A Basic SEO Checklist for 2017!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does not have to be complicated. In fact, most of the stuff is simple enough that site owners can do it themselves. A simple SEO checklist every website owner should keep handy should include:

• Fix The On-Site SEO issues such as missing title, description, and image alt tags.
• Constantly make changes to improve Click Through Rate (CTR).
• Write relevant content and put the content above the fold to reduce bounce rate.
• Boost site speed.

 

Fix On-Site SEO Issues

The on-site or ‘technical’ SEO issues include duplicate or missing title tags, description tags, and images with missing alt tags. You can use various tools that are available to audit and detect any problems with your site.

Broken links also impact your site’s SEO negatively. You can use tools to find them and repair them.

It helps if you streamline the pages and content on your website. There is no point in having thousands of pages which can act merely like ‘dead weight’ and hold your site and its pages back from doing well in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you have a lot of “dead weight” pages that don’t provide additional value and are not ranking, you can redirect them permanently to the page you want to rank. 301 redirects are the most common and effective way to redirect traffic from an old URL to a new one without losing authority. If you want to redirect your page temporarily, a 302 redirect is the best choice

Use On-Page SEO Techniques On Your Most Important Web Pages

Since search engines crawl and rank web pages and not websites, if you optimize the most important pages on your website, you will get a boost in search engine traffic. So, use common on-page SEO techniques to optimize your most important pages.

Make sure your target keywords are used in the title and body of the web page. Also, use LSI keywords so that search engine crawlers make the correct associations between the page title and the page content.

Introduce Changes to Improve Click Through Rate (CTR).

Google uses a web page’s Click Through Rate (CTR) as a strong ranking signal and it can mean the difference between your web page showing up as the number six link in the organic search results versus the number one link. There is a huge difference in the amount of traffic your website will get based on whether it shows up at number one or number six.

So, how to get good CTR? Ensure you have the right title and description tag on every web page. This improves the appearance of your web page in the search results and gives a boost to the CTR. How to get to the right words that will pull users? Use Google Adwords ads to find the words and phrases from Adwords ads for your target keyword and then use them in your title and description tags.

You can also do a Google search using the keyword you are targeting and take a careful look at the Adwords ads Google displays. You will do well to use and add those words and phrases to your title and description tags as these Adwords ads are already highly optimized.

Put the content above the fold to reduce bounce rate.

While images are essential to go with blog posts as users are more likely to click on a link with attractive images, you should make sure that the image does not hide the most important part of the story — the actual content. So, you should use in-line images that appear next to the text but not huge images that cover the entire top part of a blog post.

Once the text is visible to the users, it should be meaty enough to ensure the reader sticks around. So, the  use of punchy headlines and short paragraphs is essential. The introduction should be compelling enough to pull the reader into the story.

Put yourself into the reader’s shoes and make sure your website and content are genuinely engaging. When people see that your site is engaging, they’re less inclined to bounce to another site.

Boost site speed

It is well known that Google uses site speed as a ranking signal. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and other tools to find out if there are any problems with your site’s loading speed. If needed, most tools will give you a checklist on what to do to improve site speed. For example optimizing your site’s images which can be done by specifying their sizes in the HTML.

This quick SEO checklist is far from comprehensive but is easy to implement. Every website owner should ensure their site meets the above SEO requirements.

We hope this brief run-down of essential to-dos will be helpful in getting your website performing a bit better.