Search engine optimization will remain an important aspect of a business’s digital marketing strategy for a long time to come. Optimizing in a professional way, you will be able to significantly increase website traffic and, implicitly, maximize the return on investment.
Here are some crucial aspects of your search engine optimization checklist:
Before moving on to practice, you will need to understand the theory.
In order to get the most out of each checkpoint, you’ll need to understand the basics. Download the SEO guide for beginners and you will learn what SEO is, from A to Z.
Create an account on Google Search Console and connect to the website.
Through Google Search Console, a useful and completely free tool, you will have access to a number of functionalities and reports to optimize their websites.
Using the Google search console, you will be able to find out what information the search engine has about your site and how it performs from an indexing perspective. What’s more, Google Search Console constantly sends notifications about indexing errors, if they exist. Also here you will be able to solve them in an easy way.
Create a Google Analytics account, then deploy it to your website.
In order to be aware of the SEO performance of the website, you will need to create an account on Google Analytics. This tool will provide you with reports and analysis tools that will help you in search engine optimization.
Make sure your website doesn’t have Google penalties!
From the beginning of your journey in the world of SEO, you will need to make sure that your website does not have any penalties from Google. If you have violated the rules of the search engine, it will give you different sanctions or penalties. If you’ve unfortunately gone down the wrong path, you’ll have to deal with the sanctions first, then you’ll be able to continue with the rest of the list. To discover the penalties, go to Google Search Console and then Manual Actions.
Check the URL structure of the pages and make sure that the links are structured according to SEO practices!
Here’s how you can tell if the page links are well structured: they are composed of short and descriptive keywords, the words are separated by hyphens, a simple and easy-to-understand structure, the user can understand what is on the page respectively, since reading the URL.
Use SSL, secure the website!
The SSL present within the URL is one of the search engine indexing factors. Through it, you will assure users and indexing bots that the pages are secure. Most often, when the SSL has been successfully installed, next to the pages URL, you will be able to see a green lock.
Discover errors in the search console by checking the “Coverage Report”.
If Google encounters errors during indexing, this can affect your search engine rankings. To spot such errors and fix them as quickly as possible, make sure you constantly check the “Coverage Report” in Google Search Console.
Check and optimize your robots.txt file
Through the “Robots.txt” file, you will give search engines instructions on how to index the site’s pages. Attention, a trivial error during the configuration of the file can affect the visibility and indexing of the entire website.
Check your WordPress visibility settings
If your website is built in WordPress, ensure that the visibility setting is well configured. There is a possibility that certain plugins prevent search engines from accessing your content.
Make sure your comment links are nofollow
By means of the nofollow attribute, you will indicate to the search engines that the hyperlink related to the comments should not be taken into account during indexing. Of course, comments are extremely useful, but to avoid the likelihood that the website will generate links to other websites that have low authority, or worse, that are considered spam, all outgoing links should be set to nofollow. Check this setting through the browser’s INSPECT option.
Do you find this list useful? Stay tuned to the website to read more tips related to search engine optimization for online businesses.
