
• https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
• http://blog.woorank.com/2015/02/on-page-seo-checklist/
• http://www.fathomdelivers.com/blog/seo/ultimate-2015-seo-redesign-checklist/