To boost your search engine ranking, you’ll need to do everything you can to optimize your content for search engines, and that includes ensuring that your on-page SEO matches the best practices outlined by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. To help you with this task, we’ve put together this easy-to-follow on-page SEO checklist so you can easily figure out what needs to be done on each page of your website. Best of all, it will only take you five minutes or less! Happy optimizing!
Why on-page SEO is important
The process of optimizing your web page for search engines, known as on-page SEO, is a critical step in creating a site that will rank well in search engine results. While many entrepreneurs get wrapped up in advanced off-page strategies like guest blogging and link building, these won’t matter much if you don’t have your on-page optimization down pat. The best way to make sure you have on-page SEO under control is to create an on-page SEO checklist.
Title Tag most important part of the on-page SEO checklist
The title tag is one of, if not THE most important piece of on-page SEO. Since it’s right there in black and white in every search engine result, you want to make sure it’s written in a way that prompts someone to click through. You should be using your brand name (if applicable) and a key phrase for your business to get people interested enough to click through. While titles with under 60 characters tend to do best, having long titles isn’t necessarily bad either–if they keep users’ attention until they click!
Meta Description is most of the on-page SEO
What is a Meta description? The Meta description of a web page plays an important role in search engine ranking. It’s typically one of two sentences that show up when your website or webpage appears on a search engine results page (SERP). This short and simple summary will tell users what they can expect to find on your site, whether it be informative content, products, or something else entirely. Typically, pages with a clear, compelling, and relevant meta description experience higher click-through rates from SERPs than those with less compelling ones.
Optimize Meta Tag
Meta tags include a page’s title, description, and keywords, so it’s important to optimize them if you want your content to rank well. Make sure your page titles are descriptive, accurately reflect what your pages are about, and include keywords related to your business. Also, make sure that your meta descriptions accurately describe what users will find on those pages. Keep them under 160 characters in length and try to use keyword phrases only once per description.
Heading tags
Let’s get started with our SEO checklist. The first item to check is your page headings. You should be using H1, H2, and possibly H3 headings when organizing your post content. This helps search engines easily index your page and categorize it in a better way than if you didn’t use heading tags. Make sure you’re using keywords here too!
Get internal links pointing to your pages?
Getting links from other pages on your site can be helpful, but getting links from other relevant sites will help you drive more traffic to your pages. You can get that by adding in internal links to your content; these are either links in your page’s text or within images or videos. Include as many of these as possible, as long as they are natural and relevant to what you’re writing about. If you don’t have a good internal linking structure set up already, search engine optimization tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer will help you see how many internal links other WebPages in your industry have and give suggestions on how many might be useful to include on each page.
Where need do external links
A great starting point is to look at competitors in your space. Where are they getting their links from? Is it something you can replicate? If so, you need to get on it and do that now. Keyword Research – If a niche site ranks at number one on Google, there’s a good chance someone else has thought of an idea before. Make sure it’s not an opportunity before you start or run with any ideas you have.
Anchor text optimization
You should always use descriptive anchor text when linking to other sites, even from your own. People look at anchor text to determine what page they are being taken to and descriptive anchor text makes it easy for them to see that you’re sending them somewhere useful. Don’t link with just click here, read more, or any variation of those two. Instead, tell people where they will be taken.
Be consistent with keyword density
As always, remember to be consistent with your keyword density. If you use your primary keyword more than others, then there is a good chance that Google will ignore it and instead focus on words that appear less frequently. But if you use all of your keywords equally, it should trigger a penalty from Google. To avoid confusion and make sure everything is fair in love and war, use all of your keywords evenly.
Correct content with plagiarism and grammar
Correcting content is a major part of on-page SEO. When optimizing your pages, it’s important to know what not to do, as well as what you should do. Pay close attention to plagiarism and grammar. Many people think that using simple words and repeating keywords repeatedly is enough, but that’s far from true. Make sure your sentences make sense and don’t repeat any individual words more than two or three times.
ALT Text / ATT
In your document, you’ll likely want to add alt tags (alt=…) to images. This will allow screen readers (used by visually impaired people) to see your page. When optimizing an image, be sure to choose a meaningful alt tag (or even better, multiple). For example, if you have an image of a woman working at her desk, perhaps: alt=A businesswoman at her desk typing on her computer or alt=An employee working in an office. While not required and won’t get you far with search engines that use their image crawling technology, it can’t hurt.
URL Optimization
This is one of those things that are usually pretty easy to figure out but easy to mess up. While we often think of pages being optimized in terms of what they say, we also need to remember that how a page looks also factors into search engine ranking. Here are a few tips on URL optimization: · Make your URLs short and easy to remember (remember – you’re a person, not a search engine).
Conclusion – On-Page SEO Checklist
Now that you have covered all of your on-page optimization points, it’s time to move on to off-page optimization. The off-page optimization tips are just as important as on-page ones; to rank in search engines you need to apply them both! But we will start with an introduction to link building, which is also known as the link is earning or link earning strategies, and then provide some practical how-to techniques below.