SEO Checklist: 6 Mistakes You Shouldn’t Afford to Make

Search Engine Optimization is the trick to serve on your content to make Google likely to include your blog post as one among the top results whenever the audience searches for the keyword you have ranked for. It has become a must for every website and is no longer an optional requirement.

Considering all the factors that make up a good website, SEO is given high importance among all the digital marketing plans. From start-ups to small companies to non-profits or even large brands, a lot of website owners find it difficult to self-implement SEO or are stretched in website budget. Since missing out such an important aspect of your business may cost you more, here is a checklist to help you sort out this problem.

Checklist for SEO

Here are a few things that must be adhered to make your website search engine optimized:

The basic SEO checklist

• Setup Google Search Console: a powerful tool that helps you track your website performance in search. It helps you see the keywords for which your website ranks.
• Install Google Analytics: a free tool from Google that lets you analyze the number of people visiting and interacting with your site.
• Yoast SEO for WordPress users: the most popular SEO plugin that makes it easy to optimize your WordPress site for search engines.
• Install Bing Webmaster: the tool provides additional site reports and testing opportunities and helps obtain data that Google has missed.
• Create a Site Map: a sitemap tells Google and other search engines about the structure of the site. Web crawlers like Googlebot review this file to efficiently crawl your site.

On page SEO checklist

• Title Tags: an HTML element that specifies the title of the page. It helps the search engine know what the page is about and that the page on your website is relevant for that keyword. Title tags should be unique for each page.
• Meta Description: a snippet of up to about 160 characters which summarizes page content. The Meta description can affect CTRs which are linked to SEO and rankings.
• Content: Content is the heart of your website. With Google Panda Updates, it is extremely important to develop unique and relevant contents. Content with a targeted keyword is used to inspire all the page content to satisfy searcher intent.
• Image ALT tags: an alt tag is essentially the name of the image. Googlebot or any search engine crawlers use the alt tag to inspect an image which contributes to how the page is indexed and where it ranks.
• Internal Links: Internal linking connects your content and gives Google an idea of the structure of your website. Using internal linking can boost your SEO. Do it the right way!
• Outbound Links: outbound links to related domain helps the search engine understand your niche and helps in increasing the trust and quality of your site. This plays a vital role in boosting your SEO.
• Use short URLs: short URLs rank better than long URLs. Avoid numbered URLs and try to include your targeted keywords in it. A URL with around 50 – 60 characters is a good number to go for.
• Social share buttons: social share buttons on blog posts encourage readers to share content and drive more traffic to your website. As more relevant people read, opportunities for natural links increases and helps in boosting your SEO.

Off page SEO checklist

• Social Media: engagement with the social community is an important aspect. When you built a strong social community making your content viral is a lot easier. When content gets shared more, it increases the chances of getting a better rank in the search results.
• Backlinking: backlinks has a huge impact on a website’s prominence in search results. Search engines like google give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks.
• Directory submission: this is the main source to increase quality backlinks to your website, which helps to improve your site’s ranking. It helps to gain popularity on the web and increases your website traffic.
• Influencer Outreach: a powerful trick to add to your SEO toolbox. It helps build a diverse and strong link profile. It increases content reach and engagement, which boosts brand visibility.
• Social bookmarking sites: an effective way to not only improve your website traffic but also provide an opportunity to make your content go viral and help you gain more quality backlinks from reputed sites.

Mistakes you shouldn’t afford to make:

When there are so many things that you have to consider while optimizing your website content, you cannot be sure of making any mistakes. But, for a successful search engine optimization, you just cannot afford some mistakes.

1. Settling for duplicate contents

Content is king, so treat it with royal respect. Unique content plays an important role in search rankings. The search algorithms rate unique contents high and penalize the website for posting duplicate content. In fact, unique and high-quality contents are a must for high ranking in the organic search results.

2. Making grammatical errors

While grammar might not appear important for many people, it plays a significate role for website content. Grammatical mistakes can be off-putting to many visitors. Also, if the proper grammar is not used, the true sense of the content may not reach the viewers. Viewers may not trust the reliability of a website that has grammatical errors in its content.

3. Providing external links to unauthorized sites

If you include an external link on your content, make sure to verify their validity and authenticity. Say, for example, an external link on your website is fraudulent and prone to hacking. You’re thus leading your visitors to cyber harm. Bad user experience will only degrade your website ranking.

4. Including too many heavy files

The heavy files refer to the visual content. Images, videos, gifs, etc. occupy a lot of space and consume a lot of data; thus, they are slow to load. If your website content doesn’t load faster, the visitor may not have the patience to stay on your website and go through your content. Thus, page speed has to be optimized.

5. Not optimizing for mobile

With the changing technology and the growth of the internet, the use of mobile has increased highly. Tablets and mobiles are becoming more popular as a way for visitors to your website. It is extremely important for your business to have a well-optimized website for devices like mobiles. Google started rolling off its mobile-friendly algorithm on April 21, 2015, which increased mobile search rankings for mobile-friendly websites.

6. You don’t use canonical URLs

The canonical tag defines the source URL of a given page to the search engine like Google. These are used to state a single page as its own source or for the duplicate page to refer their source. Though Google recognizes pre-published version, having pages of similar or identical content is marked as negative and may devalue your website. So, by proper use of canonical tags, you can avoid this pitfall.

Search engine optimized content will guarantee you increased website traffic and more popularity. The popular you get, the better are your chances of earning higher profits and recognition. So, search engine optimization is an essential component of website development and designing. Implement it the right way and avoid these 6 mistakes mentioned above to start making progress today.

Guest article written by: Aditya works as a Growth Assistant at AirTract.Com, a social platform wherein people ask questions and answer, share knowledge and experience. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science Engineering and has been working in the field of Digital Marketing for the past two years. He is also a voracious reader and a big sports fan.