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).






1. KW in Title
2. Content
3. Inbound Links
4. Description
5. Sitemap
Everything else is important as well, but the loudest signal is the inbound links.
thanks for your feedback!
1. Title bars
2. Text/heds high on page
3. Keywords in page headlines/permalinks
4. Inbound links
5. Internal linking
I almost always find important text/heads in image files; site owners unaware of this problem.
basically your top 5 works for me …