Take the SEO SAT

Making sure your website is ready for success takes a combination of problem-solving skills and knowledge. Take this test to see if you are ready for the Ivy League, or if you should head back to class to brush up on your SEO skills.

Freshman: 20 points each

You have installed Google Analytics on your site.

You have privacy policy and terms & conditions pages.

Pages include targeted search phrases in the title tag (<70 chars, 6-12 words), meta description tag (<150 chars), keywords, headline, subheads, and body copy. Copy should always be reader-friendly, relevant, compelling, and inspiring.

Pages include images and/or graphics that help illustrate the target search phrase, and images have descriptive file names, alt tags, and/or captions.

There are neither misspellings nor grammar mistakes.

You have included social media links, user discussions, and/or reviews.

The site architecture has a straightforward linking structure.

Your first heading tag is an <h1>, followed by <h2>, <h3>, <h4> to help search engines understand page structure and content.

Images are optimized for the web for fast downloads.

You use HTML text instead of images for important messages.

Masters: 40 points each

Your site is mobile friendly and verified by Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Google’s Mobile Usability Report and shows Google’s “mobile friendly” label in mobile search results.

You have a keyword strategy and a list of targeted search phrases, synonyms, plus geo-meta tags and addresses for local search.

You have a linking strategy and link between related pages on your site using descriptive navigation links.

You have set up a Webmaster Tools Account on Google and Bing.

You regularly check the Crawl Errors Report in Google Webmaster Tools.

You have a dynamic XML site map and submitted it to all the major search engines and an HTML site map linked from the footer.

You have a robots.txt file, appropriate nofollow tags, preferred domain (www or non-www), and redirects (301 and 302).

You have updated all your social media profiles and online directories with your current website URL, logo and graphics, and business information.

You have a Google Places listing with a link to your site with the same name, address, and phone as your website.

You have an email, social media, and direct mail marketing strategy that regularly sends visitors to your site.

PhD: 60 points each

You have a home page with a good balance of static and dynamic content to keep things fresh, but maintain rankings for key terms.

You have configured structured data using Google’s Data Highlighter tool.

You regularly check your site’s loading speed to analyze and improve your website’s performance.

The content of selected pages shows up on Google’s cache.

You regularly check your Webmaster Tools and correct 404 errors, 301 redirects, manual penalties, and other errors.

You analyze your site traffic taking into account Google and Bing algorithm updates.

Your CSS is streamlined for faster load times, JavaScript/CSS are external so they don’t appear above body text.

You implemented rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags for improved pagination.

You use dynamic and static URLs thoughtfully and use a canonical tag on pages with parameters that don’t change the page content.

For multi-language sites, you have implemented rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotations.

Writing Section: 400 points

You have a content strategy that involves regularly creating high-quality, relevant, fresh, sharable content of at least 500 words in length and sharing it on social media.

Remember: No cheating!

Make sure no matter how advanced you are, you use only “white hat” SEO strategies that follow Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Your Score:

Your Score (out of 1600):