Launching a New Website? Your SEO Checklist 2018

SEO Checklist

It is hard to explain how important SEO is for a Business.

It is a complicated field and to be perfect in doing that; you need to handle a lot of things.

Form building a website to ranking them in Google, there are different techniques to follow.

If you’re looking for some effective strategies that you can use on your website today, Check the list below and start working on it.

SEO Checklist

About Us Page 

How you appear to visitors; helps to develop business-customer relationships by having an About Us page

Anchor text 

Clickable words used to link one web page to another; make sure that the link points to a page that uses the best keyword that fits the subject

Backlinks 

Links from other sites that are directed to your site. Building Quality Backlinks to your site can get you to top of Google

Blog title 

If you don’t have a catchy, creative blog post title, you’re missing out. This is key to capturing drawing customer’s attention.

Competitor backlink profile analysis 

Link-building your site should be efficient and original so you should use information from backlink analysis. Use ahrefs for link analysis

Contact us page

If you lack a contact page, your website will lack legitimacy. The page should feature the name, phone number, and address of office locations.

Content and length

Your content should be useful, unique and practical. It is important that articles are at least 1800 words as well as being relevant and high quality if you want high rankings.

Create relevant profiles 

Connect through creating a profile/page on the major networks i.e. Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitter.

Domain age 

This is an indicator to Google that your business is worthy.  

Focus keyword

Focus keyword is a tool that is built into WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to make sure that your content and your SEO information is targeting the right audience.

Follow influencers & relevant social media accounts

Connecting with influencers creates an avenue allowing for better content, reputation, and collaboration as your content will be able to reach a wider audience.

Good grammar, spelling and readability

Good content consists of clear and concise sentences and only requires simple spell checks.

Google Analytics

Analytics gives you insight into user behaviour, which can help you to understand your marketing better.

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster Tools (GW) 

Webmaster tool is used to monitor your website’s performance. This is where you should submit your sitemaps in order for Google to Index your site easily

Webmaster Tools

H Tags

Markup your content. Put the title in an <h1> tag and your subheadings in <h2> tags.

High website page count 

Make sure that your site has no less than 6 pages as a number of pages reflects the quality of your website.  

Alt Tags for Images

Target keyword in the image file name.

Alt tags

Image optimization

It’s a good idea to use the image alt tag so that search engines can see images.  

Read More: Video Marketing Tips for 2018

Image title tags

complementing text that appears as your mouse hovers over an image

Internal linking structure 

choosing a good internal linking structure by placing your pages in order of importance shows Google that your website is high quality.

Keyword list

A list of keywords is essential to obtain search volume. Google Keyword Planner in Adwords can help you build a list of the right keywords.

Keywords in URL

Include target keyword in URL to gain search engine rankings

Links to relevant resources

By linking to high-quality related domains, the trust and quality of your site will increase.

Long Tail Keywords

Including Longtail Keywords Will boost your traffic and increases the visibility of the website.

Meta descriptions 

Your meta description should be limited to 155 characters as lengthy descriptions can decrease search click-through rates.

Meta Description

Mobile-friendly 

Your site should be mobile-friendly as Google rolled out Mobile First Index.

Narrow down your keyword list 

Use data from search volume to cut down your keyword list. Google Keyword Planner is the best tool to get Search volumes.

Page load speed

Ensure that your site page speed is under 2 seconds. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix

Gtmetrix

Read More: Speed Up Your Websites With These Tricks For Better Brand Promotion

Permalinks 

A white hat SEO strategy that is used to indicate to Google that your page is of high quality and increase traffic.

Privacy policy and terms of service page

These two pages are needed for search engines to take your site seriously.

Related searches

Include variously related searches as keywords.

Responsive Site Design 

Use responsive design for optimized user experience across all devices.

Robots.txt

In the root of your domain, place a robots.txt file to tell Google you are friendly to search engines.

Semantics

As Google has started using artificial intelligence to understand searches, quality content becomes even more important.

Social monitoring

This involves collection and management of topic-specific social content. It helps you choose social channels to start networking.

Short URL

Use the target keyword in your URL and keep your URL short.

Site structure

Creating a good site structure is a balancing act as it enables you to spread the links on your site and helps Google to crawl easily.

Read More: How Hosting Affects SEO

Sitemap XML 

A list of URLs for the website that allows search engine crawlers to index the site  

Social shares

Manually reaching out through social media increases trust through brand citations.

Target keywords 

There are two types of keywords you can target depending on your aims. Trending keywords are beneficial for large numbers of traffic while evergreen keywords are important for lead generation.

Page title

You should limit the title tag to 50-60 characters and have the primary keyword in the page title.  

Trends

By staying up to date with related trends, it’ll be easier to find fresh ideas for content and understand your market better. Google Trends is a good tool to use to find trends.

User-Friendly Website

If searchers can find easily find the information they are looking for, your site will rank higher.

User reviews 

Fresh user-generated content affects buying decisions as consumers trust personal recommendations.

Vary the medium

Consider making your content available in audio, pdf, video, etc.

Website Audit

SEO audit helps you to improve your SEO campaign. You can use Ahrefs or SEMRush for website auditing. It is a process that involves site inspection followed by recommendations of what needs to be fixed.

WP SEO plugin 

Install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to optimize your website to its full potential.

yoastseo

That’s it! If you’ve checked off the above steps, you have now almost fully optimised your Website for Search Engines.

Now Google will know exactly what search terms your Website should come up for.

Plus, you have eliminated most of the errors that could cause problems for search bots to index your site.

Keep in mind that always optimise your websites for Users while keeping Search Engines in mind.

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