SEO Audits - What Are the First Things You Review?

SEMpdx needs to put together a list of the “Top SEO factors” for our Hot Seat events. We’re going to present the list and a brief explanation of each item as part of the opening spiel for each Hot Seat event. While we COULD cover a lot – time constraints require that we keep this portion of the event to 5 or 10 minutes. So – I’m shooting for a list of the 5 most important things to know about with respect to SEO.

While all of us at SEMpdx have our own lists – I feel that we need a list that’s built using more ‘democratic’ means. So here’s the question then: “What are the first things you look at when doing an SEO review of a site? Why?”

Please contribute your thoughts via ‘comments’ below. I’ll summarize & tally the comments, and update this post with the winning list! Here’s a starting point:

Keywords in Title Tags
Text Page Headlines (using header tags)
Keyword Use in Unique Text Body Copy
Internal Link Anchor Text
URLs
META Description
Inbound Links
HTML Site Map
META Keywords
Robots.txt
XML Sitemap file
Alt Tags
W3C Validation

Which 5 do you think are the most important? What did I miss?

(BTW – approved comments are ‘followed’, so you’ll get the link credit for your contribution).

Ben Lloyd

Ben Lloyd, Principal at Add3 and co-founder of SEMpdx, started his internet marketing experience in 1999 as an offshoot of his music industry background where he had the opportunity to promote lifestyle Web sites to teens. Shortly thereafter, he took that experience back to Portland and began agency life where he honed his search marketing skills. In 2003, Ben moved on to form his own search engine marketing agency, Amplify Interactive, which was acquired by Seattle-based digital marketing agency Add3 in 2013. Ben is now responsible for managing the Portland office for Add3 as well as client strategy and marketing for Add3.

www.add3.com/insights/