SEO trends are constantly changing, and marketers have to be on their toes. The amount of research and time that goes into perfecting your SEO strategy can be daunting for even the most experienced marketer. Whether you’re getting ready to deploy your website or you want to improve your SERP ranking, this SEO checklist will help you take a step in the right direction.
Server Related
- Monitor your server’s uptime. There are free uptime monitoring tools such as Pingdom. Otherwise, find a host that guarantees 100% uptime, like Sevaa Group.
- Ensure your website has an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate ensures that your users are safe to explore your website and enter personal information.
- Crawl your website using Screaming Frog for broken links and fix any 404 errors. Ensure that there are no orphan pages (pages that are not reachable by any link on your website).
Indexing
- Upload your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Update that sitemap whenever a new page is added.
- Review Google’s cache of your website. Search http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:[your URL here] to see how Google views your website.
- Be sure that your pages are indexed. Simply search for site:[your URL here] to ensure that the total number of returned results aligns with your database.
- Share your content on social media. Use an automatic social media poster like Hootsuite or Raventools to save you time and gather data. This will improve your referral traffic and increase your company’s exposure. Use UTM parameters when you share your content to help Google Analytics organize the sources that supply the most traffic.
- Use structured data in your content to become eligible for rich snippets on search engines.
Content
- Make sure every page on your website has a title. You can check this using Screaming Frog.
- Optimize your title lengths. If you use a plugin like Yoast SEO, finding the right length will be easy. Too long and users might have trouble figuring out what your page is all about. Too short and you may not be taking advantage of long-tail search queries.
- Make sure that the keyword(s) you want to rank for are present in title tags. However, don’t jeopardize the quality of a title just to include a keyword. In addition, make sure your content makes use of the keywords you compiled during the research process.
- Crawl your website to ensure that your pages have meta descriptions where necessary. Eliminate any duplicate meta descriptions. Make sure that your meta descriptions don’t exceed 160 characters to ensure that they show up in rich snippets on SERPs.
- Make sure all pages have an H1 header and get rid of any duplicate H1 tags. H2 tags are equally important but not required for every page. However, H2 headers improve your pages’ readability score. Make sure you’re using H3 and H4 subheadings properly. Use headers to organize your content into a logical hierarchy, not for stylistic purposes. Headers tell search engines which information on your website is relevant to users.
- All of the images on your website should have alt-text. This text is meant to explain the image to visually-impaired users.
Mobile
- Test that your website is optimized for mobile devices using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Your website should be responsive, meaning it should be readable on all devices, this includes images and videos.
Sevaa Group approaches every project with SEO in mind. A beautifully developed website loses traction if it’s not accessible to users. Therefore, we do everything we can to make websites mobile-friendly and optimized for all search engines. Talk to us about working on your next project!
