Everyone wants more website traffic. Traffic equals prospects. Prospects equal leads. Leads equal sales. Thus, at its most basic, traffic equals sales.
The best way to put your website in a position for additional organic search traffic to your website is with on-page SEO. There are a lot of factors to remember when you’re optimizing pages so here’s a helpful SEO Checklist to keep you on track as you do your work. Print it as many times as you need and keep it handy when you’re doing any on-page SEO work!
Our SEO Checklist
Use this checklist when you’re optimizing your webpages and stay on track. Every SEO factor adds to your site’s authority.
Keywords
It all starts with the keyword. Pick something that speaks to your subject matter and include geographical designations, especially if your business has a storefront or local presence. Once you’ve found the keyword that works for you put it everywhere you can to give it more strength. Feel free to download our “Getting your Keywords Right” workbook if you need help with this.
Fresh Original Content
Copy and pasting other people’s work is a bad idea any way you slice it. Taking someone else’s hard work and passing it off as your own is dishonest. If you need another reason not to do this, Google looks for duplicate content and penalizes those that pilfer info and reprint it to their own sites.
Formatting Your Content
Making sure your content is fresh is important but newness isn’t the only factor in play on your pages and posts. Having your keyword represented in your body copy, page title, meta data and your headers lets search engines know you are talking about your keyword’s subject matter rather than stuffing a high-yield keyphrase for results.
Here’s a quick bullet list of things to watch for when drafting your content:
- Keyword in bold
- Keyword in italics
- Keyword in Header 1
- Keyword in Header 2
- Keyword in Meta Data
Put your keyword in all these locations organically without impacting the quality of the content. It’s a balance.
Media Elements
Building content with nothing but words has more than one negative effect. It makes your content one big solid block of imposing text which is hard to read. Your site visitors have few options for interaction. Most importantly, you miss out on opportunities to let search engines know what your content is about.
Name your uploaded images and videos with your keyword in mind and start inserting high engagement media into your posts and pages for extra authority online.
Page Load Times
You’ve written your copy and posted it online. Your keyword is present in your body copy, titles, and meta data and your media elements are large and in charge but now your pages take forever to load. That means the total file size of your webpage is just too big.
Google awards websites with fast load times by pushing them to the tops of search engine results pages. Keep your file sizes as small as possible and keep your pages loading quickly.
Social Sharing
After you start publishing decent content on a regular basis people will start to take notice. When a customer or fan finds something they like they invariably want to share that information within their circle of friends and contacts.
With online social endorsements now outweighing backlinks in Google’s new results algorithm there’s every reason to get involved. Add social media sharing buttons to your pages and posts and collect more fans and follows than ever before.
Links and Backlinks
In basic terms links are like little pathways on the web that leads from one piece of content to another. Linking from one page of your website to another one with related info creates navigation options for users and keeps your bounce rate down. Link to your own material everywhere prudence allows.
Backlinks are a slightly different story. They are links on someone else’s site that leads directly to your online material. Backlinks can be built in many ways but they don’t come as easily as on-site links. The more links you have from reputable sites the more web authority your site will garner through simple association.
Make sure to run down this basic SEO Checklist every time you draft content online. Optimized content goes farther than generic material so cover the basics to increase your chances of getting good SEO rankings and more traffic.
Download our free Checklist PDF and stay SEO organized for all your web content.
Check out these related links for more info:
How Web Photos Affect SEO
Local SEO: Getting found locally
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