The WebConfs website has a very useful list of “Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website.” Basically they collected all the major factors that might affect the search optimization of your site, attributing a score to them. The score ranges from -3, which is very bad for your site, to +3, which is very good. Below you will find a summary of the most important factors:
One of the easiest things but very important SEO tasks you’ll need to do each time you publish a post, is to give the page a good dose of one page optimizations. This WordPress onpage SEO checklist explains in simple terms what needs to be do to fully optimize each WordPress post.
Keywords
- Keyword in title tag (+3)
- Keyword in URL (+3)
- Keyword density in document (+3)
- Keyword in H1 and H2 headings (+3)
- Keyword in the beginning of document (+2)
- Keyword in ALT tags (+2)
- Keyword in Meta tags (+1)
- Keyword stuffing (-3)
Links
- Anchor text of inbound links (+3)
- Origin of inbound links (+3)
- Links from similar sites (+3)
- Links from .edu and .gov sites (+3)
- Anchor text of internal links (+2)
- Many outgoing links (-1)
- Outbound links to bad neighbors (-3)
- Cross-linking (-3)
Meta Tags
- Description Meta Tag (+1)
- Keywords Meta Tag (+1)
- Refresh Meta Tag (-1)
Content
- Unique content (+3)
- Frequent updates (+3)
- Age of content (+2)
- Poor coding or design (-2)
- Invisible text (-3)
- Doorway pages (-3)
- Duplicate content (-3)
Other factors
- Site accessibility (+3)
- Sitemap (+2)
- Site size (+2)
- Site age (+2)
- Top-level domain (+1)
- URL length (0)
- Hosting downtime (-1)
- Flash (-2)
- Misused Redirects (-3)