It amazes me how many websites in the world exist that are poor design.  Dealing in the Courier industry, their website is their store front, one of two points of contact with customers.  Why, when the average courier company in the USA does roughly $2.5M in sales have such crappy websites?  I mean, cough up $3000 for a well designed site that caters to the various audience members.  The Internet is here to stay folks.

Putting functionality and design aside, the Search Engines want to rank quality sites higher in their ‘organic’ listings.  If they provide poor quality sites in their rankings, the ’searcher’ will go to another search engine.  Point is, if Google doesn’t like certain things about your site, you won’t get ranked.

What are these things?  There are two places you need to look. 

1.  On-the-page factors

2. Off-the-page factors

Today, I’m going to point out some basics from #1.  Although this only represents somewhere around 30% of the weight in your rankings, without it, you won’t get ranked…period.  This information is readily available and basic, so do it!  If you website lacks any of this, contact your webmaster immediatly to enhance your site for promotion.  You’ll enjoy the benefits.

This is your On-the-page Website Check List.

1. Validate your HTML code.  Use the W3C Markup Validation Service.
2. Name your files with keywords and make sure you use hyphens instead of underscores.
3. Quality Anchor text in the footer of each page. 
4. Have you properly ALT tagged your images?
5. Title Tag with main keyword and 100% relevant to the content.  Stays withing the SEs guidelines.
6. Your description tag needs to work hand-in-hand with the Title to get the searcher to “click” on the listing.  Sometimes this is what is displayed in the search engine results page.
7. Every page should have a unique Title & Description.
8. Be careful of using the money keywords in the keyword description for competitors to yank.
9. Is the correct DTD statement being used?

10. Avoid using Javascript and when used, it should be referenced as an external file.

11. CSS should be referenced as an external file.  DO NOT use tables or frames.  CSS is more work and effort on the developers part, but its better design
12. Are you using a heading tag and is it compelling?
13. Do your main graphics use the ALT tag properly?
14. Place your keyword phrase in the following areas:

     i. Title Tag

     ii. Meta Description

     iii. H1 tag to begin the content

     iv. First paragraph of content

     v. Appearing in Bold or Italic in the first three paragraphs of content

     vi. Appearing in the filename (with hyphens not underscores)

     vii. Used in anchor text to either an internal page or relevant external site.
15. Check for bad links.

16. Fix bad links and create XML Sitemap and submit to Google.  That’s submit your sitemap, NOT your site to the Google directory.

17. Don’t display different information to the search engines to deceive them.  They are getting smarter daily at the black hat tricks.

18.  READ THE GOOGLE WEBMASTER GUIDELINES!  (be weary, Google only gives a very high level overview of what they want, but they’ve done a great job outlining the biggest, most common tricks)