Do you think it's getting out of your hands to manage your blog smoothly? Most SEO checklists you'll find on the internet don't tell that SEO needs continuous efforts. This is the most prominent mistake bloggers make at the beginning, reducing traffic from their blogs. You might be wondering why you cannot gain the right traffic on your blog even after all your efforts. That can be because you may not be able to identify what needs to be done once and what you need to do every time. In this detailed blog, you'll find the complete SEO checklist that you must keep with yourself every time you post a new blog. Let's start!!
Basic SEO Tasks:
Set Up your Google Search Console
After launching their website, website owners first set up their Google search console account. GSC is an excellent platform that allows users to access specific information about their website regarding organic search performance. It provides the users with metrics related to keyword performance, ranking positions, analyzing website errors, submitting sitemaps, etc.
Set Up Your Bing Webmaster Tools
Most website owners overlook this crucial free SEO tool. However, Bing is the second most important search engine that offers excellent search traffic to webmasters. Setting up the free Webmaster tools is a tremendous step toward opening more doors to your website's success.
Set Up your Google Analytics Account
Your SEO Checklist is incomplete without setting up your Google Analytics account. Google Analytics helps website owners get real-time insights about their website performance to track the audience behavior, engagements, conversions, data reports, customizations, etc.
Install Yoast for WordPress Website
If you have a WordPress website, the next step should be to install a high-quality SEO plugin like Yoast. Yoast is considered the number one choice for SEO experts to improve their SEO game. If you are new to SEO, it will be a great way to optimize your content for the search engines.
Create and Submit Sitemap
Creating and submitting sitemaps is an excellent step to tell Google which pages to crawl and index for your website. In short, it tells the search engine crawlers about the essential pages of your website to crawl and index. Also, it allows the search engines to quickly understand your website structure, which ultimately helps improve the overall website ranking.
Create Robots.txt File
Robots.txt is a file used by website owners to tell search engine crawlers which pages to crawl or not. Suppose you don't want the search engine crawlers to crawl specific pages of your website, such as in an e-commerce website. In such situations, creating a Robots.txt file becomes necessary.
Technical SEO Tasks:
Create a Logical Website Structure
One of the essential things your audience notice by visiting your website is whether it is easy to navigate or not. You need to create a logical website structure for your website so that the audience can easily navigate throughout the website. Each sub-page of your website must be interlinked with your main page.
Check for Crawlability
Crawlability is a significant issue faced by websites that reduces the chances of indexing your web pages. If you want search engines bots to index your web pages, you need to make sure the pages are crawlable. For this, you need to peek into the coverage report of Google Search Console for any issues or warnings associated with your Robots.txt file. Read the reasons that block pages from indexing and remove them to help them get indexed.
Remove the 'noindex' Tag.
Many are still not able to find why search engines cannot index their website. They assume that if a webpage is crawlable, it can be easily indexed. However, that doesn't seem to be true always. It won't be indexed if your web pages contain a 'noindex' Robots Meta tag or x-Robots tag. You can easily find this issue in your Coverage Report by Google Search Console. Only then can you get your web pages indexed by the search engines.
Switch to HTTPS
One of the major causes of poor SEO performance of your website is having only an HTTP extension. Users do not trust a website, especially for payments that don't have an HTTPS extension. For this, you require an SSL certification. Search engines only prefer your website when they see that you care for the user experience.
Optimize the Page speed
We all understand how frustrating it gets when the website you open takes too much time to load, making it a crucial step for webmasters to check the page loading speed of a website. When your website loads faster, the bounce rates automatically reduce, and the SEO performance improves. Several page loading checker tools are available on the internet to provide you with all the necessary information associated with your page loading speed and tips to improve it.
Optimize for Mobile Phones
As top searches happen using mobile phones, optimizing your website for the same is essential. There are several things website owners must consider for making their website mobile-friendly. You can use the several free mobile-friendly test tools available to find what needs to be done.
Find Broken Links
Many broken links on your website can negatively impact your SEO performance. Since search engines focus on the user experience of the websites more than anything, fixing broken links becomes a necessity. As a webmaster, your job is to find the broken links and restore them to improve the user experience.
Fix Canonical Issue
Often the same pages appear on your website twice. Under this, one or more URL contains identical content that confuses the search crawler to index a webpage. First, you need to make a site audit and find the number of duplicate pages on your site. Now check for why duplicate pages appear and fix them as soon as possible.
Keyword Research Tasks:
Research the Primary Keyword
Your blog must contain a primary keyword around which your entire blog revolves. Use several keyword planner tools on the internet like Google's Keyword Planner to make a clear keyword strategy.
Analyze Search Intent
Analyzing a keyword and writing content is not enough unless you examine the right search intent behind your User's query. Your User searches on the internet for a reason, and if you fail to find it, you'll lose the game. For this, you'll need to do thorough research on the search engines about the many ways user's search for a particular query.
Research your User's queries
Do you think your blog can rank if you are not providing your Users with their answers? For this, you need to research well on the search engine what precisely the User asks for. Whether they are looking for definitions or merely solutions, then make a content strategy to make your blog rank.
On-page SEO Tasks:
Work on your URLs
URLs play a significant role in optimizing your website for search engines. You need to tell the search engine crawlers what your webpage is about by making your slug short and descriptive. The best way to make this work is by adding your primary keyword to the URL slug to help the searchers understand what exactly the page is about.
Go Creative with your Title tag.
How does your audience reach you if they can't understand what exactly your page is about? The best way to make your target audience aware of the content is by writing a compelling title tag. The best idea to optimize your title tag is to add your primary keyword. However, never force it to your title and incorporate it only when it fits organically to it. Your audience will ultimately click if they find it compelling.
Write a Compelling Meta Description.
Your meta description is the next thing after your meta title that can make the User click on the link. So, make sure to make your meta description as compelling as possible. You don't have to provide your users everything, but make it compelling enough to get more impressions.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is a crucial step to making your website more navigable. Also, it helps make it easier for Google to understand what exactly your page is about. Add internal links to the page only that makes sense. Do not add unnecessary internal links as it will not affect SEO performance.
Off-page SEO Tasks:
Analyze Competitor's Backlink Strategy
Do you think you can make a successful backlink strategy without understanding your competitor's strategy? If yes, then you are wrong. Invest in buying the various backlinks analytics tools to map out a clear plan against your competitors. It will help you gain insights into your competitor's backlink profile to be one step ahead of them.
Transform Unlinked mentions into Links
Many times, high-quality websites mention the names of other brands but do not link with them. The role of a great webmaster is to increase the external links as much as possible. Your job is to reach out to the authors and ask them to make the mentions clickable. There are several tools available on the internet to help you find these unlinked mentions.
Go for Guest Blogging
Among the several ways, guest blogging is another excellent step to improve your link-building process. In this, guest bloggers link to the websites using the author's bio. There are several guest blogging platforms that you can use to publish your blogs to gain higher organic traffic.
Comments: