So many people are concerned with how well their sites and pages rank in the search engines. Time and time again, I get questions sent to me via email and instant message asking the same thing. “Garry, can you please take a look at my site and tell me if it is search engine friendly?” or, “Garry, how come my site doesn’t rank for the keywords I want?” or, “Garry, where do I start with learning more about search engine optimization?”

With the obvious demand for a better understanding of search engines, how to rank in them and how to market your content in them, here is a search engine checklist that I believe you’ll find helpful. It is a simple Yes/No checklist. The more questions that you can answer yes, the more you’re on your way to search engine traffic bliss! Drop a comment with your scores if you’d like.

Simple Search Engine Checklist:

1. Are you creating content that your readers are interested in?
2. Does your content contain focused keyword phrases?
3. Are you optimizing your pages with three to five keyword phrases?
4. Do most of your important keywords appear above the top fold?
5. Are your keywords hyperlinked?
6. Do your graphics on your post contain focused and relevant keywords?
7. Does your post title contain focused keywords?
8. Does your post URL contain focused keywords?
9. Can search engines and people easily find your content from the home page?
10. Do people link back to your home page and individual pages?
11. Are you using basic HTML coding (e.g. H1, h2, h3, Bold, Alt text, etc.)

If you can answer “Yes” to all these questions then you should have a healthy site for users as well as search engines. Feel free to drop a comment and also I’d love it if you’d share this post with your readers on your own site as it can do nothing but help.