Daniel Shakhmundes’ SEO Checklist is used internally for his clients and projects. Consider this as a best-practices guide for increasing the visibility of websites on the internet.

1. robots.txt
   Allows Search Engine Spiders/Crawlers to determine what portions of your website may be indexed. Even if an entire website is meant to be publicly indexable and searchable, welcoming them at the doorstep implicitly may improve ranking.
   robots.txt should be placed at the root of a website.
   Here’s the robots.txt file & address/URL for Shak.WS: http://shak.ws/robots.txt
2. Code & Programming Quality
   Does your website conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications?
   Their Quality Assurance Toolbox has the tools you need to validate conformance with the standards authority itself.
   Search engine spiders/crawlers appreciate high quality code & programming, because it makes websites easier for them to digest, but it also ensures that they absorb all content without omissions or errors. Don’t be surprised if this property/characteristic is used in ranking websites.
3. Know Your Stats (Correctly)
   Metaphorically speaking, you certainly must have your fingers on the pulse of your website traffic statistics. How else would you know whether your SEO is working and identify what efforts are successful? There are at least two important aspects to knowing your stats correctly:

   A) Implementation of traffic analytics tools – we recommend using at least two, for confidence in your results – sometimes different tools pick up different things.

   B) Identify junk traffic and strive to eliminate it – protect your forms from spammers using a tools like CAPTCHA, and ensure that your web-server is secure against brute-force communications – junk traffic may be hackers’ attempts at compromising your website’s environment (intrusion attempts to access any non-public information), and spammers looking for ways to send their junk email through your website and areas they can post their spam links. Junk traffic will only skew & distort your statistics, in addition to raising the risk of even more detrimental consequences.