A lot of scripts, like Wordpress, have great SEO right out of the box. You don’t need much tweaking to get a blog indexed quickly in the search engines. However, if you’re starting a site from scratch, or not using a script with well designed SEO, then you will need to make changes so the spiders find you and rank your site well.

Last month, Small Business SEM wrote an article called How to SEO your site in less than 60 minutes. I’ll outline below a few of the first steps you should take as suggested by Matt McGee. For the full list of steps and details, check out his blog post.

1. Visit www.yourdomain.com.

• A. Does it take you to somewhere else? Visit yourdomain.com. Does it automatically forward you to the www? If not, then you need to do a 301 redirect. Search engines might consider your site as 2 seperate sites (dupe conent).
• B. Review site navigation. Textlinks are the best. If you have flash navigation, search engines might have a tough time finding their way around your site. Included in site navigation is your URL structure. How long are your URLs? Do they have keywords in them?
• C. Review home page content. Do you have an adequate amount of text? Are your keywords placed in the text copy? Do you have a sitemap?
• D. View the source code. Check your meta description and meta keywords.

There are 8 or 9 other steps you need to take to ensure your site is properly optimized in under 60 minutes. So be sure to check out the rest of them.