This is the ultimate SEO checklist and if you implement every item of this list you can get enough organic traffic to your website to generate revenue.
When you implement the SEO checklist pay attention to every point of the list. Every small point will affect the overall SEO score on your page.
SEO Basics
- Setup GSC and Bing Web Master Tool
- Setup Google Analytics
- Install and configure WordPress SEO plug-in
- Generate Sitemap and submit to search engine
- Generate Robots.txt file
- Check for Google penalties
- Monitor indexing of your pages
Keyword Research
- Identify your competitors
- Do keyword gap analyses
- Find primary keyword first then find your secondary keywords
- Find LSI keywords
- Find long-tail keywords
- Find question keywords
- Analyze the search intent of the page
- Identify the keyword difficulty and search volume
Technical SEO
1 Add your site to Google Search Console
This first thing you have to do if you have not done it already. Without having Google Search Console you can not get an idea of how Google evaluates your site and what are the strengths and weaknesses of your site.
Google search console shows you lots of information related to SEO of your site.
Sign in to your Google account and go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
Then Click “Add a property.”
Choose “Website” from the drop-down menu and enter the URL of your site
Click “Continue.”and select the verification methods to verify the ownership of the site.
You can use the HTML file upload verification method.
2 Setup Google Analytic to access the reports
Google Analytics is a powerful tool and you can use this tool to improve the performance of the SEO.
How to set up
- Visit https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/ and log in with your Google account. If you do not have any google account you can create a new one
- Then fill the form you can see inside the analytic page. Here you can enter basic details and URL of the website
- Once you fill the form and hit the submit button you will be directed to the tracking code page
- Now you copy the tracking code and install it on your website
You can read this guide for setting up your Google Analytics account.
3 Check your site has Google penalties
How do you check that your site has got Google penalties?
There are several ways you can use to check for penalties
You can use the Webmaster tool
Using Google analytic
https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/google-penalty-checker/
If you have penalties you have different ways to remove these penalties.
Technical SEO
4 Only one URL for your website
5 SEO friendly URL – In a WordPress site correct permalink structure.
6 Check robot.txt file for crawling your website properly
7 Look for index coverage report in your Google Search Console
8 Validate your sitemap.xml and submit to Google.
9 Check your site structure so that you can reach any page in 3 clicks.
10 Create breadcrumb menu structure
Lots of people ignore breadcrumbs but this is very easy to implement if your website is running on WordPress. This is a navigational element of your website.
Advantage of having breadcrumbs
Easy navigation for user and user can easily go back to where he came from, good for mobile search
Improve the User Experience
11 Define your canonical URL correctly
12 use hreflang tags if you use more than one language
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14 Improve the loading speed of your site
There are several things you can do and we have an in -depth guide to improve the loading speed of a WP driven website.
On Page SEO Checklist
On Page SEO is all about dealing with your page content to give a better user experience to users and arrange your content so that search engines can crawl your page and index the content.
Common on page SEO optimization technique includes optimizing title tags, contents, internal links and outbound links.
Now we will see the important factors related to on page SEO.
15 Optimize the title
Use keyword closer to the beginning of the title tag and use modifies
16 Optimize the meta description
Write unique description about the article and include your keyword this will help user identity what is inside in your page when they see your page on SERP
17 Use H1 with seed keyword
This is the main title of the webpage. You can write simple title including the keyphase
18 Use H2 H3 H4 H5 properly to organize your content
We have the contents block in a page that is why we are using H1, H2, H3 tags in our page. What is important to google is what’s inside those tags so that google can understand the content of the page and index them for keywords
You can use the secondary keywords for the contents of these blocks. You can refer to our guideline for keyword research and content development.
19 Target keyword should be inside the first paragraph
20 When developing content focus on EAT
21 Add List and Table to your contents
22 Improve UI/UX of your content
23 Internal linking structures
24 Create good outbound links in your page
25 Add images to your content and optimize them.
Please keep in mind that image optimization (or Image SEO) is not only adding keywords to the ALT attribute of the image. You can do the following things for perfect image optimization.
– Name you image file properly
Google can get a clue about the content of the page. Although now Google’s Artificial Intelligence technology can identify the image, people still use filename with the keyword.
– Add your keyword to ALT tag and description
This describes the image and visually impared people can use this to identify the image. Search engines also can use it to read about the image.
– Select one of the three file types GIF, JPEG or PNG
– Use correct size (width and height) for your image
– Decrease the file size of the image to improve the load time of the web
– You can use the SVG files (Vector graphics ) whenever possible
– Use multiple images for responsive pages using srcset
– Implement lazy loading for images
– Use CDN for faster performance
– Use browser caching to save images in your local computer and when you visit the page the second time you can load the page very fast.
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You can read our guide for image optimization to study in details to optimize images
1 Include your target keyword in title tag
– Using modifiers like “best”, “guide”, “checklist”, “fast” and “review” can help you
2 Include your target keyword in first 100 words in your content
3 Include your target keyword in H2 tag at least one time
4 You can use your target keyword in your content 6 times
5 use external links to relevant sources
Meta Tags
We have the contents block in a page that is why we are using H1, H2, H3 tags in our page. What is important to google is what’s inside those tags so that google can understand the content of the page and index them for keywords (Kyle Roofs)
Do not focus on keyword ranking instead you can focus page performance. At the end of the day you need to monitor how many uses come to your web page.
So there is no point to look at one keyword and go after it. In Google Search console you can see how many keywords you have for that ranked page and you can check the number of impressions of your web page for a particular keyphrase.
Build links directly to your target page