Top 8 SEO Checklist Items for Website Design & Development

Web Design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. Web Design involves implementing specific solutions that follow the business rules and objectives outlined by the client. Your website is the most important component of your company’s marketing plan. It’s the central hub for your messaging and content marketing efforts. All other marketing materials should support and drive traffic to your website.

1. Don’t Forget the SEO Basics Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of publishing and marketing information that ranks well in search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Bing etc.

2. Validate all Code Against W3C Allows internet users to check HTML and XHTML documents for well-formatted markup. Mark up validation is an important step towards ensuring the technical quality of web pages. If there is an error on your web page code, robots will stop searching your whole website's content.

3. Use Proper Structure The better your site structure, the better your chance of higher ranking in the search engines. Every website has some “structure.” It might be a rigorous and streamlined structure, or it may be a disorganized jumble of pages. If you are intentional and careful with your site structure, you will create a site that achieves search excellence.

4. Link Internally for Better Crawling and Indexing Link building is the art of getting other websites to link to your website. Internal link building is the art age-old of getting pages crawled and indexed by Google.

It is the art of spreading real Page rank about a site and also naturally emphasising important content on your site in a way that actually has a positive, contextual SEO benefit for the ranking of specific keyword phrases in Google SERPs.

5. Understand Pagination and Canonicalization pagination is used to help users navigate large amounts of data on a website and to help search engines better understand those sites. Clicking the numbered page links and forward/back icons enables visitors to efficiently navigate material that search engines can properly crawl web pages. Canonicalization is the technique of picking the best URL when there are several choices.

6. Ensure Proper Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol. The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.

7. Manage and Implement Structured Data Structured data" as a general term simply refers to any data which is organized. For example, if you have a bunch of scattered Post-It notes with phone messages about meetings, dates, times, people, etc, When we talk about structured data for SEO, we're usually talking about the particular vocabulary known as "Schema.org".

Schema.org is the most commonly used approach to structured data mark up for SEO purposes. It isn’t the only one, though. Some websites use the Microformats.org vocabulary, most often for marking up product reviews (h-review markup) or defining a physical location (h-card markup).

8. Page Load Speed is Critical Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your web page loads. Google just announced that page speed will be a ranking factor in their mobile-first index. It's more important now than SEO Best Practices.