Basic Website SEO Checklist

Targeting the right keywords.

Keyword research – Look for decent traffic volume but with low competition. Higher the competition the harder it will be to rank for that word.

Long tail keywords – Three / four word phrases that are very specific to your niche.

Focus one keyword per page /article

Understand “user intent”- What the searcher is actually looking for and expecting to find from their search for that keyword.

Keyword Stuffing – Never use this old method of ranking make sure your writing sounds natural.

Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Meta tags are content descriptions that help tell search engines what a web page is about.

Include keywords in title, description, and subheadings.

Write titles and descriptions that grab the attention of visitors so they will click.

Used to tell search engines that a URL is the master copy. These stop problems caused “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.

Allows the search engines to easily index your website.

User experience -Displays when a user enters the wrong address.

Page loading time – Make your pages load faster as page load speed is now a ranking factor.

Use Google’s PageSpeed tools to test the loading speed

Don’t forget to check the speed for both desktop and mobile.

Comply with web standards. Having validation errors in your code can affect your sites performance.

Also make a big impact on user experience.

Choose one and stick with it.

Remember add a canonical tag for the one you are not using as main web address to avoid duplicated content.

Small icon visual representation of your business like a logo.

Displayed next to your site’s title on bookmarks, browser tabs, and history archives.

Ability of website to be fully functional on different browsers available.

Desktop browser compatibility in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Edge.

Mobile browser compatibility in iPhone/iPad and Android.

Inbound links, backlinks or external links, are links that point from one website to another.

Broken links leads to non-existent pages.

Robots.txt file tells search engine which pages they can or can’t request from your website.

Tracks and reports website traffic.

Indicates to search engines what your data means so they can represent it in a more user-friendly way.

Rich snippets – Help make your webpage stand out and look more enticing in the search results.

Google now uses mobile-first indexing. That means they look at your mobile site to determine how to rank in search results wherever you search from.

Responsive website is a must.

Optimise size of images to make sure they loads fast. (Speed is now an important ranking factor)

Add ALT Tags to all images to give an appropriate description of the image to explain what the image is about.

SSL keep internet connection secure.

Google prefers sites with SSL.

Any site without SSL google display a warning “Website not Secure”