By Robert Williams
Special to YNOT
With SEO tracks and tactics and practices developing by the day, companies do not want to take a chance and miss an efficient trick. Irrespective of whether your firm is only beginning to use SEO or is improving on its SEO skills, it’s helpful to create a checklist to know that you’ve done it all.
To help your SEO game become stronger, we have created a checklist of SEO activities that includes several factors — things like server setup, site architecture, factors affecting technical content and mobile factors. This will help you catch what you’ve missed and feel confident about what you haven’t.
Setting Up Your Server
The procedure of creating your own website can prove to be tiresome and complex. You need to make sure that all your hosting and server issues are resolved. Following is a list of things that need to be taken care of while doing so:
1. The Site Uptime Must Be Monitored
In order to monitor your site uptime, you can use one of the tools available for free on the internet like Uptime Robot or Pingdom. These tools will help you verify and check how reasonable your website’s uptime is. You can also search for some web host guarantees for uptime which will compensate if the guarantees are damaged.
2. Start Using HTTPS
An important part of SEO is the change to HTTPS or setting up HTTPS. The earlier your company does this, the better your migration is going to be. Ensure that you verify that HTTP leads towards HTTPS instead of the 404 error page. Also, try running an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) test to check the security.
3. Use The Single URL Kind Of Format
Make sure that the non-www or www URL is utilized exclusively. Also ensure the alternative redirects correctly.
4. Keep A Check On Your IP Neighbors
Notice if your website’s IP neighbors show any indication of a web spam. If so, then the filters used by Google may show greater sensitivity towards your website. Use a tool suitable for this purpose to identify spam in your neighbor’s website. Remember that we mean outright spam and not just poor content quality.
5. DNS Issues Must Be Resolved
In order to resolve issues related DNS, you can search for a tool online like the Pingdom. Discuss these issues with the web host.
6. Look For Errors In The Server
Use tools like the Screaming Frog to search for server errors. While examining, you must not find redirects of the 301 and 302 type. These indicate that your URL redirects. If you find any of these, it is best to update them and remove links to service error pages.
Indexing
Now, on to indexing…
1. Use Sitemaps Efficiently
Ensure that your SEO practice includes placing an XML sitemap, which also has to be uploaded to Google’s Search Console as well as to Bing’s Webmaster Tools. When adding a webpage, you should also update the sitemap accordingly. You can also use W3C’s validator to check that code validates effectively.
2. Google Cache
It is extremely easy and useful to check Google’s cache to check for any missing data from your website’s page templates.
3. Pages That Are Indexed
To check if your pages are indexed, google site:example.com. The numbers should match with your database. In the case that they are fewer, you know that your pages aren’t being indexed. If they are higher, you’ll know duplication is taking place.
4. Postings On Social Media
Use tools like auto publishers on WordPress to automatically publish your content on social media. Publishing data on a social network increases your website’s exposure, and it will do better.
Content
Now on to content, which is what most people think of when they are thinking about optimizing SEO.
1. Title Tags
This is the most important content-based aspect of your website. It is necessary for your SEO team to ensure that your website isn’t missing any title tags.
2. Length Of The Title
Learn to optimize the length of your page. Use tools like Screaming Frog to do so and find out at what character/word length does your title get cut. It isn’t mandatory to write a short title to fit in this, but you must insure all information needed fits below this cut-off.
3. Meta Description
Create separate meta descriptions for all your web pages and crawl the entire to the site to find any missing meta descriptions. This is done because Google may use this description to showcase information about your website in their search engine result page.
4. Keywords
You must apply a few keywords to your content. It is a must, however, to avoid stuffing your content with too many keywords as this is flagged by Google’s latest algorithm.
Architecture Of Your Website
Try including site architecture as soon as possible and incorporate it efficiently.
1. Links To Your Logo
It is important that the logo at the top of your page leads viewers to the home page immediately. A link to the homepage for navigation is a must.
2. External Links
Links that have been provided to navigate to some external sites or those which are provided on each webpage are usually interpreted by Google as spam. These aren’t violations, however Google perceives them as a poor quality directory.
3. Link Depth
Pages that are necessary and showcase lots of important keywords should be no more than two levels deep. For better results, viewers should be able to access these pages easily from the home page of the website. Use crawl depth tools to find out about the depth of few of your important links.
4. Hierarchy
Like we discussed before, your pages should be visible from the home page — but this doesn’t mean your website doesn’t require a hierarchical structure. Make all the main categories and sections available on the homepage and create subcategories within.
Mobile
With the increasein mobile usage over the last decade, it is important to design your mobile site accurately as well. You must ensure that your mobile site is extremely user-friendly and has responsive images, as well as responsive navigation.
After analyzing the entire list, it is important for your SEO team to understand that if they ignore even one of the above points, it will spoil your rankings.
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Robert Williams is a serial entrepreneur, digital marketing specialist and co-founder of Adult SEO.
Image via luisosorio.
