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).