The goal of successful SEO is to rank high in the organic search results of search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Higher website rankings mean more traffic, more traffic means more customers and more sales.
Do you want to improve organic traffic, generate leads and improve your position in search engine results? This SEO checklist can help.
Competing for top search engine rankings involves two elements:
- On Page: Optimize and improve the content of your website pages, including technical factors.
- Off Page: Measure and improve things that happen beyond your site, such as the number and quality of links coming into your site from other sites.
Do you do your homework before creating your content?
For optimization purposes, you should have one or at most two target keywords or key phrases per page in mind. If you’re trying to rank well for four or more keywords on a single page, it’s time to take a step back and consider breaking your content up into several different pages so you can create page focus.
The main purpose of your content, in search terms, is to answer search engine queries.
Now that you’re ready to get started, the following checklist will guide you through creating the perfectly optimized page. No single factor on the checklist is decisive for your page ranking well, but they work in combination to increase your overall score: Google looks at over 200 key factors when it ranks each page.
On-page optimization and technical factors
- Title – (Meta title)
- Your title should be different for each subpage. Your keyword or key phrase should always be included in the title.
- The title should not exceed 60 characters (since search engines are rarely able to display longer titles in searches).
- Description – (Meta description)
- Your description should be unique to each subpage and briefly describe what the page is about. Your keyword or key phrase should be included here.
- The title should not exceed 156 characters (since search engines can rarely show longer titles in searches – each can show 160 characters).
- Headers – (Header Tags)
- Headers are also called H1, H2, H3 and they are simply your headlines, the way you include those that are highly dependent on the platform your store or website is made of.
- Every web page must have at least one or more headings. Your keywords or key phrases should be included here.
- It is highly recommended to have no more than 30 headers on a web page. Search engines might see more than 30 as spam.
- Body – (Text Content)
- The body is simply the text content on each of your pages. Each text must be unique. Just as you should not “copy and paste” from other pages or texts on the web, since you could be penalized by search engines (Google) for “duplicate content”.
- Your keywords should be included in both the title, description, headings, and body.
- Images
- Optimize your images for the web: Before you upload and embed your images on a web page or web store (so they aren’t huge and take forever to load in browsers).
- Of course, a full-size banner image will need to have more pixels. However, even these should be no larger than 100KB, and small images should be less than 10KB in size.
- Remember to name the images; Do this with a title tag, alternate tag, and/or description.
- Give images a name, so that it fits with the content of the image and, if possible, use your keywords to name it.
- social media
- Is your brand/domain represented on Social Networks? – The importance and benefits of social networks are enormous. You gain both authority, links, and being in contact with a variety of potential customers – all of these can positively affect your ranking signals for Google and other search engines.
- If you are not represented, start by placing social sharing buttons on the webshop/website, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Create a Facebook business page, Google My Business page, etc.
- Velocity
- Loading speed: is it fast or slow? Fast loading speed is a benefit: not only for the web user, who may not have the same patience to wait for your page to load, but also for Google (and other search engines) who may penalize your site if it is. So. speed not optimized correctly.
- Speed optimization consists of several factors among others: Gzip compression, image caching, web pages, etc., optimized images, optimized HTML, CMS, plugins, JavaScript and code in general.
- Check your website speed using Google Speed Insights – your page should preferably have a score above 70.
- mobile optimized
- Website optimized for mobile devices. More and more people are browsing through mobile phones or iPads; therefore, it is important that your pages are optimized for mobile devices. You can check this on Google Speed Insights.
- Make sure your “buttons” are big enough to push through your phone. If they are too small, they can be difficult to use.
- Sitemap.xml, Robots.txt and canonical
- It is important that you have a Robot.txt and Sitemap.xml file included with your website or web store, this helps search engines and their “Robots” when they crawl and index your website.
- A Sitemap is a map of your website. Be sure to create a link to your Sitemap at the bottom of your page (Footer) on all pages. Note! Some web platforms generate a sitemap automatically, you may want to check if your page has a sitemap by typing your page’s URL followed by Sitmap.xml.
- A Robots.txt file tells search engines which web pages they can index; Is it allowed or not to index? Check if your page has a “Robot.txt” by typing your page URL followed by robot.txt as it should be there.
- Avoid duplicate content and different versions of your site by inserting “canonical tags”. Learn more about using canonical tags in Google.
- When in doubt, contact an SEO company and ask them to look into it for you.
- Links – SEO Off Page
- Do you have incoming links? Inbound links to your domain and individual web pages are probably the most important “weapon” when you have to tell search engines that your domain is more important than the competition’s. When used correctly, the link gives authority to your domain.
- Check your competitor’s link profile and get an idea of ”what it takes” to outperform them in search (in combination with on-page SEO). You can talk to an SEO specialist about this.
- Building a good and solid link profile is something that takes time, and you can make some links yourself, but I recommend that you contact a serious and professional SEO company or SEO specialist and consult them.
Following this checklist will result in a page and domain optimized for good search ranking.