Basic SEO Checklist to Improve the Google Rank

Basically SEO checklist  include the tasks that are performed with/for a website or a webpage to generate organic traffic. It helps to rank on search engine pages. 

If you have not your own yet, then follow this SEO checklist. Sure you will get better results. 

Why do we need an SEO checklist? It will help to know what you need to do, and what is left to do, and  what has been done. You can analyse your website or webpage. Even many seo tools or SEO service agencies are available to make this easy. 

In addition, on Google search engine you need to perform best with best practices for better results. But how do you know if that is best practise or not? Thus this SEO checklist 2021 may help you to get the desired result. If you agree let’s come.

As seo divided into different categories, SEO checklist also categorised as well. Such as :

Basic SEO Checklist

Technical SEO Checklist

On Page SEO Checklist

Off Page SEO Checklist

Basic SEO Checklist:

  1. Setup GSC(Google Search Console)

It’s one among Google’s free tool lists that is to help you track your website’s or webpage’s performance in Google search engine.

Search Console is used for:

  • Provides a list of keywords that drive you the most traffic, even to which page
  • facility of sitemap Submission
  • inform and Fix website errors
  • send the message about Google’s new update 

It is the first and key step of doing SEO. 

2. Setup Bing Webmaster Tools

After Google, it is the most popular search engine. So, we can’t leave it, setup Bing Webmaster Tools.

This tool provides the facility to track the performance of your website on Bing Search Engine.

3. Setup Google Analytics.

It will help to find where users come to your website. It creates the potential How you can increase the traffic on websites. 

Google Analytics is the BEST way to see how people find (and use) your site.

Google Analytics is also a free tool which provides such feature :

  • how much traffic comes on your website from google
  • List of top Website pages that bring traffic
  • Graph of traffic showing that your traffic is increasing or decrease
  • define the source of traffic
  • can see users, page view, bounce rate, season time during for particular period of time

You’ll need to combine Google Analytics and Google Search Console to import data later.

4. Add SEO Plugin Yoast  or Rankmath ( WordPress Users Only)

Yoast SEO or Rankmath is the most popular SEO plugin for a WordPress site that makes it possible to do SEO in a fast time.

Yoast makes it very easy to optimize your WordPress site for search engines.

This technology helps you with SEO things like robots.text and sitemaps.

Technical SEO Checklist

Google promotes websites that have a great experience with visitors.
Technical SEO whereas ensure to index on search engines without error, also impact on user experiences. Later lead to more keywords ranking, increased organic traffic, etc.

In addition, One technical error can leave a bad impact on all the webpages.

So, ensure to follow this SEO Checklist, that can have a high impact to seo rank on google search engine.

Let’s discuss:

  1. Ensure the Use of HTTPS .

There is no doubt. HTTPS is one of the factors among others which impact on the SEO ranking.

So it’s time to change HTTP into HTTPS.

To check that you are using HTTPs or not, then look in the starting of the URL bar and see a padlock. If yes, yes.

2. Eliminate any duplicate or thin content

Make sure that only a single version of your site is indexing on search engines. 

See below Such as:

–        https://www.abc.com

–        https://abc.com

–        http://www.abc.com

–        https://abc.com

Search engines view all of the above domains as separate websites rather than one website.

So check one by one, none other than one is working. If yes then Setting up 301 redirects to the primary version(For example https://www.abc.com is prefered version.) of the URL.

3. See and fix any crawl errors:

Crawl errors are common but should not occur.

Crawl errors occur when a search engine fails to reach the page of a website.

Google Search Console (GSC) is very helpful in finding and fixing crawl errors.

You need to take simple steps. 

Just open GSC, then click on Overview at the top if left sidebar, then click on coverage. 

Or click on the Coverage button in the sidebar of GSC. Now you can see the list of urls which have some crawl error.

4. Improve website Speed

website speed impacts the user experience. If a website loads slowly, then users leave before loading. In result, We can see the high bounce rate means bad users experience in Google analytics. Which again is a seo rank factor. 

Google pagespeed insights, free tool generate the report of where is potential and how we can improve the website speed.

So, check your website speed and make sure to load your website as  quickly as possible.

5. Serve Mobile-Friendly Website 

Google new policy “Mobile-First Index”. It can be seen in Google Search Console report about Which web pages are mobile friendly or which are not.
So it is possible that your website does not get a good rank as per your effort. 
Make sure that your website is mobile friendly, use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool to check. If have, it’s okay.

6. Fix Broken Link- Internal and External

When a link leads a user to a page that either doesn’t work or is not expected by them. In result, It is calculated as poor user experience. Broken links can be fixed easily through either updating or removal.

On Page SEO Checklist

On page Seo checklist include the techniques that apply to optimise a web page and content of web pages.

Let’s know.

  1. Short and keyword-rich URL:

URL should be as short as possible. 

Why? Recent studies say that pages perform better which have short URLs. Furthermore, it is easy to read and understand for the user, which leads to improving the CTR(Click Through Rate).

Next, url tells that page is for what about. So make sure that URLs have the keyword.

2. Place Keyword In Your Title Tag

For Better results and rich user experience, the keyword should be in the title tag.

It’s important to place the keyword in the Title tag at the appropriate place. There is no better option Other than to put your keyword in the front of the Title tag.

3. Use Modifier in Title Tag:

Modifiers such as “top” “2021”, “best”, “easy”, “checklist”, “quick”, and “review” where help to rank for long-tail versions of your target keywords, enhance the CTR(Click Through Rate).

4. Ensure Use  Keyword in The First 150 Words

Make sure the focus keyword is included in the first 100-150 words of the webpage.

Because Google puts more weight for such placement.

5. Use H1, H2 or H3 Tags with Keyword:

H1 to H6 are known HTML Heater tags on the webpage, leaving a high impact on seo according to order H1-H6.

Make sure to contain your keyword in H1, H2 or H3 tags.

6. Optimize Meta Descriptions: 

Meta Description which shows in SERP list for search query. It should be unique between 150-160 character length, including the keyword phrase. 

7. Ensure use of and optimise images on Every Page: 

Use of image, video enhances the user experience and interaction,  and additionally reduces the bounce rate.

Furthermore, allow image alt tag, image description and image search in google increases the visibility of your page.

8. Use Synonyms and LSI Keywords

The days to get rank with the repeated use of the same keywords has gone.

Now, Google’s upgraded algorithms give weight to those pages, which also  have keyword’s synonyms and LSI.. 

LSI Keywords can’t take the same as synonyms. Basically It refer to those that are closely tied with your keyword.

9. Improve internal and external link:

Why don’t ? When It can be done easily.

So add 2-5 links  which refer to the high authority website like wikipedia, face, google etc. 

Also add some other links which refer to your website’s other pages.

Ratio of link to content may vary between 2-4 links per 700 words.

But make sure, the link should be relevant with the content as well as the anchor text.

Off Page SEO Checklist

All the tasks which can be done outside of a website or webpage to help you improve SERP position. They can be included into the off-page seo checklist. Such that : Link building, content marketing, forums, profile creation, image and doc sharing etc.

Off-page SEO is done to increase website reach and get authority links from related sites.  It helps to increase the chance of higher rank on SERP.

Link may be do-follow or no-follow. Dofollow link passes a relation link about you from the linked website. That tells the crawler who you are and what for. Do-follow links from a high DA site help to improve seo rank in quick time.

  1. Keywords Research and Analysis: 

You can hope for a better result, if you are working on those keywords which are searched and relevant to the website.

Make a list of parameter to choose the keywords such as:

  • Monthly Volume – How many times is searched,
  • CPC(Cost per click) if you want to run paid campaign
  • PD (Paid Difficulty) 
  • SD(SEO Difficulty) How many efforts need to get top rank
  • Relevancy with website or webpage’s content

For this, some free available tools like Keyword Planner, Google trending, etc can be used. 

2. Analyse and steal Competitor’s link building strategy:

If you are not getting traffic as per expectation, then you need to analyse the competitor link building strategy, to know how he is getting  the enough traffic and from where?

Find the source where competitor’s websites are getting the backlinks. So, try to get the link from the same source to beat the competitors.  

3. Make link building strategy:

There are more than one way to get backlinks, so I need to make a plan to do that. 

Basic things of link building strategy:

  • Make  a list of websites which offer/provide links,
  • know the difference between no-follow or dofollow,
  • know the DA of the website providing backlink, if the DA is high, it is good.

Ways of getting a backlinks: Bookmarking, image sharing, doc sharing, profile creation, blog posting, business listing, directory submission, etc.

Conclusion:
In this article, we, Miraculous Soft, SEO Service Agency, tried to define the seo tasks in short which may help to improve your website rank. These task can get a space in the basic list of SEO task if we make.