A Complete SEO Checklist for Website Owners

Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer a voluntary marketing activity reserved for the savvy but a critical requirement to achieve the best results. It helps to index and rank your website on search engines like Google and Bing, to increase the visibility and reach of your brand.

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But implementing SEO requires a lot of work, patience, and effort to succeed. That’s why taking the time and applying all the technical and on-page tactics is essential. Here is a complete SEO checklist for you and your website to ensure nothing is missed.

Technical SEO

First things first – technical SEO. It involves completing various tasks that make it even possible to rank your website. These actions help search engines access your website, crawl and interpret information, and evaluate and successfully index it on SERPs.

Open accounts on reporting platforms

First, you will need tools that allow you to stay on top of your SEO efforts. The essential software includes Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Bing Webmaster.

These reporting platforms are free but provide invaluable diagnostic and analytics data. They will help you track progress, evaluate it and make adjustments well after you complete every item from this checklist.

Build and submit an XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a roadmap to your website. Submitting the sitemap file serves as a guide to search engines as they crawl web pages.

Building and submitting a sitemap is pretty straightforward. The sitemap remains automatically updated and in sync with the pages on your site. Many web platforms have this feature built-in or have plugins and add-ons that create the file for you.

On the other hand, you can use several free tools to generate a static sitemap. That includes your free reporting platforms.

Create a robots.txt file

A robots.txt is the instruction manual for search engine robots. It tells robots how to crawl your site and what pages or parts of the site not to index. It’s an important step, seeing as how search engine robots will examine the entire area as their default setting.

Create the file even if you don’t want to implement any restrictions on your site. But make sure that the file is accurate, verified in your consoles (Google and Bing), and doesn’t obstruct access to important pages.

Examine all domains

Examining every site domain in case they redirect to your primary domain is essential. If they turn to your website, make sure they have a permanent 301 redirect.

It’s a simple fix, but don’t overlook it. A wrong redirect HTTP code can duplicate content and perplex crawlers when indexing your site.

Increase the website speed

A first impression lasts just five seconds. Users who spend more than three seconds waiting for a page to load likely bounce from the site altogether. That’s why search engines have incorporated the page speed ranking factor and why Google wants your site to load in less than a second.

First, run a speed test of your website. Getting it to a competitive level will improve both user experience (UX) and ranking. Then, minimize the use of JavaScript and heavy code, and reduce the cache of elements on your website.

Create a mobile-friendly environment

Statistics reveal there will be almost three billion smartphone users in 2020. Search engines know this, and responsive design has become a ranking factor and a staple of UX design.

Run a Google mobile-friendly test to determine how well your website performs on smaller devices. Also, remember that even though most WordPress themes automatically scale to tablets and smartphones, it’s worth doing a quality assurance (QA) test to determine the actual usability of your website on a smaller screen.

Include an SSL certification

Security is yet another significant ranking factor. Chrome, Opera, Mozilla, and other browsers will raise red flags and alert visitors that your website is insecure. That’s why your website should have an SSL certification in place. It’s a sign of trust, which is relatively simple to include on your site.

Install plugins, add-ons, and extensions

If you use a content management system (CMS) to build and upload content to your website, adding plugins and extensions is essential to enable advanced technical optimization.

WordPress has many plugins that turn your site into an SEO powerhouse. The same applies to Drupal, Magento, Wix, and others. Look for add-ons to increase management control and maximize functionality.

Resolve pre-existing issues

SEO tactics are consistently changing, and staying up to date is crucial for the success of optimization. You will need to resolve outdated tactics and missed issues like duplicate pages to make your new on-page tactics effective. Looking for a data-lead SEO agency in your area to help you with this can be pretty beneficial.

On-page SEO

Modern SEO is all about context. The days when all you had to do was stuff a page with keywords are gone. Today’s search engine algorithms care about how each web page fits the website.

That’s where contemporary on-page SEO steps in. Refining page elements to optimize them and fit them into the context of the website makes it easy for search engines to navigate and ultimately rank your website.

Keywords and topics

Before you build context with your website, you need to know the aim of those efforts. Keyword research will help you find the primary context for your website, each web page, and additional topics and phrases used in your niche market.

Creating topic clusters might be a good starting point. Define the main keyword of your business (primary product or service), and branch it out into several specific sub-topics (secondary products and services). Then use sites like AnswerThePublic to help you define even more specific topics for your content.

Create content

Content is king. That’s an old SEO saying that has withstood numerous algorithm changes.

When creating content for your website, remember that quality always beats quantity. But you shouldn’t have a few lines on a significant page, either.

Instead, focus on creating relevant, informational, and accurate content that adds value to visitors. Content that resonates with users automatically ranks better with a search engine. It’s a sure road for moving your website higher up the SERP.

Customize URLs

URLs are often overlooked elements of a website, but they can be used to improve ranking. Customizing a page URL lets you induct a keyword or even a long-tail phrase which immediately tells crawlers what the page is about. It also makes the structure of your directory cleaner and works towards adding context to your website.

Add custom tags and meta descriptions.

Custom title tags, meta descriptions, and even alt text for images might be less relevant to the site visitor, but all three are used by search engines when indexing each page on your website. To optimize them, make sure each one contains concise, helpful information and keywords relevant to the content on the page. These are small steps but highly important if you want your site featured as a first-page result.

Conclusion

After you check off everything from this list, you must be patient. Optimizing a website for search engines requires effort, dedication, and consistency. But if you effectively implement technical SEO and on-page tactics, in time, success will come, and a top spot on SERPs will be yours.

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