Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Listen to this article

SEO Checklist is a search engine optimization guide that will help you improve your site's rankings in the future!

How to Use the SEO Checklist I've seen many structures that don't express SEO continuity. A lot of people will list some very disparate things, like from a technical point of view, in terms of on-page optimization or off-page optimization, this will confuse first-time SEO users and feel that working in SEO is hard.

SEO needs to be adjusted and optimized every week or even every day, just like website advertising, but how to optimize and what aspects to optimize, look at this checklist.

The content of the article:

• SEO Basics Checklist
• List of technical SEO
• Keyword Research Checklist
• On-page SEO checklist
• Link building checklist
• Create a digital growth strategy for your website

SEO Basics Checklist

Once you have created a website, before you start SEO, the first step should be to complete the basic tasks, but these will not directly improve the website's rankings, but will help SEO rankings to a certain extent.

1. Set up Google Search Console

Track keyword performance in website organic search, view ranking keywords, view rankings, find website errors, submit sitemaps.

2. Set up Yandex webmaster tools

Webmaster Tools is Yandex.webmaster.

3. Buy and Set Up Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

By purchasing https://ahrefs.com/, create a project list for Ahrefs and set up Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) is a free tool that can help you improve your website's SEO performance and get more organic search traffic.

Crawl the site and check over 100 SEO parameters, see all your backlinks, see all the keywords you rank for.

4. Set up Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica

• Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to see how many people are visiting your site, where they are coming from and how they are interacting with it.
• Yandex.metrica is also a free tool, especially popular in Russia. Shows us various metrics of user interaction with the site. A very useful tool.

5. Install SEO plugins

If you're using WordPress, you need an SEO plugin to help you optimize things like sitemaps and meta tags, here are a few guidelines (you only need to install one of the suggested ones):

• Yoast SEO.
• Rank Math SEO.
• The SEO Framework.

If you're using a different website platform like Shopify, you most likely don't need an SEO plugin.

6. Create and submit a sitemap

A sitemap tells search engines where to find important content on your site so they can easily crawl and index your pages. Your sitemap can usually be found at one of the following URLs:

• /sitemap.xml
• /sitemap_index.xml
• /sitemap

If you can't find your content in the search, first submit your sitemap to Google and Yandex.

7. Create a Robots.Txt file

Robots.txt is a plain text file that tells search engines which pages they can access and which they can't. It is recommended to prepare a robots.txt file, which is necessary if you need to prevent search engines from crawling pages or sections of your site. For example, if you run an e-commerce store, you probably don't want them to crawl and index your cart page.

Block crawling of the /cart/ folder in the robots.txt file. This can be done by visiting http://yourdomain.com/robots.txt to check if you already have a robots.txt file. If you see a plain text file, you have a file. If you see anything else, do a Google search for "robots.txt generator" and generate it.

List of technical SEO

Many websites tend to block the ranking a website needs to get due to technical issues, so from a technical point of view what principles should we follow.

1. Planning the site structure

It is extremely important that visitors and search engines can easily navigate through our website, so we need to create a logical structure of the site, we can start by drawing a simple mind map.

2. Make sure the page is available for scanning

Google incorrectly indexes non-crawlable content, so it's worth checking the coverage report in Google Search Console for warnings or exceptions related to robots.txt. If you want Google to properly index your page, you should remove the blocking rule from your robots.txt file. This approach is also applicable in Yandex.webmaster - tools - analysis of robots.txt.

3. Make sure your pages are indexed

Indexing and crawling are different things. Just because search engines can crawl a page doesn't mean they can index it. Pages cannot be indexed if they have a "noindex" robots tag or an x-robots tag. If you have pages that should be indexed marked "not indexed", remove the "not indexed" tag.

4. Be sure to use HTTPS

HTTPS is not a factor at all when deciding whether to index a page or not. We use HTTPS as a lightweight ranking factor, and having HTTPS is great for users. This is also possible with a free certificate from Let's Encrypt.

If you don't already have HTTPS, consider switching to it.

In addition to the potential ranking boost, HTTPS will protect your visitors' data. This is especially important if your site has contact forms. If you're asking for a password or billing information, it's not only important, it's absolutely necessary.

5. Make sure the site stays on the same domain

Visitors should not choose multiple paths to your site. This can lead to crawling, indexing, and security issues. To make sure everything works, paste these four URLs into http://httpstatus.io:

• http://yourdomain.com
• http://www.yourdomain.com
• https://yourdomain.com
• https:// www.yourdomain.com

If all goes well, three of them should redirect to a fourth.

If it doesn't, you need to set up a 301 redirect.

If you're using HTTPS (and you should), it's also important that the available version of your website is the secure version. This is https://yourdomain.com or https://www.yourdomain.com.

6. Make sure your site loads quickly

Your website loading speed is critical as it determines if your website has the first step of retention, page speed has been a ranking factor for desktop since 2010 and for mobile since 2018. It's easy to see why. Clicking on a search result and waiting for it to load is unfriendly. That's why as page speed decreases, bounce rates increase.

You can use tools like PageSpeed ​​Insights and GTMetrix to see how fast your web pages are loading.

7. Make sure your pages are optimized for mobile devices

Since 2018, more and more searches are happening on mobile, so having a mobile-optimized website is more important than ever. Test your website with the Google mobile testing tool.

8. Install Image Compression Plugin

Image compression reduces the size of image files and increases page speed, which is very important, since page speed is one of the important ranking factors in Google and Yandex rankings. If you are using WordPress, there are many plugins that can do this. For example, ShortPixel. Compress up to 100 images per month for free.

If you are using a different website platform, please search Google/Yandex for the relevant plugin or use the ShortPixel web app.

9. Fix Broken Links

Broken links can negatively affect the user experience and make it difficult for you to gain "authority" for your site.

Use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to find broken links on your site.

• Scan your site with Site Audit.
• Go to the internal page of the report.
• Look for 404 page errors.

10. Fix duplicate content issue

Duplicate content is complete or near-duplicate content that appears in more than one place on the Internet. This is very common in eCommerce SEO. Due to multi-dimensional navigation, this can lead to hundreds of duplicate content issues.

You can use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to find duplicate content issues for free.

• Scan your site with Site Audit.
• Go to the Duplicate Content report.
• Click on the "Questions" tab.

Keyword Research Checklist

Keywords is the most important part of SEO and the biggest problem. Because many people don't know where to look for these keywords, it's impossible to start your own search engine optimization. The keyword search steps will help you find the content you want to display.

• Find your target keywords.
• Assess the search intent.
• Assess your chances of ranking in Google.
• Explore what people want to know.

Content List

Choosing the right keywords is the first step in the hardest part of your SEO work, but if your content doesn't meet search engine standards, all your efforts will be in vain. Like a child who is about to take the school entrance exam, he usually studies very hard and forgets about eating and sleeping, but suddenly for some reason he did not show up for the school entrance exam. So let's update the content together.

1. Solve user problems.
2. Write a great introduction.
3. Use headings to create a hierarchy.
4. Use images to segment content.
5. Use short sentences and paragraphs.
6. Add a simple directory.

On-page SEO checklist

Page SEO Page SEO is actually part of the content and the process of optimizing it. The main part of all SEO is three parts, namely keywords, content, channels. Among them, keywords are used to gauge user needs, content is designed to generate opinions about your own brand, and channels are used to spread your opinions. Let's see how to optimize the SEO of such a page?

1. Use Short Descriptive URLs

In most cases, the easiest way to create a short, descriptive URL is to set the primary keyword as a URL alias.

2. Create an eye-catching title tag

A general tip is to include the target keyword in the title tag.

3. Write a compelling meta description

• Expand the title.
• Double the focus on the purpose of the search.
• Do not exceed 120 characters.
• Include main keywords (where it makes sense).

4. Link to relevant resources

Link in the page content to authoritative sources, if appropriate.

5. Optimize your images

If you followed the checklist in order, I believe you should have installed an image compression plugin. However, there are a few other image optimizations you should be doing page by page:

Name the image descriptively. Do not use common image filenames such as IMG_568245852.png or Screenshot-2023-09-12. Use a descriptive file name, such as shiba-inu.png or bit-tower.jpg.

Add descriptive alt text. When the page fails to load, the alt text replaces the image on the page. This is very useful for those who use screen readers.

6. Add Internal Links

1. Create a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account.
2. Scan a website with Site Audit.
3. Navigate to the Linking Capabilities report.
4. Set the "Landing Page" filter and add a new page.

Link building checklist

What is link building? Presumably, many people have a big question mark. To explain it this way, we humans exist offline and what we use to exchange is called currency (offline user is called fiat money, online user is called digital currency and user credit is called credit currency) and the link is like to the network.

The currency of a large number of sites owning it will gain a lot of weight on the network in order to get a relatively high ranking in search engines (be it an external or internal link). Well, without link support, your website is just as hard to see for users as it is for a passer-by who no one cares about.

1. Copy a competitor's link

If a page mentions and links to more than one of your competitors, that might be a link worth checking out.

Here's how to find those links:

1. Go to Content Explorer (Content Analysis).
2. Search (“Competitor 1” AND “Competitor 2”) – “your brand”.
3. Click to search.
4. Set "one domain name - one result".

2. Recycle lost links

Backlinks don't always exist. For example, if we look at backlinks with a backlink analysis tool, we find that there have been hundreds of thousands of lost links over the past time period. There are a lot of reasons why this happens, some of them are recoverable, some are not, but we can recycle them.

3. Use unrelated opportunities

Just contact the author and ask him to "make the text clickable". Since they are already familiar with your brand, they are usually more than happy to help you.

But the big question is: how to find these unrelated possibilities?

4. Create a guest blog

Guest blog is where you write and publish articles on another website in your industry. Most people ask guest authors to add a link to their website from the author bio. There are many ways to find guest blogging opportunities, but the easiest way is to find sites that have already written about the topic. Why? Because these sites may be interested in content on similar topics.

Here's how to find these sites:

• Go to Ahrefs Content Explorer (Content Analysis).
• Enter an appropriate topic (for example, “keyword research”).
• Select "In Header" from the dropdown list.
• Click "Search".
• Navigate to the "Websites" option.

Here you should see the top 100 sites with the most organic traffic from pages related to your topic.

5. Advertising resource page

Use Google search operators to find relevant resource pages, for example:

• [subject] intitle:resources inurl:resources.html
• [subject] intitle:links inurl:resources.html
• [subject] inurl:.com/resources
• [subject] inurl:resources intitle:resources

6. Find people who link to less content than you

How to find related articles with lots of backlinks?

Do the following:

1. Go to Content Explorer (Content Analysis).
2. Search topics (for example, long tail keywords).
3. From the drop-down menu, select "In Header".
4. Filter pages with a large number of referring domains (websites with links).

Create a digital growth strategy for your website

Many people say that SEO is a long process of website promotion, but in fact it is not. SEO is just one way of digital marketing. For the current bloody sea of online traffic, we are combining a more comprehensive channel strategy, of which the advertising strategy is the fastest and most important, how to build your digital growth strategy, we are looking down.

1. Optimize your website click-through rate and increase website traffic.

Step 1: Find relevant Google ads for your target keyword or related keywords.
Step 2: Include commonly used words and phrases from these ads in your page title and meta description tags.
Step 3. Get more clicks.

2. Find a Social Event Theme and Explode Social Communication

Step 1: Find the top selling event topics in various media.
Step 2: Use the basic positioning of your own brand to combine events from different media to publish content.
Step 3: Connect audiences across different media to promote your brand content by positioning the target users you need to reach.

3. Use social advertising to accurately target your potential audience

Step 1: Create Creative Brand Content Content
Step 2: Develop content to reach the audience and potential audience of the brand.
Step 3. Set an advertising budget to launch a social advertising promotion mechanism.
Step 4: Optimize and test the intersection of target audience, brand potential audience, and audience with creative interest.

4. Use KOL and AFF to replace resources

Step 1: Find contact information for potential KOL and AFF bloggers and decide if they are related to their own topic or may be related.
Step 2: Exchange resources with KOL and AFF to promote your own brand or theme.
Step 3: Optimize and customize your own brand to achieve the conversion goal of users visiting your online site.
Step 4: Have resources for long-term cooperation and make joint growth at different times.

SEO is a process of continuous optimization, not a one-time thing, so the SEO process must constantly combine theory and practice, and putting all the content in SEO is difficult. Every online website goes through SEO. The main points of successful methods are different, so with the help of the basic design, we can find the method that works best for us.

Reading this article:

• Analysis of reasons and elements of doing SEO
• Website traffic - examples to increase traffic

Thanks for reading: SEO HELPER | NICOLA.TOP