30 SEO Checklist Must Haves
30 Indispensable Ideas for Your SEO Checklist
In today’s digital world, the dominance of search engine optimization has reached a fever pitch. Many corporations now devote entire departments to their SEO, but this kind of investment isn’t necessary when you’re building up your website. Lendvo often works with small business clients who don’t possess the funding necessary to support an entire team of SEO specialists. Luckily, there is a great deal that website owners can now do to elevate their products and services to the next level. In fact, there are many actions that you can take to ameliorate your website’s ranking right now. When you’re developing an SEO checklist for your website, make sure that the following 30 tasks are front and center.
1. Get your company’s list of products and services in order
It may seem like an obvious step, but many companies neglect to think about each and every product they offer. This is a major consideration when it comes to your keywords. You’ll want to get as creative as possible, generating different combinations of words to cover every possible phrase that would describe your business services. If you can, ask co-workers and family members to come up with a list as well. Once you feel as if you’ve exhausted every possibility, then head over to the Google Keyword Planner and look for even more ideas.
2. Optimize your Google keyword strategy
When planning your SEO checklist, it is absolutely imperative for you to find the keywords that boast the best return on investment. If you notice that a certain keyword is receiving a high amount of hits but still retains a low cost per click, then you should definitely add that keyword to the top of your list. Selecting keywords is an ongoing process that will be a part of your business strategy for the foreseeable future, and developing your keyword tactics is one of the best ways to solidify your website’s dominance. When it comes to presenting your loan application to a company like Lendvo, you’ll want your numbers to look as impressive as possible. Choosing effective keywords is definitely one way to get there.
3. Pay attention to your tags
You’ll also want to ensure that your tags are in the correct order. Arrange them with the title first, then the description and finally the keywords. Keeping your title tag tags to between six and nine words is always a good idea. You will have approximately 60 characters total to showcase what your business does.
4. Your description tag is what hooks new customers
The description tag should clock in at around 150 characters and must be persuasive enough to convince potential clients to click. Think about which words will jump out to someone who’s doing a quick search online.
5. Keep your keywords correct
When it comes to your keyword tags, start with the longest words and then end with the shortest. Check to make sure that there are commas between every keyword.
6. Take care with your heading tags
Put your heading tags in order, starting with h1 as the first.
7. Numbers count when it comes to your words
Google’s Panda update really changed the game when it came to website rankings. Nowadays, companies need to ensure that all of their content is of high quality in order to rank high on the search list. This means that you’ll want to keep the word count on each page between 250 and 450 words for optimized search. The copy should look polished and professional. If you or your fellow business owners aren’t writers, then you may want to outsource this task online.
8. Qualify your links and URLs
Again, Google does not look kindly upon websites that try to cut corners when it comes to links. Make sure that your links are all simple and sleek; this goes for your URLs as well. Monitor your outbound and inbound links on a regular basis.
9. If you don’t have a sitemap, then create one immediately!
If you want your website to look professional, then you’ll definitely need to create a sitemap for it. Especially if you’re seeking funding from a company such as Lendvo, it’s ideal to make sure that details such as your sitemap are in order. Building a sitemap is easier than one would think, and there are even some free online courses to help you if you’re not well-versed in this area. When you’ve finished building it, upload it to the website’s root directory. Once you’ve created a Sitemap XML file, then submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.
10. Keep the robots at bay
Your robots.txt file should also be uploaded to your website’s root directory. This file instructs search engines on what they should not be including in their results. Although it’s a relatively simple task, make sure that you’re doing it correctly. Some website owners have unknowingly excluded their whole website from search engines, which is obviously a catastrophic move.
11. Analysis is key
Installing Google Analytics is your best bet when it comes to staying on top of a website’s performance. More importantly than installing Google Analytics, however, is using it on a regular basis. You’ll gain invaluable insight into how potential customers are finding you.
12. Check your server
Another ongoing part of SEO maintenance is making sure that every part of your website is functioning. Click around your website every so often, keeping an eye out for redirects and other types of error messages.
13. Static can be a good thing
When it comes to your website’s ranking, making a few sections static can be quite helpful. By keeping the same content on your homepage, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor. Rewriting your URLs may also be a necessity, depending upon how well your pages are getting indexed.
14. Prioritize text
Although the old adage is that a picture is worth a thousand words, in the world of SEO, a thousand words is worth more than a picture. Keep in mind that text is more helpful to your SEO strategy. When you’re writing text for your website, try to make your business’s offerings stand out from the crowd. What is it that your company does better than any of your competitors?
15. Unique content attracts unique visitors—and new clients
The more original your text sounds, the more likely it will be that you can generate buzz when potential customers click on your pages. Original content will always make your website more intriguing. Again, if you want to make your copy truly shine, outsourcing it to a professional can be an excellent idea. Once you’ve completed your copy, be sure to run it through Copyscape to guarantee that the content is completely original.
16. Make your website accessible to everyone
While you’re taking a look at the images, make sure to write descriptions of the images so that your site will be easy to navigate for those who are visually impaired. Also, adding alt tags is relatively simple and can make it much more convenient for search engines to understand the content on your website.
17. To supercharge your website’s reach, start a blog
Although it can be somewhat of a time commitment, blogging every week can work wonders for your SEO strategy. It casts a positive light on your business achievements and positions you as an expert in your field, all the while driving more traffic to your website. Blogging provides value for customers to keep coming back, and it’s a solid component for any soft sell strategy. Be patient, and you will eventually see the fruits of your labor.
18. Come up with creative content
Aside from blogging, podcasting is always an excellent way to hook new clients. However, it isn’t the only way to punch up your website in order to get more hits. Adding infographics is very in vogue right now, allowing businesses to impart wisdom in a way that’s entertaining and visually appealing.
19. Video is a more powerful tool than ever
Of course, creating a YouTube channel and then embedding it into your website is also a great way to drive traffic to your company’s offerings. With online video exploding at an exponential rate, there’s never been a better time to produce some videos for your site.
20. Include a privacy statement for good measure
These days, consumers want to know exactly what information is being collected whenever they visit a website. Adding a privacy statement to your site gives them the information that they need while making your business look professional.
21. Google Webmaster Guidelines can be an invaluable tool
If you want to avoid any practices that could cause your site to be penalized or removed from Google indexes, then you’ll definitely want to check out this important list of tips. Again, the practices that used to work five years ago may now be considered verboten, so it’s crucial to examine this list for any potential website minefields.
22. Google isn’t the only game in town
Although it’s sometimes easy to forget, Google isn’t the only search engine on the internet. Some consumers prefer to use Bing, so make sure that your site is also optimized for Bing searches. Sign up for Bing’s webmaster tools and familiarize yourself with their best practices.
23. Mobile is becoming even more crucial
With the popularity of smartphones and tablets also booming, it’s always smart to check your website’s performance on mobile. You may be surprised by what you find. Sometimes a font that looks perfect on your laptop will seem completely disjointed on a smartphone. Google’s Mobile Usability Report, which is located in Webmaster Tools, will give you all kinds of feedback about how your site is functioning on mobile. More and more purchases are now happening on mobile, so this component cannot be overlooked. When you’re presenting your website to lenders such as Lendvo, you’ll want your web traffic and sales to be as impressive as possible. Mobile can help you achieve your goals. The Mobile Usability Report truly gets down to the nitty-gritty, offering up invaluable insights about how your website translates to mobile.
24. Keep an eye on your site speed
Nothing turns off potential clients faster than a website that moves at a snail’s pace. Tools like GTMetrix will help you to evaluate this important component.
25. Use an SEO Cloaking Checker
Search engines really don’t react well when cloaking crops up. Cloaking occurs when there are two different versions of a website page—one that the search engine sees and another that potential customers can view. If it seems as though your site has a cloaking issue, huge problems may be on the horizon. There are many free SEO online tools that check for cloaking, so be sure to monitor this on a regular basis.
26. Don’t make your website a maze
For optimal SEO, you want all of your pages to be accessible from your homepage. If you do have pages that are “buried” in your website, requiring visitors to click on several items before finding them, then you will want to simplify your site.
27. Use anchor text effectively
When you use hyperlinks to take site visitors to a different URL, it pays to use one of your most popular keywords in the anchor text.
28. Analyze how your CTA (Call to Action) is performing
Although it’s important for websites to delicately balance hard sell and soft cell, a strong CTA is crucial. Tools such as Crazy Egg will help you to monitor if new customers are getting to the good parts of your website—or abandoning it after the homepage.
29. Flash and JavaScript navigation may be working against you
Always use some manner of text navigation in order to allow search engine spiders to find the important items on your page. Flash may look pretty, but text navigation is still a necessity.
30. The ultimate SEO checklist is always evolving
As you’ve probably surmised by now, the website work of a business owner is never finished. There’s always a new update to research or analytics to run, but this is also part of what makes the process interesting and enjoyable. When you do your own SEO, you’re able to better familiarize yourself with your customers’ unique preferences. This is an extraordinary resource that can affect all areas of your business, and it’s another reason why bootstrapping can be good when you’re developing your online presence. Companies like Lendvo look for initiative and innovation, which is why many start-ups who work with Lendvo choose to do their own SEO.
Keyword spelling is also hugely important. So many people lose out by having incorrect spellings. Even spellcheck won’t catch everything. Your words may be spelled correct, grammatically speaking, but they may not be the spelling you were aiming for.
I am just now really delving into SEO and how it works. I wish I had seen this article when I previously had a blog. It is amazing how important SEO is when it comes to getting traffic driven to your site. This article was very helpful particularly in learning about the word count between 250-450 words. It may just be because I am a newbie at this, but I had no idea that word count (especially limiting words) was so crucial.
Blogging is an indispensable tool to expand your reach and as you pointed out, it requires patience and consistency!
Thanks for this list! I knew some of the basics, like the stuff about tags, but I didn’t know that I should be splitting up my larger articles into shorter pages. I thought people preferred everything on one page and wasn’t thinking about what Google likes.
This article is a nice compilation of both big picture imperatives and detail orientation.
Tip number 13 is something that I have not heard before. Thanks for sharing this tip, as it encourages me to be okay with some of my content that has more of a static feel to it.
Nice work, this article could literally be used by managers and administrators as a step-by-step guide to generating web exposure for their organization. It brings to light the mythical world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing and turns it into something practical, something that could be implemented with existing staff and a tight budget. It also does a good job of referencing the different optimization tools like Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. Really helpful resource.
The introduction lays out the importance of the SEO process. Essentially, with the way American culture is heading, computers will continue to dominate in every respect. With that overall domination, comes a tool like search engine optimization. I enjoyed the factoid regarding the dedication of entire departments to creating the best SEO they can.
This article reads easily, and really takes advantage of the list format. Because it targets an audience that likely has never been exposed to SEO before, this article will probably be treated as gospel. And rightfully so. This type of tool is a game changer, and this article is an excellent guide.
Likewise, this article provides some helpful tips for keeping your site user-friendly. This is extremely helpful because as we move more into the future, people are going to want things faster and easier. Finally, the author understands just how finitely useful this article can be. Because a list like this may always be changing, it’s hard to pinpoint what may be useful. Therefore, the article’s focus on tips and tricks for small business owners to utilize is essential to contribute to the effectiveness of it.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is what it says it is, but it won’t work for you unless you understand it. Even companies with an in-house IT department aren’t necessarily better at SEO. Do some research to learn how much you still have to learn. There are many pieces to a successful SEO strategy, and often a checklist is a good starting point. If at some point you find the process too complex, consider hiring an outside firm, like Lendvo, to elevate your products to the next level.
Keywords and tags are critical to successful SEO. Keywords should be more than a list of products or services. Imagine how a consumer might type in a search for your type of company. You may be a plumber, but a potential customer might be searching for “leak repair.” Selecting and revising keywords will continue to be an important part of any SEO plan. Tags are the first line of attack to grab the attention of the consumer. First comes the title tag, about 60 characters that describe what you do. Next comes the description tag, about 150 characters that creates interest in the person doing a search .
I’m really glad this #24 is on this list. Yes, the media toolbox for websites keeps expanding with new and shiny ways to connect, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to cram ALL of them into a single page. I’m getting sick and tired of connecting to websites only to wait for ten minutes while the page loads a million photos, videos, and ads. I’ve even started closing the tab after 15 seconds and mentally marked that site as not worth visiting. I loved checking for sports news and scores on ESPN’s website before they upgraded, now I never visit it because it takes too long to load.
Not all of us spend thousands of dollars each year to buy the newest phone or laptop, either, so people need to keep that in mind too when they’re designing a website.
Most of this was easy to understand, and maybe digging into webmaster guides would help, but there were a few that confused me.
#8- What does “cut corners when it comes to links” mean? What is the wrong way to create a link?
#20- I’ve never really paid attention to privacy statements. What needs to go into one? What kind of legal protection does it offer the site?
#27- Why does it help SEO to have a keyword in the link text? Does that get marked by a search engine?
Most business owners, at least starting out, don’t have a lot of spare cash on hand. That’s what makes this checklist so useful. Most of these aren’t things that require a lot of cash or SEO knowledge.
Items 7 and 15 break that trend. Paying a good copywriter on a regular basis for polished content isn’t exactly cheap, especially when getting blog posts up every week (or even more often).
Not that cheap writing is a good thing. More than a few cheap content mills don’t exactly give quality results, just keyword stuffed gibberish that doesn’t appear to be written by someone who speaks English.
Is there an alternative to these options?
Keywords, rich content, links. Those remain the best way to produce organic SEO. It would even be my argument that content has taken on an even greater importance in the digital landscape. Ever since Google introduced the Answer Box in a recent update, those trying to get listed there are working harder to define themselves as experts in their field by producing more content. I agree that keywords are still a big part of the process that determines ranking, but the overall importance of those seems to have paled in comparison to some of the other things you mentioned. And why wouldn’t it? It isn’t hard to see where the presence of keywords would be a sketchy and ineffective way to determine ranking. The biggest thing mentioned in this article and the one that is most often overlooked is the sitemap. Sitemaps are crucial and there is really no excuse to avoid creating one. If a business is using the WordPress platform there are plugins that will create a sitemap with one click. Static content on the homepage is another thing many people miss. Doing this kind of thing falls under the category of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If you have worked hard to get a high ranking from the homepage, leave it alone. The biggest SEO killer right now seems to be websites that are not responsive to mobile platforms. If your website isn’t friendly with an Android phone or an iPad then it probably isn’t going to rank very high. SEO is something that can be done effectively by anyone with a little bit of training, but choosing to have a professional attend to it might be money well spent if it produces quality, organic results.
I enjoyed the article and all the details that people tend to not think about when they are writing for the internet. You get so involved in creating something engaging that will actually get people stop to and read article that you forget about the other import parts of getting your work out there. You don’t always remember to include keywords that are searchable or to check and make sure your links work so great reminders on easy things to forget. #10 is not something I’ve ever dealt with before and I’m going to have to do more research on robots.
Great checklist and I can think of a ton of people that would benefit from the tips. I can never stress enough to website owners how important Google keywords are. I’ve always loved the Google keyword feature and anyone with a website needs to pay attention to how these can work for you. Watching what words are getting clicks it so important when figuring what is going to bring in views and eventually revenue. Keyword tactics are vital to business strategies.
Interesting article with quite a few things I’ve never heard before like Google Panda. Friends have said they can’t find my articles so I’ve been wondering how to improve the search. I know about website rankings and have tried a few things to get my articles so they rank high but I’ll have to check out Google Panda and see if it will help more. I do try to keep my articles to the 250 to 450 word length to make them easy to search and I didn’t realize you could outsource the writing part, not that I would, I like to do that myself. I have also never heard of SEO cloaking or that you need a checker for that, need to sign up for the checker to see what my website is doing.
I just did a key word search on tools to improve your website and found this article on this company Lendvo’s site, Lendvo. I didn’t realize what the company was until I kept seeing the phrase seeking funding from Lendvo and noticed that it is apparently important to create sitemaps and optimize your keyword strategy to get money from them. It then dawned on me there was a site that loaned you funding for domain names and other website related needs, how awesome is that! Good thing I stumbled across the article, great information for some future website improvements.
As a website owner attempting to handle my own SEO, I’ve searched the Internet over for the information that I just found here inside of this article. Thank you very much for these awesome tips. Some of the information wasn’t new to me, but some of it is new. I was missing out and didn’t even realize it until reading this article. This is a thorough list that outlines just about everything that I need to know in an easy-to-read fashion. Since SEO can sometimes be complicated, I appreciate the fact that this is written for the average individual to understand.
Great information, but I would also like to warn against a common mistake that many website owners make: website spelling. It is fun to have a name like Tonz o’ Goodz, but it is also a name that is likely to cause confusion with customers, not to mention direct them to a website other than your own because they’ve misspelled it. I made this very same mistake when I first created my website. It is great to have a fun name, but keep it away from your website and avoid this headache. Use proper spellings on your website!
Great article for anyone that has interest in SEO and website optimization. In fact, it is one of the most thoroughly written, easy-to-understand pieces I’ve found. For the average individual, the terminology associated with SEO is in itself confusing. We all know that SEO is oftentimes a headache. With the information that I’ve read here, I now clearly understand things that I did not before. It seems that many of the articles and blogs I encounter are written for those who have plenty of training and experience, which I do not. I am certain that I am now able to go back and revamp my websites SEO and gain better results in the process. I thank you for this great information!
I hope that everyone will use these tips because they are all so awesome, but number 29 is my favorite and one that I truly hope web owners will use. No one uses flash any more. It is outdated and played out, so if you are still using it, stop now! You are only hurting yourself and your business by continuing to use it as there are now bigger and better things that you can use instead. I agree that you do need text navigation in place, and that you need to look somewhere besides Flash to get it.
Tip number 26 is vital to your success and sadly, many website designers are not using this tip. Your homepage should be the main attraction of your website. It should entice visitors to want to look at the other pages of your site and the links should certainly be there so they can just click and get what they want to see. It is so easy to create a homepage that has links to all of the other pages of your website, so I highly urge everyone with a website, for SEO purposes, to do just that.
Well-written article with some very nice tips inside for a newbie to the world of SEO. I have yet to start on my website as I wanted to learn as much as possible before I began. Although I had heard some about SEO, I was clueless about what SEO actually was before this article. While I’ve still got a lot to learn, this information has certainly helped me immensely. Some of the information I’ve read elsewhere, but I’ve discovered new information as well. I want to do the very best that I can at my website and now I can!
It has come to the point where I don’t even look at the way my website pages look on a laptop or desktop computer until I am satisfied with how they look and operate on a mobile device. Making sure your website is mobile-ready is a step that is so important but is often overlooked by small business owners. Your tips relating to making your site mobile friendly are great.
This article is thorough enough for any website owner to use as a starting checklist to evaluate or build out their website. With just a little additional research on specific tips that I am slightly less familiar with, I feel like I will be able to make some real improvements to my website to enhance its search engine rankings. I thank you for taking the time to create this comprehensive list.
Prior to the Internet, your marketing strategy included television, print, and radio advertising. Now, it’s all about SEO. If you haven’t given any thought to how quickly your website is found among your competitors, you are not doing your business any favors. Hire someone to redo your website by employing many of the SEO strategies listed in this article. If you have a blog, use specific keywords to make sure your posts are found. This is crucial. Employ these strategies and your business will profit.
SEO sounds difficult. It sounds confusing. Without it, however, your business will quickly be overtaken by the competition. Every large business that has succeeded has employed SEO in their marketing strategy. The tips in this article are not just ideas. They are tried and true methods of generating more visits to your website, more customers for your business, and more money in your pockets. A lot of people complain that they’ve reached a dead-end with their business, but before you give up, ask yourself this next question. Have you used any of these marketing strategies in your own?
Website content is so valuable in both copywriting, to convey your message and for SEO optimization. Your checklist highlights the importance of keeping keyword optimization and creativity as equal partners when drafting website content. Thanks for the excellent tips.
It wasn’t until I was into my business for more than 10 years before I learned about SEO. For 10 years or more, I had struggled in trying to gain new business. When I learned about SEO, I realized I was doing just about everything wrong. I quickly hired a company that specialized in SEO and gave my business a complete overhaul. After employing many of the techniques described in this article, my business doubled in size within the first year. Now, over 5 years later, my business is booming. If you have yet to use any of these techniques mentioned in the article, do yourself a favor and get started. You won’t believe what they will do.
Thank you for this thorough articles on SEO tactics for my website. It is so easy to forget how important it is to review and work the SEO website basics, such as keywords and header tags. I was actually not aware of the page word count demands brought on by Google Panda updates. This article gave me a lot of good tips to work on my website.
I appreciate your inclusion of the need to tag images with descriptions that search engines can find. This one strategy alone has helped improve a number of my website page rankings on the search engines.
This article included a lot of tips that I had never thought about to keep my website search engine optimized. For example, I have never checked my site for potential cloaking issues and was surprised to find duplicate versions of some of my pages. After reading this article, I also sat down and navigated my website as though I was a new visitor for perhaps the first time since I created my site originally. As a result, I changed some things and think it is much more user-friendly now.
This checklist was great! There are so many things it mentions that I haven’t verified on my website in a long time. I intend to set up a quarterly tickler to run through this checklist and confirm my website is still doing well. Thanks for the well thought out article.
Thank you for including compliance issues into your checklist, such as privacy policies. Compliance is one area that can be easily overlooked. I also took another look at the Google and Bing webmaster guidelines after reading this article and wow, have they changed! I appreciate the reminder as it is so important to include tactics that the search engines find important.