I have a little extra time today so we’ll continue our Crucial SEO Checklist.

5. Make your navigation in HTML

Biggest mistake in web design is to use images for website navigation. While for some big, established companies and webmasters SEO is not a great concern so they can get away with this, for anyone wanting to have well-optimized pages this should be the first thing to lose. It will not only render your site navigation valueless for search engine crawlers, but very similar effects can usually be achieved with CSS that maintain the aesthetic impact while still providing valuable and relevant text for the search engines.

6. Make sure that all images include ALT text

The alternate text should be a textual alternative for the meaning of the image and it is another place to optimize your pages. Search engines simply can’t read images and decipher the content there. They can only see your ALT text, if you’ve provided it, and the association they’ll make with the image and your relevant content will be based exclusively on this attribute. This is important for accessibility for vision-impaired users as well for visitors with browsers that don’t support images.

7. Use of Flash content

While Flash can do a lot for presentation, from an accessibility and SEO standpoint you should use it only on non-crucial content.

8. Unique <title> and meta description tags

Ensuring that each page has a unique <title> tags is one of the most important on-page SEO optimization part. A lot of webmasters seem to be unaware and use duplicate <title> tags for multiple pages or do not target search traffic at all with this important tag. If you run a search on a any competitive keyword of your choice on Google and click on the top few links that show up in results, note what text appears in the title bar of the page. You should see right away that this is a key place to include targeted keywords for your web pages.

9. Make sure that important page elements are HTML

When optimizing a web page keep in mind that the search engine crawlers are only looking at the source code of your page. Anything on there in a multimedia component (images, flash movie,..) very likely will be invisible to search engines. So it should be clear that the most important elements of your page, where the heart of your content is, should be presented in clean, standards-compliant and well-optimized HTML source code.

10. Include your targeted keywords in page content

Many website owners publish their pages and think that they will rank well for competitive keywords within their niche. Unfortunately, this will basically never happen unless you include targeted keywords (that you have used in meta tags and H1 tags) in the page content. What that means is that you need to create well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently but do not over saturate to avoid triggering spam filters.
The Conclusion: without relevant content with your targeted keywords in it you will never rank well.

That is it for part 2 , stay tuned for part 3.

You can read part 1 here: Crucial SEO Checklist Part 1

Enjoy.