Your Seo Checklist: Steps To Optimizing Your Website

 

If you’ve been looking for ways to improve your company’s digital performance, you’ve probably wondered how to optimize your website. Digital transformation has put the user increasingly in the spotlight, making understanding of individual demands or interest groups essential to the success of a business. In this sense, being easily found in Google and other search engines is a key factor in strengthening your online presence. The main search sites try to offer the best possible experience to the user, highlighting on the first page of the response only those sites that are really reliable and that deserve the attention of those who are looking for it.

 

This write-up will explain all the points that should be included in your list of steps to put the SEO strategy into practice. We will see from techniques you can apply within the web pages themselves to strategies to get links to your site and the user experience better.

 

1. SEO On-Page

On-page SEO optimizations are improvements that we make in the elements of the web pages themselves, especially with regard to the formatting and content of them. Let’s see what they are:

 

• Keyword

Keywords are an essential part of an SEO strategy because they help give the semantic value to your pages. They represent one of the best ways for search engines to interpret the subject of a content, listing it in the results when the user searches for a term that actually has some connection to that page. To find keyword ideas, you can use Google’s keyword planner (just have an AdWords account), tools like Keyword Tool.

Remember that search engines are sophisticated enough to understand synonyms for related keywords and phrases. Therefore, there is no need to repeat your keyword in excess: known as keyword stuffing, this practice is condemned by search engines and may even lead to penalization of your positioning. Not to mention that this leaves the text monotonous, without rhythm and without appeal with its public.

 

• Title

The title (<title> in HTML) is the first information about your page that appears in search engine results, so it deserves a lot of attention. It must be relevant to your content and convey to the user what they find when accessing your page.

 

If your title is intended merely to attract clicks instead of reflecting the subject the page is about, your placement may be harmed, as this is a way of trying to manipulate users to click on your link. Build an interesting title that will spark people’s attention, but always with honesty. Remember to include the keyword here, keeping in mind that the closer to the beginning of the title, the better the chances of you getting more clicks.

 

• URL

The URL is the second information about your page that appears in the SERP, so it is important that it convey some meaning. Addresses containing numbers or characters without a clear sense, such as www.yourcompany.com.br/?p=145367, are not friendly and do not represent anything to the user. A friendly URL should contain the page’s keyword, be consistent with the content, and count on about five terms beyond the site’s own domain.

 

• Meta Description

The meta description is the third information about your page that users see in the search results list. This is a short description of the webpage and is a great resource for influencing people to click on your site. The meta description is a tag in the <meta content = “” name = “description”> format, where the content parameter is to be filled with the desired description, not to exceed 160 characters. If you do not add the meta description tag, the search engine will automatically assign a description for the page, which in general will produce an undesirable result.

 

It is therefore best to create a description that will arouse the reader’s curiosity, and whenever possible include a call to action at the end – something like “Click to find out!” And “Learn more!” – to encourage you to access your page.

 

• Content

When a user searches for a particular term, it is the searcher’s job to deliver the best results in order of relevance to that person. One of the most important factors in determining this relevance is the quality of the content. When we talk about content, we refer mainly – but not solely – to the production of text format materials such as posts on your company’s blog and landing pages that are really interesting to the audience you want to reach. Thinking about other rich media such as videos, e-books, infographics and podcasts is also part of this type of strategy.

 

• Heading Tags

Heading tags, or headers, are the <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags. As already mentioned, the <h1> tag can be used to indicate the title of the page. On the other hand, the <h2> tag represents an inter-title within the text, the <h3> tag represents an intercept within <h2> and so on until <h6>.

 

These tags serve to structure the text better, making it clear to the search engine that certain parts are more prominent than others. Therefore, the use of these headers also contributes to search engines better understand their content, representing one more factor that they analyze for relevance and positioning purposes.

 

• Images

Images are a key part of the content, as they work with the visual appeal and help complement what is present in the text. Not everyone knows, but good use of this feature can be beneficial to an SEO strategy.

 

The main search engines in the market rely on an exclusive search of images, in which your site may also have the chance to appear. For this, the ideal is to help the searcher understand what the image shows through a parameter known as alternative text (alt text).

 

2. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO strategies are external to your pages and involve practices to facilitate and encourage other sites to point to links – known as backlinks – to yours.

 

Let’s understand how this works?

 

• Backlinks

We can imagine the external links pointing to your site as if they were votes, indicating to the search engine that you were relevant to the point that someone included a backlink to your page. But how to get these links? The best way to achieve this goal is by producing and disseminating quality content.

 

Here it is worth noting that you also need to share this material on social networks, through email marketing campaigns or other channels, so that it reaches even more people. You can contact a blog that posts articles that have to do with your market and offer to collaborate. In return, those responsible may offer a link to your site in your description of author in the subscription of posts, for example.

 

3. Page Load Time

Google and other search engines see the user experience as one of the positioning factors, and page load time has a lot to do with it. Users already expect sites they visit to upload quickly – even more if they’re using a smartphone and a mobile connection. If they do not, they will quickly lose their patience and abandon that page, going in search of new content (which will likely be made available by the competition). If your site is experiencing this issue, keep in mind that visitors who drop out of a site will rarely return. So, try to follow the following guidelines to optimize the loading time of your site:

• compress the images to decrease the amount of data on the page;
• compress the HTML, CSS and Javascript files;
• enable caching;
• avoid importing external files;
• if these changes do not improve the loading speed satisfactorily, opt for a more robust server.

 

4. Google AMP

The AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project is an open source standard for web publishing whose purpose is to upload your articles faster on mobile devices. Accelerating this speed of loading has been a concern of Google, especially because it has to do with the good user experience and the fact that the number of mobile internet access has already exceeded the number of accesses via desktop around the world.

 

5. Redirects

Sometimes we want to change the URL of a page on our site for a variety of reasons, including optimization reasons, as we saw earlier. But what about the visitors coming to your site by an old URL – whether from a third-party site or even from a search engine?

 

First of all, this solution no longer requires you to ask all site administrators who have links to your site to fix these backlinks. Second, redirects allow Google and other search engines to understand that the page with that old URL was given a new address and so it is not a new webpage, thus retaining the relevance it already had before.

 

6. Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml is a file that must be in the root directory of your site (www.yourcompany.com/sitemap.xml). Its job is to list all the URLs of the pages it contains to guide search engines to find all of them, in other words, it’s a feature that helps increase the chances of your pages appearing on Google and other search engines. While generating the sitemap and putting it at the root of your site is already a great SEO practice, you can get even better results by sending this file to the search engines.

 

7. Robots.txt

Robots.txt is also a file that should stay at the root of your site, but it does have a different sitemap function. Its purpose is to point out to search bots, computer programs that crawl the web for new pages and page changes, which directories they are allowed to visit or not.

This is to prevent internal pages, important only to company employees, from appearing in the search results, for example. The strategy also prevents users from reaching a site through searches if it is still under construction.

 

8. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a navigation feature that can be included in the site to structure it into levels or categories. They serve both to help the user locate within and to help the search engine to better qualify its pages.  In addition to facilitating user navigation if he wants to return to a page some level up, such as seeing the agency’s services again, breadcrumbs may also appear in Google results.

 

9. Canonical Tags

When you create more than one page with the same content or very similar content, this may catch the eye of Google. The search engine does not handle duplicate information well and may apply some kind of punishment to your site for this, unless you indicate what the original content is through canonical tags.

 

An example would be a site that has a paged part to list a number of successful business cases. Because pages of this type have a very similar structure, changing only the list of cases, Google can see them as duplicate content. Thus, it is worth including a canonical tag from the second page onwards pointing to the first one. Another example is when you replicate original content from your own blog on another site. To avoid problems, make sure that this external page has a canonical tag pointing to your blog.

 

Final Considerations

As we can see, a complete SEO strategy has many details, ranging from on-page aspects to off-page factors and a little more technical detail. Despite all these minutiae, these are implementations that really pay off and can be the differential that will get your site to the top of the search.

 

About Author:

 

Sarah Feldman is a Marketing Manager and is currently working with Digital Express, a Digital Marketing Agency in Dubai. She loves to learn and share about the latest digital marketing updates and trends.