This document provides a checklist of 12 things to evaluate in the homepage SEO of a local business website. These include checking for redirects on the homepage URL, evaluating visible text and meta tags for keywords, optimizing images and navigation links, ensuring mobile friendliness, and analyzing social media integration and speed. Maintaining a well-optimized homepage is important as it is often a website's top-ranking page due to its many external links.

1. Learning Session
Topic:
12 Things To Check In Your Local Homepage SEO
Audit

2. Your homepage is arguably the most important page
of your site.

3. Sometimes when you go to a site’s base domain name (i.e.
“www.example.com”) the site will redirect, sending your
browser to another URL (such as
“www.example.com/wp/home/index.php”).
This can happen depending upon how your system
administrator, ISP or site designer configured your website.
If your homepage must redirect, you generally would want it
to do so only once, rather than multiple hops to the final URL.
If your homepage redirects, you might want to assess it
through a server header check utility-if your redirected URL
isn’t passing a 301 status code, this should be corrected.

4. 2. Evaluate The Visible Text On The
Homepage
Web pages can be a bit deceptive where text is concerned
At minimum, the homepage should have the following items
reflected somewhere in the plain text on the page:
The business name
The category or type of business that consumers would search
for (ex: “Plumbing”)
The name of the city, and possibly the district name where the
business is found
The street address
The phone number

5. 3. Evaluate Your Homepage Title
Tag
Does the <TITLE> contain the business name,
business type/category, and the main place/city name
you serve?
The two things that consumers most search for when
trying to find your business are your business name,
and your business type/category. So, these should be
concisely added to the TITLE text.
If you need to redesign your title tag, consider using
the Moz title tag preview tool at:
http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-
tool

6. 4. Check Under The Hood For The
Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description text is important – can attract
potential customers to choose your business above
competitors appearing in search results along with
you.
The text should describe your business – what it does
and perhaps what differentiates your company from
others.
Also, this snippet optimizer tool may be helpful if you
wish to craft a new description.

7. 5. Has The Logo Been Optimized?
The logo image on the homepage doesn’t need to be
linked back to the homepage.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen calls-“Ten Most
Violated Homepage Design Guidelines”.
The file name could be descriptive, and you could
benefit from incorporating the Schema.org markup
for logos.

8. 6. Check For Structured Local Data
The business name, address and phone number
should be marked up with the local
business/organization schema.
You should check your markup using Google’s
Structured Data Testing Tool and the Operator
Toolbar for errors.

9. 7. Is The Phone Number Formatted
Simply Enough?
The phone number should be in visible text and
punctuated in a fairly common manner to ensure that
search engines can interpret it and successfully
identify it as a phone number.
Use one of the standard punctuation formats
composed of parenthesis and/or dashes or periods.
Examples: (123) 456-7890, 123-456-7890, 123.456.7890

10. 8. View Your Website On a Mobile
Device
Find out how friendly your site is for mobile devices.
Familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster
Guidelines for Building Smartphone-Optimized
Websites and make the site friendlier for those
smaller devices!
Mobile design is increasingly affecting rankings,
and Google has confirmed that it can negatively affect
rankings in mobile results if a site is badly-configured.

11. 9. Are Major Navigation Links
Spider-Friendly?
The homepage is typically a website’s best-ranking
page, because it typically has the most external links
out of all the site’s pages.
Spiders ideally should be able to locate all the site’s
pages once they arrive on this top page.
The links into the other pages and main sections of
content should be spiderable.
Check to see that your main navigation element links
appear as straightforward links in the page code.

12. 10. Is Your Image SEO Up To Par?
Other main images on the page can also contribute
significantly to the site’s SEO if executed correctly.
The best base for Image SEO is using original photos
using Google Image Search or TinEye to see if other
sites are using them as well.
Images are sometimes also hyperlinked to deeper
pages, and in those cases the links should be well-formed
and the URLs should also contain good
keyword text.

13. 11. Clock Your Homepage’s Speed!
Google has maintained that rankings can be affected
by a page’s speed of appearing in a user’s browser.
While this probably is not a heavily influential
ranking factor, it’s still worthwhile to make sure your
pages are up-to-speed for the sake of a good user-experience.

14. 12. Analyze Your Social Media
Presence On The Homepage
Check to see if your social media links are properly
sociable! I’ve analyzed a great many local business
websites that have messed up with their social media
links in some way.
If you don’t have a social media presence, you really
should integrate this into your online promotion mix.
A final mistake is in choosing to implement a “submit
a link” button for the homepage

15. Final Thoughts
While this checklist is not all-inclusive, it is still a
good start to getting what is probably the most
important page on your site into top condition.

16. Reference source: http://searchengineland.com
http://phoenix.fortuneinnovations.com
Thank You...