The SEO Checklist for Your Website
15-05-2017
SEO can be exhilarating and draining at times, but one thing is certain: it is always rewarding. In fact, the top ranking blogs in the world rely on SEO alone to bring in 90% of their traffic. To some digital marketers, this might come off as old news or obvious insight. Yet, when we look at how many webmasters promote their platforms nowadays, SEO certainly looks like it’s being put on the backburner while social promotions and PPC ads are skyrocketing.
Social promotions are nice and they can be essential to your overall marketing success, but SEO is the only true way in which you can ever make an ongoing, semi-passive income. It’s not completely passive because as we all know, maintaining your position on the SERPs requires constant monitoring and updating. Still, it doesn’t require the same kind of effort as trying to earn social mentions. Most followers aren’t going to constantly revisit your old pages and share your content because they’re looking forward to the newest best thing, so your older pages won’t get as much attention through social platforms. SEO, however, draws in new users with almost any optimised page that might be ranking.
Well, how do you start ranking? We’ll show you how with this basic checklist:
Keyword Analysis: Analyse which keywords you want to rank for the most using tools such as the Google Keyword Planner. Here, you’ll find all the key phrases that are relevant to your niche and find out their popularity and competitiveness. Once you’ve chosen your key phrases, nautrally incorporate them into your body content, titles, descriptions, and other pertinent aspects of your website. You can use free keyword density analysis tools to help you strike a healthy balance of keywords.
Title Optimisations: Titles, headlines, and sub-heads all serve critical roles in drawing attention to the rest of your content. The most popular websites use titles that are captivating and relevant to the user. A good rule of thumb is to use confident words in your titles, incorporate numbers whenever possible, and don’t be afraid to personalise your message. Rather than writing, “The SEO Checklist,” for example, we personalised our title by extending it to, “The SEO Checklist for Your Website.” This small edit adds a certain persuasive power to the title, almost guaranteeing more clicks that the original option.
Solid Body Content: If you have a blog on your website, which we highly recommend that you do because it has significant SEO value, be sure to write with the consumer in mind. Many SEO strategists end up writing content that’s geared only towards web crawlers, which might work at first but will ultimately get your website penalised and lower your traffic rates due to having dull or repetitive content. You can also use your articles to build an internal link structure for your website and elevate your chances of getting indexed quicker.
Meta Tags and Descriptions: Meta tags and descriptions have minimal SEO value, but they still hold quite some weight in the grand scheme of things; most notably, they tell your search engine and your visitors what your website is all about. This will potentially improve your click-throughs.
Competitor Research: Make use of your competitors by analysing their SEO strategies and content creation tactics. If you want to steal their traffic, simply do what they’re doing, only three times better. We recommend that you use free SEO analyser tools to help you monitor your competitors.
Backlinks: Backlinks are links of your website on other people’s websites. Each time an authoritative domain gives you website a shout out by linking to you, you earn higher credibility to Google and other search engines. Backlinks are arguably the backbone of SEO. Be careful, though, because not all backlinks are created equal! Only pitch for backlinks from reputable or compliant websites.
Internal Links: You are more in control of this linking strategy because internal links are your shout-outs to your own pages. If we were to link to an old article, like we just did, that is called an internal link. Internal links help web crawlers discover and index your page faster, which boosts its chances of ranking on SERPs.
Page Loading Speed: Your page loading speed matters a lot to search engines because they want to ensure that their top ranking pages give great user experience. Otherwise, the user might just turn to a different search engine! So, to play in your own favour, take away unnecessary redirects, large images, complex codes, or anything else that might slow down your page loading speed to four seconds or more.
Mobile Friendliness: Similar to page loading speed, your mobile friendliness now plays a part in your search rankings. More than a third of all UK Internet users admit that they primarily use their smartphones to go online. With a statistic like that, it’s no wonder why search engines are prioritising mobile-friendly web pages!
Compliancy: Finally, make sure your website plays by the rules. As good as your SEO optimisations might be, it won’t matter if Google penalises your website for violating compliance regulations. Find out what they are here.
Now that you have this basic checklist, it’s time to start optimising your pages and boost your rankings on the top search engines today! To monetise your potential influx of traffic, sign up to become an Affiliate with T DOT UK. We’ll help you set up your first campaign and give you the analytics you need to track and convert your leads!
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