22-12-2021
Website Checklist - SEO
If you’ve had a new website developed, you want it to be easy to find. With thousands of new websites being added every day, it’s becoming increasingly important to make your website stand out from the competition. With the right keywords, you can improve your website’s discoverability and make it easier to find on search engines like Google and Bing.
We’ve put together a concise overview of these dos and don’ts to ensure optimal organic visibility.
- Incorporate relevant keywords into your content and metadata. This metadata includes a website’s page title and meta description, which you can easily manage yourself in the Content Management System. One way to find these keywords is to conduct thorough keyword research. You can do this yourself using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, or you can have a specialist handle it for you.
- Conduct a baseline measurement. How do you rank on the first day of launch, and how do you rank a few weeks after launch? You can do this very easily by noting the position of specific keywords within Google and repeating this a few weeks later. Then you can see if you’re ranking better for the desired keywords and make adjustments where necessary.
- Each page has a relevant meta description that is about 120 to 160 characters long.
- Page titles include the topic and your company name and are limited to 55 characters.
- Ensure SEO-friendly URLs so
visitors immediately understand what the page is about.
Tips for an SEO-friendly URL:
- Maximum 65 characters
- As short as possible
- In lowercase
- As relevant as possible to the content on your page
- Spaces are represented by "-" characters.
- Google Search Console is set up and linked to the website, and make sure your sitemap is added. Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google. It allows you to track and maintain your site’s presence in Google’s search results.
- Check the images on your website for alt tags . Photos should have a descriptive filename that makes them easy to find. In other words, an alt tag is a snippet of text you use to tell Google what the image is about.
You add an alt tag for three reasons:
First, to help Google assess how relevant the image is to the page where it appears. For certain search queries, this can boost the page’s relevance.
Second: to help the image rank in Google Images.
Third: to assist people with visual impairments. They use special software that reads the page aloud, including alt tags.
- Pages use logical headings and subheadings. The page’s topic is in an H1 tag (main heading) and is supplemented with H2 and H3 (sub)headings. By using H1, H2, and H3 heading tags, you contribute to the readability and SEO structure of your website.
- There are sufficient internal links: both within the content and in the sub- and main menus. By adding the right internal links, you ensure that Google and other search engines understand the relevance of certain pages, the relationship between pages, and the value of certain pages.
- Noindex and nofollow meta tags have been removed from the development phase. Noindex prevents search engines from indexing web pages, so you should only use it during the development phase.
- Google Analytics has been installed and, if applicable, linked to Google AdWords.
- Voice search is growing rapidly. The use of frequently asked questions and long-tail keywords is very important here. Long-tail keywords are specific and often much longer than the short search terms with high monthly search volumes. The top spot in the rankings for a long-tail keyword will therefore generate proportionally less traffic. However, the traffic you generate often has more value because the search term is specific. This increases the likelihood that your visitor will find exactly what they were looking for on your page. And this, in turn, is good for your conversions.
- Make sure your website is always up to date. This will help you rank higher in Google.
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