It’s easy to forget the the simplest SEO tasks when you’re busy. Search engines can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site, but only if you’re consistent about doing the SEO work.
Here’s a simple checklist reminder for the next time you post on your blog or add a new page to your site. This list doesn’t include overarching SEO techniques for your entire website, but focuses on the everyday tasks when adding new content to a site which is already optimized for SEO.
- Choose keywords appropriate to the page; don’t simply replicate the website keywords on every page. Ask yourself, “What does my visitor want from this page or blog post?”
- Title tag
- Description tag
- Alt tag for images
- Image file names
- Social sharing fields (title, snippet, image)
- Using your keywords in the headings and sub-headings
- Keyword in page URL (aka “slug”) (and domain name, if possible)
- Keywords in text: don’t stuff them in, but having them near each other (“proximity”) helps; put them closer to the top of the page.
- Links to internal pages
- Links to external pages (make sure it’s a reputable site)
- If you’re using WordPress, choose one of the SEO plugins, like Yoast, to make it easier. It gives you easy-to-complete fields for data entry on the tags and snippets, and reminds you if your SEO isn’t strong for that page.
- If you have a Category or Round Up page that shows popular posts on a specific topic, add the new post/page to that directory for your website.
You can check where you currently rank for your keywords in Google Analytics. It’s the Queries report: Acquisition>Search Console>Queries
Want details? Check out my blog post Getting Your Website Seen on Search Engines.
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