Basic Website SEO is the first step to getting your website to show in search engine organic results pages.
But what on earth is SEO? Or, for the non-acronym lovers out there, what is search engine optimisation? It is the way you can help increase traffic from search engines organically. What do we mean by organic traffic? Visitors find your website after finding you on a search engine’s results page (SERP) and not through paid ads.
Ready to dive in?
Start Your Free Trial Today
Search engines use algorithms to rank your website and web pages. With the ever-changing landscape of search engine algorithms and especially Google algorithms, SEO can be tricky but not impossible!
Website launch is a critical time for business, and you can easily miss out on important steps that can help your Search Engine Optimisation SEO.
Configure your website for optimal performance and great success.
Basic Website SEO Checklist
Getting shown on search engine results page through organic methods.

Keywords
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.

Titles & Meta Data
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.

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

SiteMap
Allows the search engines to easily index your website.

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

Check Site Speed
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.

Validate Code and CSS
Comply with web standards. Having validation errors in your code can affect your sites performance.
Also make a big impact on user experience.

www or non-www
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.

Favicon
Small icon visual representation of your business like a logo.
Displayed next to your site’s title on bookmarks, browser tabs, and history archives.

Browser Compatibility
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.

Links & Broken Links
Inbound links, backlinks or external links, are links that point from one website to another.
Broken links leads to non-existent pages.

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

Google Analytics
Tracks and reports website traffic.

Schema Mark Up
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.

Mobile Friendly
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 Images and Add ALT Tags
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 Certificate
SSL keep internet connection secure.
Google prefers sites with SSL.
Any site without SSL google display a warning “Website not Secure”