In order for your website to be found by potential customers, it must be optimized to its full extent. This optimization makes it much easier for search engines to read your site and understand what is about.
While there are a multitude of elements that contribute to a website’s overall SEO, the on-page SEO checklist below will get you started.
- Each page that you want indexed has at least 400 words of content.
- The keyword phrase you are targeting is included in the title tag of the page, the body content (at least twice), the H1 tag, and in the meta description.
- Your content is high quality. This means at least grammatically correct, no spelling errors, and structured correctly.
- You include media in the content – images, videos, etc. Be sure to add your keyword phrase to the title tag of all images.
- Include the proper Schema mark-up for relevant pages.
- Include the ability to share the page or blog post on relevant social media channels.
- Inter-link from other pages to the page you are currently developing.
- Use SEO friendly permalink URLs. (i.e. example.com/your-keyword)
- Link out to other pages that are relevant to what you are writing about and give the reader a more in-depth answer.
- Make sure your site loads in under 3 seconds. Load speed can be decreased by using a CDN, compressing images, and switching to a dedicated server.
- Include your keyword phrase in any subheadings you use in the body of your content (H2, H3, H4 tags).
- Use dashes instead of underscores in all URLs.
- Include a sitemap so that your website can be easily navigable by search engines.
- Create a robots.txt file. More information about creating a robots.txt file can be found here.
- Include the Google Analytics script in the header of your site to track.
- Include a relevant privacy disclosure and terms of service agreement page on your website.
- Submit your website to Google Webmaster Tools.
