The Basic SEO Checklist For Your Website

I have recently quit my job and moved to a new city. Now, most of you can imagine my current situation - yes, I am enjoying my freedom! Exploring the new place, meeting new people, eating, and sleeping.

The days passed and not too long, I started getting bored. Now, what? As a regular guy, I started looking for new job opportunities. I also did one more important thing, I started taking up projects as a freelancer for a few startups. For them, now I am a Digital marketer, SEO analyst, and blah blah blah...

Now getting to the point, while working with these startups I started recognizing a pattern. Most of them miss out on the common aspects of SEO. They are just too criminal to ignore them. Probably, busy building a million dollar company or planning their sales strategy.

Whatever, my take here is - If you’re ignorant about your website optimization, you’ve probably lost most of your potential customers, already. Yes, it's very crucial to be on search results when a user is searching for something that you offer in this modern business world.

Before I begin, I want to make it very clear that I won’t be categorizing this checklist into On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, Mobile SEO and so on. This checklist covers anything and everything that’s very basic from an SEO perspective and no business should ignore this list.

So without much delay, let’s uncover the basic SEO checklist for your website.

1. Make sure your website is HTTPS redirect:

It's the most fundamental thing to do on your website. It gives your website visitor a safe browsing experience. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of the HTTP. That secures the communication between user and website by encrypting the data.

Google recognizes HTTP websites as not secure. If your website is one them - bingo! You just lost the trust of your website visitors.

So, make your website HTTPS ready today. Eliminate browser warnings and alerts, improve security and let users have safe communication between browser and server.

2. Use SEO friendly URLs:

Now, this can be a little tricky but, let me try to simplify it to you. SEO friendly URLs will help you in structuring your website hierarchy and in directing your users to their desired destinations with ease.

URL is the first thing Google and everyone notices on your website. Poor URL structure will not give you the SEO benefit and your pages are also likely to be ignored by search engine indexes. All leading to low search ranking and domain authority.

Here are a few things to consider for building an SEO friendly URL structure:

2.1 Keywords: 

Every page you publish on your domain should have a purpose and the reason for its existence must be clearly outset. May it be your product information page, self-help guides, blog, transactional page, and more - all have their own significance to be present there.

Using generic/automatically created URLs don’t suffice the reason for their existence. Also, they are confusing for the people browsing your site. You don’t want people to be lost while browsing your website. Instead, you’ll want the right people (and crawlers) to discover the right pages.

All it takes is a bit of keyword research to include relevant terms in your URLs. The terms that exactly define what the page is about. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or The Hoth to do identify your potential keywords and to know it’s search volume.

Include the term that is most relevant to your page and has the highest search volume. Please avoid keywords stuffing and repetition of keywords, only use them contextually and where it is relevant. This helps you avoid being penalized by Google or being seen as spam by visitors. 

 Generic example: 

               https://example.com/1S23XPoyy8gGdvM07bhZlvg

 Blog article based example:

               https://example.com/blog/online-marketing-tools

2.2 URL length:

Now, most you might be thinking ‘does the URL length really matters? ’ Of course, it matters. The shorter URLs tend to rank better than long URLs.

To prove this Backlinko has done some extensive research, analyzed 1 million google search results. The takeaway from their analysis was shorter the URL the better.

Below graph shows you how Google ranking declines as URL length gets longer.

So, whenever you publish a new page, keep URLs as short as possible, without losing its gist.

2.3 Case Sensitivity: 

Always use lowercase letters in your URLs. Using occasional uppercase letters or all uppercase letters in URLs can lead to unnecessary redirects or 404 errors on certain servers. So always stick to lowercase letters.

2.4 Use hyphens: 

Google recommends using a hyphen (-) instead of underscore (_) in URLs. Because Google treats hyphen as a word separator, but not the underscore. So, just use hyphens to separate words in your URL string.

3. Content optimization:

You might have come across this point in every other SEO article that you read. It's that important still, most people don’t get it right. Just writing the great content will not do any justice, we’ll have to optimize the content that we create.

Okay, let me not bore you with my Gyan. I will straight away list a few basic and most important aspects of content optimization. Be sure to implement them in your content optimization strategy.

3.1 Using the right header tags: 

Header tags will help you structure the content and make it easily readable for users. Each header should give the reader an idea of the subsequent paragraph they are going to read.

• The H1 tag is usually the title of the post. The largest text that stands out on your page.
• The H2 tags describe main topics that you cover inside a post.
• Rest H3 - H6 tags serve as additional sub-topics/sub-headings within each section.

3.2 Optimize your Images for search engine: 

Image optimization for SEO involves many things. If done correctly, it reduces your page load time and improves your search ranking, too.

Here are a few quick tips to follow:

• Always use high-quality images that are relevant to your page and that resonates well with your audience.
• Reduce the image size before you use it on your page. It will help improve your page load speed. It can be done easily, just use tools like Kraken.io or Compressnow to do it.
• Add “Alt text” to your images. This will help web crawlers to better understand your images and can boost your ranking in search engines. 

3.3 Get some quality backlinks: 

By ‘quality’ I mean to get backlinks from a good website that has decent domain authority. Also, your link should contextually fit within their content and should not look spammy. This will certainly improve your domain authority and boosts your search ranking.

Here are a few popular ways to get backlinks to your website:

• Creating awesome content that people would love to link back because it’s valuable. 
• Build a relationship with influencers in your industry and if you ask they wouldn’t mind giving you a link back - if your content is worthy.
• Try Guest blogging on the related sites to yours. Indeed, these posts should be valuable for their readers and you can link back them to your site.
• Shootout outreach emails to people within your niche that ultimately link back to you.

4. Improve your site speed and page load time:

Probably most you already know site speed is of the ranking factors Google considers to show your website on search results. This is because users spend less time on a website that responds slowly and these websites tend to have higher bounce rates.

So, it's not logical to show them on search results anyway. That’s why Google just abandons such websites. And the same applies to your pages as well.

If your website or any of your pages load slow and you want to fix it. Use PageSpeed Insights from Google. This tool will give you PageSpeed score and also provides PageSpeed suggestions to make your website faster across devices.

5. Ensure your website is Mobile friendly:

Did you know? Around 57% of total internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. That’s why it’s extremely important to have a website that is optimized for mobile devices.

Now, check your website’s mobile friendliness within Google Search Console using Mobile-Friendly Test. This will analyze your site and will alert you on any errors or critical fixes that need to be done.

That way you can design your website to be mobile-friendly and ensure your pages perform well across all devices.

Now, this concludes my checklist! 

While you go back and implement all of these, I suggest you to use tools that will help you monitor, analyze and track your website performance. So, you know the impact and the organic boost you get from your SEO efforts.