“Your website isn’t coming up. I can’t find it out!”

This is the most frustrating phrase when a local business owner has to hear. He put hours into building the perfect site for his business with a dash of eye-candy website design. How it feels when his regular customers can’t even find when they search the shop online. It is very disheartening- do you know where did he go wrong?

Well, in this case, he didn’t optimize his website for the web.

It isn’t enough to craft a striking website and hope it gets discovered. You must get your website optimized to help it rank in search results- a strategy technically termed as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a thorough procedure that can make all the difference. Here is our website optimization checklist. You can go through every step of the process to ensure you have a well-versed and well-optimized site. Let’s read out what you need to put on your SEO to-do list!

Website Optimization Checklist

Before we explore the nitty-gritty of SEO, there are a few things you will need to add to your pre-checklist.

Google Analytics

It is one of the first important things that you will need to do.  Google Analytics is a free tool that lets you get a clear insight into your website’s overall performance. This tool enables you track critical site metrics that shows your site’s performance in search results.

Google Search Console

The next thing you will want to include in your website optimization checklist is to set up Google Search Console. It provides you with tools that help you check your traffic inflow and help you get your content showing up in search results.

This tool does the leg work by helping you optimize your site and identify any issues that is holding you back from ranking in search.

SEO plugin for WordPress Users

The WordPress site users will want to install an SEO plugin to make their site SEO-friendly. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins. You can download it from WordPress store and use it for your site. This plugin will ensure that you optimize your pages for SEO before you publish them.

Keyword Checklist for SEO

Now that you have completed a thorough pre-checklist of your website optimization, it’s time to find the appropriate keyword checklist. You may know the importance of keywords and how significantly they play a vital role in helping your content rank in search results.

Here are some items you’ll want to check off your website SEO checklist next:

Long-tail Keywords for Your Website

Apart from other essential aspects, finding long-tail keywords is a critical component of your SEO checklist. Long-tail keywords are highly recommended for your site because they are detailed and present more information about the search results. Moreover, it also helps you drive more traffic to your page.

Analyze Search Intent for Keywords

The search intent for your list of keywords is critical because it tells you what your customers what to find in the search results. When you know what your customers want to find, you can add that information and other details to your page to help it rank in searches.  

Identify Keyword Difficulty   

The next thing on your website SEO checklist is to find out keyword difficulty. You should know that every keyword you choose is not a viable option for your business. Some keywords take time to rank than others because of the other websites that are trying to rank for those keywords.

Check the difficulty level of each keyword you select to ensure that it’s the perfect term that you can reasonably try to rank for in searches.

Optimize Tags

Once you have selected your keywords and you are confident that these are going to rank for sure, it’s time to optimize your pages for them. So, the next thing you want for website optimization checklist is integrating keywords into your tags.

So, here are a few tags that you want to pay attention to-

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Header tags
• Image alt tags

By optimizing your tags, you can help your site rank better in search results.

Optimize SEO friendly URLs

The last thing to be noticed on the keywords section of our SEO checklist is URL optimization. When you create your URLs, make sure that they’re well optimized for search engines.

There is always a mistake made by companies for not customizing their URLs. They have URLs that are numeric or difficult to address. When you look at the URLs like this, you don’t have an idea what the page is about. Without descriptive URLs, search engines won’t accept it as a reference point, and visitors will find it difficult to remember your URL.

Content Creation Checklist

One of the most significant and fundamental parts of SEO is content marketing. Without content, you have nothing to rank in search results and without SEO, your content won’t rank in search. These are the two strategies that work side-by-side.

Add Internal Links to Content

Adding internal links to your content is the next important thing to your SEO checklist. These links are critical to SEO for two reasons.

Firstly, you can keep your audience engaged on your page longer. They will click on internal links and visit other pages on your site, which will send a positive signal to Google.

Secondly, it helps Google crawl and index pages on your site.

Add Visuals

Adding visuals to your content may not directly impact your SEO, but adding them can improve user experience, affecting your SEO.

When people visit your site, they would love to see attractive visuals along with some text. It will pull their attraction and let them remain on your site.

Create Backlinks

The last important item to check off the website SEO checklist is backlinks.

Backlinks are nothing but links to your site from other authority sites. These links work wonder by boosting your site’s authority and trust, which allows you to rank better in search results.

Once you have created good excellent content, you can use it to earn backlinks for your business. Simply reach out to industry authorities and invite them to check out your content. Thus, by earning more backlinks, you are helping to build your site’s trust and authority, which will ultimately boost rankings and drive more traffic to your site.

Technical SEO Checklist

The last thing to be added to your website optimization checklist is technical SEO. Besides other important things, you need to do quite a few technical tasks behind the scenes to ensure your site ranks in search results.

Improve Site Speed

Do you like to wait over a minute for slow-running pages? Of course not! Your visitors want your site to load within two seconds. If your site lacks to load quickly, you are at risk of losing your visitors.

Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?

Next on this website optimization checklist is to check whether your site is mobile-friendly. More than 50% of Internet traffic comes from mobile devices. You must have a mobile-friendly site to prevent your business from losing valuable traffic. Not to mention, Google takes your mobile site into account when ranking you in search results.

So, how do you make your website mobile-friendly? It is through responsive web design. Responsive design makes your site adapt to whatever device your audience uses. It makes sure that your mobile users will see a mobile version of your site that’s easy to browse and use.

As you can see, there are a lot of technical terms and items to check off your website SEO checklist. If you’re feeling confused, nothing to worry! There are lot more things that go into optimizing for search engines, and sometimes you need professional help to make it work right. That’s where the experts at Yukti Digital can help.