In the last few days I have been working with a new client (Headstart Employment) that offers employment services (such as resume writing, cover letter preparation and interview training) based here in Melbourne. Specifically I have been helping them set-up the basics when it comes to SEO and their website. Being a brand-new site (powered by WordPress) that is yet to be indexed with the major search engines, I came up with the below list.
Moving forward I plan to track the success of establishing the basics as noted below and will post new blog entries reporting my findings. Stay tuned!
Review site and amend where required
- Review the site and make SEO related changes where necessary. What this will include:
- Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly URL (E.g. http://www.headstartrecruitment.com.au/about-us instead of http://www.headstartrecruitment.com.au/?=109)
- Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Page Title
- Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Meta-description
- Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Meta-keywords
- Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Links / Anchor Text / Title tags / Image Tags (if any)
- Review of internal links
- Add links to footer to main pages of your site
- Suggest design / usability changes that I believe would be beneficial
Implement the following tools / features
This involved implementing the following SEO tools / features to the site, including:
- Install Google Analytics and verify
- Create a Sitemap for your website (with all your links – for both visitors to your site and also search engine crawlers)
- Create an XML sitemap for your website (this is a file that the search engine crawlers can read easily and understand the content of your site – no one actually sees this file)
- Install the All in One SEO plugin
- Install the Google Analytics plugin
- Install the internal links plugin (allows you to easily create links to other pages within your site)
- Install the Twitter Tools plugin
And finally
- Submit site to the major search engines
- List your Business with Google Maps
- 301 Redirect the non-www to the www version of your website
Creation of robots.txt file.