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Essential Basic SEO Checks

Posted by Paul B | August 23, 2007 .

SEO, to some a science to others a load of rubbish. Either way there are a few things that will definitely get you punished in the natural search results, no if’s or but’s about it. Bad redirects, a non spider friendly layout and duplicate content are some of the main ways of ensuring you under achieve. Luckily there are plenty of free tools out there to help, these are some of the checks I run on each page I create:-

Bad Redirects
In my mind anything other than a 301 permanent redirect is bad, if you’re looking for a quick way of being shunned in the search engines then I doubt there’s any quicker way then using a 302 redirect. It’s surprising how often this turns up and how often it catches out SEO professionals. For example if you’re using domain forwarding with the Plesk control panel you’re doing a 302 redirect and punishing your target domain.

Being Spider Friendly
Spiders are the bitches of the search engines, they’re out there doing all the work and reporting back what they find but get none of the credit. If you want to get on with a search engine, get on with the wife. If your content isn’t spider friendly then there’s a good chance that it’s not all going to be found and so not appear in the index and search results.

Avoiding Duplicate Content
You’ve spent ages writing content for your website, the last thing you want is for somebody to steal it. What’s even worse is for a bad site structure to result in you getting a duplicate content penalty for your own content. It’s best to run this tool once your content has been live for a month or so. If somebody else has copied you then lay the smack down on them, if it’s one of your own sites then use your robots.txt, nofollow or some other method to block one copy of the content from being indexed.

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