SEO Checklist for Beginners.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How to Use This SEO Checklist

SEO Basics Checklist

Technical SEO Checklist

on-page SEO Checklist

Content SEO Checklist

Off-Page SEO Checklist

Local SEO Checklist

Mobile SEO Checklist

eCommerce SEO Checklist

Conclusion

Today, the internet is accessible to more than half of the world’s population. Every day, many people browse the internet for various things. Additionally, 53% of B2B and B2C website traffic originates from organic search. This implies that search engines like Google may be the primary source of the traffic to your website. In order to increase website traffic, you must optimize your website for search engines.

Once you understand the fundamentals of SEO, you will realize that it’s not as difficult as it first appears. Also, you’ll understand that SEO is all about using best practices to increase the chance for users and search engines to find your website.

The purpose of the SEO checklist for beginners is to assist you in starting SEO for your website. Therefore, this article’s SEO checklist is thorough and includes all topics listed in the table of contents.

How to use this SEO Checklist.

The comprehensive checklist covered in this article will help you to ensure hassle-free SEO success. It covers some of the best practice activities and points that you need to be aware of. It guides you through the primary SEO Checklist for beginners The SEO sector has developed different types of SEO to make it easier to handle. It’s necessary to understand that these SEO sub-categories do not represent a distinct process. Rather, they are just a method of breaking down a challenging process into a number of simpler processes.

The checklist has been divided into several sections that address the key focus areas, ranging from SEO basics to e-commerce SEO. Also, to increase your chances of success with SEO, you must concentrate on each element and adhere to SEO best practices.

The checklist summarizes the best SEO practices, briefly outlining the problems that should be addressed and providing advice on how to resolve them. For a deeper understanding of SEO, the article is cross-referenced with related materials. Below is an SEO Checklist that will be helpful to both beginners and seasoned SEOs. However, before reading the checklist, you undoubtedly want to know what SEO is precise.

SEO Basics Checklist

It’s important to comprehend the various elements that makeup SEO. This can help you to use the checklist more efficiently and improve your SEO.

1. Understand basic SEO concepts.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO. Is the practice of optimizing your web pages to enhance your website’s natural visibility in the search engines’ result pages (SERPs). When customers enter a search term, you want your website to appear on the top page of Google (or Bing or Yahoo). How many pages, for instance, will someone go through when looking up cooking tips before clicking on a website to check it out? Most users never scroll past the first page of a website. Therefore, SEO makes websites more user-friendly to visitors and easier to grasp.

 There are several different types of SEO, which all aim to improve a website’s visibility in search engines. In order to meet the numerous search engine ranking factors and keep users satisfied, you must consider hundreds of guidelines while optimizing a website for search engines.

2. Verify your website with Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google for tracking the effectiveness of organic searches for your website.

You can use the Google search console to discover the information Google knows about your website, examine your position in Google rankings, and identify and correct crawling and indexing mistakes. Additionally, google search can notify Google of updates to your website.

Therefore, the most crucial tool for SEO website optimization is GSC.

You must first create an account with Google Search Console before adding and verifying your website properties.

3. Verify your website with Bing Webmaster tools

A platform called Bing Webmaster Tools offers data and insights for your search engine. Bing is worth considering as it is the second most used search engine after Google.

You can utilize a set of tools provided by Bing to optimize the way your website appears in Bing Search. Basically, these are referred to as Bing Webmaster Tools and are functionally comparable to GSC.

4. Setup Google Analytics

You need analytics and reporting tools to be able to track your SEO performance, and Google Analytics is the finest and most free option. It aids in providing information about the number of visitors to your website, its origins, and its interactions with it.

Installing Google Analytics code and being familiar with fundamental SEO reports should be your first two steps.

Additionally, to see Search Console data in Analytics, it’s also important to link Google Search Console with Google Analytics.

5. Check for Google penalties

the fundamental SEO tests you should perform from the beginning.

Websites that violate Google’s Guidelines may be subject to different penalties (both manual and algorithmic).

If your website receives a Google penalty, you might need to take an alternative path to recover from the penalty (if at all possible) before moving on to the SEO checklist.

Technical SEO Checklist.

The term Technical SEO refers to the specific technical factors that influence a website’s search engine exposure.

Basically, the objective of technical SEO is to make it easy for search engines to access, crawl, understand, and index your website.

It is referred to as “technical” because it has nothing to do with the website’s real content or website advertising.

Important guidelines for technical SEO.

• Check and make sure that ALL your website pages have SEO-friendly URLs. (Short and descriptive, include keywords, and use hyphens (-) to separate the words.
• Website security – Install SSL and make your website HTTPS.
• Use the COVERAGE report to locate and correct crawl errors.
• Check and optimize your robots.txt to ensure that search engines can properly reach your website.
• Verify the visibility settings in WordPress.
• Check your comment settings to ensure that all comment links are set to ‘nofollow’
• Optimize your site structure and URL structure.
• Add and verify your website to Google Search Console and specify your preferred domain.
• Create an XML Sitemap and upload it to all major search engines.
• Develop websites that load fast on both desktop and mobile devices.
• Use Hreflang if your website supports many languages.
• Add structured data markup data to your homepage.
• Check that all your pages define a canonical URL.
• Test your structured data markup implementation.
• Enable breadcrumb menus on all your posts and pages.
• Check that your schema implementation for breadcrumbs is correct.
• Optimize your logo and favicon.
• Check and optimize your 404 Page.
• Use Lazy Loading for images and videos.
• Check and improve the loading speed of your website.

On-Page SEO Checklist.

On-Page SEO focuses on the page itself and how to make it more user- and search engine-friendly.

It should be highlighted although search engines consider a website as a whole, ranking is done on a page-by-page basis.

Therefore, it’s important to focus on optimizing each and every page of your website.

Checklist points for on-page SEO.

• Optimize your page titles. This is an essential SEO component. Page titles, which are displayed in the search results and should entice users to click, should be intriguing. Furthermore, search engine bots should get enough clues from the page title alone, on what the page content is all about.
• Optimize your H1 Tag for all pages (including the homepage).). The H1 tag is what is displayed as the top heading of a page, while the page title is displayed in the SERPS. So, a page that has been optimized contains only one H1 tag, and it often uses the same values as the page title.
• Check and optimize your headings. A page must also have subheadings (H2, H3) for the various sections in addition to the H1 tag. Subheadings can cut lengthy text on a website making it easier to read and scan by crawlers.
• SEO for Images – A page’s images should all be correctly optimized in order for search engines to understand what they represent. Image SEO depends on factors like filename, file size, and ALT text optimization.
• Page formatting – It is not a smart SEO strategy to publish a page with text and graphics without taking the time to enhance the content. Although Google cannot see a page in the same way a human can, there are ways to comprehend how a page looks. This includes whether a page is cluttered with pop-up adverts. This is taken into account when ranking pages.

List of other on-page SEO checklist points.

• Optimize your meta descriptions (including the homepage).
• Check for your brand name on Google.
• Optimize your website for Google site links.
• Optimize your posts for Google site links.
• Optimize your posts for Google-featured snippets.
• Make sure that your target keyword is included in your opening paragraph.
• Add text content to accompany your non-text content.
• Optimize your content for E-A-T.
• Create a dedicated image sitemap and submit it to Google.
• Optimize your videos and other multimedia elements (with proper schemas).
• Create a dedicated Video sitemap and submit it to Google.
• Optimize titles/descriptions/content of your category pages.
• Check your internal linking strategy.
• Give credit to other high-quality websites.

Content SEO Checklist.

Content SEO is a subclass of on-page SEO. The focus of content SEO is on improving content quality.

Many people consider this to be one of the several forms of SEO because it is an important factor of SEO success. However, you may frequently find content recommendations under on-page SEO, which is also a legitimate strategy.

The key to success is producing excellent content that both people and search engines can understand.

The process of creating content should begin with keyword research.

Guidelines for Content SEO

• Find the SEO keywords that are important for your website and incorporate them into your content.
• Look for long-tail keywords and semantically related (or LSI) keywords, and add them to your titles, headings, and main content.
• Publish content that is thorough and long enough so that users can get what they want. Additionally, search engines have enough clues to understand the context of your content.
• Link out to other high-quality websites (if it makes sense) and to other pages of your website to help users learn more about a topic.
• Also, make use of schemas and structured data to pinpoint to search engines important parts of your content.

Off-Page SEO Checklist

The main focus of Off-page SEO is promotion. So, Off-page SEO refers to strategies you can use to advertise your website on the Internet. Basically, the previous types of SEO focused more on the structure and content of the website.

Popular websites are more likely to rank higher on Google than less popular websites.

The most important points on the off-page SEO checklist are:

• Learn about link building and why it’s important – Link building is the process of getting SEO backlinks from other websites.
• Brand Promotion. Basically, Google likes to rank known brands high in the results because people trust them.
• Review your link profile to identify and remove bad links
• Get links from high authority websites (11 methods)

Local SEO Checklist.

According to experts, local businesses should use local SEO

In other words, you should optimize your website for local SEO if you want to attract customers to your local store.

Guidelines for local SEO.

• Optimize your logo for local SEO
• Make sure that you have your business name, address, and contact details on all pages of your website.
• Add the Local Business schema on your homepage.
• Create a Google My Business Account
• Register your business with trusted directories such as Yelp, Yahoo small business, Foursquare, and other.
• Promote your website on local directories and websites (for example online local newspapers).

Mobile SEO

Again, mobile SEO is a subset of SEO that is tailored for mobile devices.

More than 60% of Google searches are now performed on mobile devices in the modern world.

Therefore, this is a clear sign that Internet usage is shifting from traditional desktop computers to mobile devices.

Important guidelines when working on mobile SEO.

• Your website should be mobile-friendly. You need to run the mobile- friendly test.
• The website loads fast on mobile (check your mobile speed).
• The website is easy to use on mobile. (test it on different resolutions).
• The user experience on mobile is not disturbed by interstitial banners, other methods of aggressive advertising, or, popups.
• Your CTA on mobile is visible and easy to access.

eCommerce SEO

The e-commerce sector is very large. An e-commerce website requires more advanced search engine optimization techniques than a blog or business website.

The most important eCommerce SEO guidelines.

• Firstly, before you begin to work on your product pages, properly optimize your homepage and category pages.
• Optimize your product pages based on the results of your keyword research.
• Optimize ALL graphic components (pictures, videos) of your business.
• Furthermore, add the necessary schemas (products, offers, etc.). • Contemplate original strategies to encourage individuals to link to your product pages.
• Promote your store on social media networks.
• Create a blog and post articles on your products and how they can be used to help people.

Conclusion

Finally, having a list is the best method to work on your SEO. Evidently, our SEO checklist up there covers almost all aspects of SEO. All of the aforementioned elements belong to a website with great SEO. As a result, your website will receive more visitors and rank higher.

So, you can learn SEO more quickly and acquire the necessary skills to use all SEO techniques by enrolling in an SEO certification course.