The Complete DIY SEO Checklist
Need to finally get serious about SEO? Here’s the post for you!
It’s a very direct, straightforward process that will drive more traffic and more customers to your website as quickly as possible.
The Complete DIY SEO Checklist
Heads up:
1.) Everything on this SEO checklist – and on-page optimization in general — should be thought of as a piece of a larger pie. Try to get as many of them as you can, but don’t worry too much if you miss a few.
Get Started With The Foundation
The tools
Setup Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is a great tool to add and manage multiple pixels and tracking codes without the needing to edit the code of a site.
Setup Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must-have. For SEO, you’ll be able to track things like how much traffic you’re getting from search engines, which pages are getting the most organic traffic, what’s the bounce rate, along with many other important metric
Set Up Google Search Console
Search Console is a free tool provided by Google to webmasters. This is how you communicate directly with Google and get data and feedback on how your site is performing.
Using WordPress? Install Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that makes it incredibly easy for you to create SEO-friendly content. It takes care of things like canonical tags, noindex tags, and sitemaps for you.
On-Page SEO
Perform a keyword research
Understanding the terms that people use when they search, and the intent behind them is crucial to your SEO strategy.
Be sure to consider searcher intent and difficulty, pick 1 keyword per page, and you’ll generally want to start with lower-volume keywords first.
Add your keyword to your title tag and make it useful for searchers
Even though including keywords in the title tag is still important, it is not enough to get you to rank high. Search engines now weigh in the clickthrough rate on the results as well when determining rankings, so an attractive and compelling title will help you get more people to click on your page.
Add your keyword to your meta description and make it relevant
The content of the meta description is not used by search engines as a ranking signal. However, including your keyword in it and writing a compelling meta description can help with your CTR.
Add your keyword to your H1 tag, and make sure to only use one
Even though the value of the H2, H3,…, H6 tags for SEO is debatable, it is still generally a good idea to include your primary keyword in your H1 tag, make sure there is one H1 in the entire page and that it appears before any other heading tag.
Use your keyword 3 times, and make sure you have at least 500 words per page
Use your keyword 3 times, and make sure to have at least 500 words on each URL (minimum – the more the better). You can still rank with less, and you don’t ever want to put unnecessary text on your site, but I recommend not creating a new page unless you have 500 words worth of content.
Use synonyms in your copy
As search engines gain a more complex understanding of human language, content creators are able to utilize more natural language and still stay relevant to the keywords they are trying to rank for. Synonyms are great, and using natural language that’s influenced by keyword research (rather than just pure keywords) is highly encouraged.
Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in your copy
Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is a method used to determine context. Including keywords that are thematically related to your primary keyword can help the search engine understand what the content of your page is about.
Add descriptive ALT tags and filenames to your pages
Search engines “see” images by reading the ALT tag and looking at file names, among other factors. Try to be descriptive when you name your images.
Link to other pages with SEO-friendly anchor text
In addition to including links to relevant and authoritative sites in your content, Google looks at the language used in the hyperlink itself. By including internal links with text that is relevant to the page that you are linking to, and including your keywords, you are indicating what the content being linked is about.
Avoid using keywords in global navigation, though, as that can look like over-optimization. Stick to in-content links instead.
Off-Page SEO
Check out your competitor’s link profiles
This is the easiest way to get started with link building. Tracking where they are getting their most authoritative backlinks will help you to understand their strategy, how they are anchoring the links on their pages, and provide insights as to where you can gain similar links.
Technical SEO
Check Google’s Search Console for crawl errors, duplicate content errors, missing titles and more
This is Google’s free tool for website owners to get data on the search performance of their websites. You’ll be able to use it to find technical issues with your site such as duplicate content, find data on search rankings, visibility, CTR and more.
Look for broken links, errors, and crawl problems
The larger your site, the more important this is. Broken links, errors, and crawl errors make it harder for search engines to find your content, index it and drive traffic to it.
Make sure you don’t have duplicate content
Duplicate content can dilute the value of your content among several URLs. Use 301 redirects, canonical tags or use Google Webmaster Tools to fix any duplicate content that might be indexing and penalizing your site.
Check your site’s speed and keep it fast!
Search engines value sites that provide a good user experience and the speed of your site is a huge factor. A slow loading site will increase your bounce rate, as visitors lose patience and leave.
Make sure your site is mobile friendly
As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches.
Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all the pages on your site that you want to be indexed,
Other Important Stuff
Claim your brand name on as many social networking sites as possible
For reputation management reasons, not only do you want to make sure no one else gets your account name, but you can often own all the results on the first page of a search for your brand if you’re a new website or company.
Use an SEO Audit Tool to double-check everything
Performing an SEO audit manually is time-consuming and complicated. Fortunately, there are SEO auditing tools that can help with the process. These will speed up the process, identifying errors and offering solutions. This allows you to spend more of your time working on overall strategy, instead of weeding out broken links.
Care about the US? Setup Bing Webmaster Tools
This is the equivalent to Google’s Search Console for Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is the default search engine for Internet Explorer and Edge browsers.
Next Steps
We hope this helped!
If you’d like some help with all this, just click here and we can help