When starting a new SEO project or taking a fresh look at an existing project, it can be hard to know where to start. That's why we've decided to share our in-house checklist to save you the trouble of making your own and to help you avoid missing the important aspects along the way.

The following steps can be used for a comprehensive review and to help generate a plan of action to fix problems on most web sites. Of course each website is different, but we intentionally made this checklist generic, so it should be applicable to most sites you come across.

• You can also download a PDF version of this checklist here.

Index

1. Review # of indexed pages

• Use the site:domain.com search command at Bing & Google. This will typically display all indexed URLs including subdomains. Reported numbers may be inaccurate for large domains.
• Record how many URLs are reported in the index.
• If the home page or other important pages with lots of links are missing, that's a bad sign. It may mean severe indexing problems or a possible penalty.

2. Review # of indexed images

• Do a site:domain.com search in Google Image Search, record the # of indexed images.
• Do a site:domain.com search in Bing Image Search, record the # of indexed images.
• Review how well the images are indexed using file name and img alt text.

3. Review Webmaster Tool Data at both Google and Bing

You should do a full review of all the reports in both Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT), this is valuable data direct from the engines that can be very helpful, make use of it! At the very least, review these most important s...