The digital economy is worth 15.5% of world GDP! This astounding figure tells us that having a strong online presence for your business is surely going to have some serious impact.
Yet, to make any headway with your website, you need to embrace all aspects of SEO. Without strong SEO strategies built into your site, it’ll be like shooting at a target in the dark when it comes to trying to attract unique visitors to your site.
So to get you on the right track, we’re going to give you a basic SEO checklist that every website should have. By using this checklist effectively, you can expect your website to rank higher. Let’s get to it!
Basic SEO Concepts
You can separate search engine optimization into three key components: on-page, technical, and external factors. Each of these SEO components contains various checklist points to consider for your website.
We’ll now run through each of these SEO components in more detail. See the points below as a beginner’s guide to SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is all about making everything that you can see visually on your website optimized for search engines. Your main priority should be to rank well on Google as this is the most popular search engine by far! Here are a few checklist points to consider for on-page SEO:
- Keywords and phrases
- Regularly updated content
- URL choice
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Headings and body copy
- Image alt attributes
- Anchor text
It’s also a good idea to consider structured data for your website. This is to do with Schema markup. And if you’re wondering “what does anchor text mean,” then click the link to find out.
Technical SEO
There are various technical SEO aspects to consider. Here are some SEO basics to think about:
- Signing up for Google Console
- XML Sitemap
- Robots.txt
- Site architecture
- Site speed and mobile-friendly
- SSL certificates.
If you have more than one domain name, you need to make sure it does a 301 redirect for good SEO practice. It shouldn’t have 302 direct or mirror your main site.
External Factors for SEO
There are certain aspects of SEO that don’t happen on your site, so we can call them external factors. There are three main external factors we’ll mention now:
- Social media
- Local search
- Backlinks
Social media activity is an obvious way to draw attention to your website. With so many users on social media platforms, you have the opportunity to gain popularity on them and divert traffic to your website.
Listing yourself on local online directories can help your business a lot. It’s an essential part of basic SEO if you are a local business looking to attract customers.
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better your Google and other search engine rankings will be.
Your Basic SEO Checklist
So now you have a basic SEO checklist to refer to when you are starting a new site or revamping one. Either way, it’s a good idea to bookmark this post and check back on it when you are doing any sort of SEO work.
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