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Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Website & Site Audits 2019
Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Website & Site Audits 2019
There is no use of a website for a business, that’s nowhere found on Search Engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing. SEO is the Brain that gets you found by People, increase your brand and authority.
Organic Traffic; the ultimate goal for any Online Business is a sure-shot way to be found and purchased from on the web. The point of attracting leads to your online presence through Advertising and Content Marketing is to eventually obtain a consistent, uninterrupted flow of organic traffic. Since the competition among businesses online is very intense, when a potential customer or website visitor find your business, chances are he will see it along with other Businesses that offer the exact same product or service that you do. Although there is no ultimate method to attract organic traffic in large numbers, Search Engine Optimization is a major driver that’s crucial to enhancing a Business or Website’s presence on the Internet.
The biggest nightmare for any company striving to get increased outreach on the web is to see negligible or 0 organic traffic at the end of each day. Going from being invisible to a popular business/website online requires effort and strategy on your part. Organic Traffic is definitely not an overnight accomplishment and needs a good deal of time and attention. That said, getting a good flow of organic traffic fast is a very real need for E-commerce companies and Internet services which is why having an effective plan-of-action right from the time you build your web presence should be your utmost priority.
5 steps to Rank any website on Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization ( SEO) is the process of making your website ranking higher on Search Engines in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.
SEO never a quick fix, it always takes time to rank, as you’re doing SEO, your Competitors are doing SEO and Search Engines like Google keeps on Changing their Algorithms. SEO is a continuous process. 40% to 90% of leads come from Search engines like Google. 93% of all the search queries start with a search engine, more than 75% is search on Google. Top 4 positions (above the fold) gets max. a number of clicks.
SEO mainly divided into 5 Steps:
- Keyword Research
- Competitive analysis
- Technical SEO
- On Page SEO
- Off Page SEO
Keyword Research: is a method of finding best suitable queries searched by your target audience based on the user intent, search volume, keyword competition and length of the query etc. All ways easier to rank longer tail keywords (keyword phrases having 4 words or more). Here the best tools are – Google keyword planner, Keywordtool.io, Uber suggest etc.
After selecting the Keywords, it’s time to do competitive analysis to determine, how long it takes to rank the website. Here we do it using third party tools like – Moz, ahrefs, semrush etc
Technical SEO is all about making your website load faster (improve page speed), Clean code both front end and back end (W3 total validations), website architecture, Integrating webmasters and Analytics. Adding Sitemaps, making your website mobile friendly, optimize the images (visuals), website security (SSL) etc.
On Page SEO – is the technique of the using the keywords (which we want to rank in the website) within the website. Like using keywords in Meta title, Description, URL structure, within the content, heading tags, Alt text for images and internal links, breadcrumbs, Rich Snippets. Search engines give higher value to a website having unique content and lengthy content ( 1700 words minimum)
Off-Page SEO – 70% of SEO is off page , how well is your website famous, or how many backlinks that point towards your website. Search engine loves to see both quality and diversity of backlinks coming to your website. There are hundreds of ways to get backlinks, like guest blogging, Web 2.0, Document sharing, video sharing, business listing, Press releases, social bookmarking etc. Off page is a continuous process – keep getting high-quality relevant backlinks. ( make sure those links will get indexed ).
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Here is SEO Checklist we follow:
Don’t use Keyword rich domain names, for example: if a search is about “buy shoes online” Then buying a domain buyshoesonline.com ( or other TLD’s ). Using some aspect of a keyword is fine, but exact match keywords are not recommended as you may be penalized by EMD update.
- Preferred to use Top Level Domain extension. There are about 1500 TLD, The most famous of them is .com, .net, .org which are highly recommended. ( TLD has very little or no value in ranking your website on Google )
- Make your website Canonical. It’s nothing but redirecting your website to the dominant version of the main URL. For ex: if your search in the address bar “learndigital.co” it automatically redirects to www.learndigital.co
- Make sure your website has an XML sitemap– A sitemap is a file that contains all the links or URLs of a particular website it helps search engine is crawl quickly and more intelligently and see how pages are interconnected.
- Schematic Mark-ups: When you want your listing to be shown in a different way in Google, like image snippets, review snippets, event snippets, do Schematic mark-ups which help to get better Clicks and improve your CTR. Now search engines will understand more about your website.
- Using Robots.txt, Blocking certain pages of your websites from search engines like confidential pages, private pages etc., use can also use a meta tag: link rel =”no index, no follow”
- Make your website mobiles friendly by building a custom mobile page or make your website responsive (ie automatically the website adjusts based on the device). As more than 60% of the traffic comes from mobiles and Google gives priority to mobile-friendly websites. Make your website navigation structure clean ( UI/ UX).
- Page Speed Analysis: Make sure your websites load as fast as possible ( less than 5 sec optimal) anything more than that people will bounce. Make sure your website is hosted on a fast server with good ram and bandwidth, optimize images – don’t directly use HD images having big file size. Keep the image size as small as possible, use photo editing tools like Canva or Photoshop. Decrease the CSS and JS files as it increases the loading and use a good caching plugin and CDN. Tools to check loading time: GTmetrix, tools.pingdom.com, Google speed insights.
- Integrate with Google Search Console (previously Google Webmasters) and Bing Webmasters. When Google crawls your web page, its going to give a complete report on how is your website performing on Search engines. Crawling errors, Country targeting, Canonicalization. Submitting sitemap etc, Search Analytics – for what keywords or queries your ranking in which position of SERP (Search Engine Result Page). You will also get any warning if your website is penalized by any of their algorithms.
- Coming to On Page SEO: Use your Primary Keyword in your Title Tag, Keep the title tag between 60 to 70 Characters, Begin with your keyword and end with your domain name. Don’t do keyword Stuffing; Try to write magnetic headlines. This will be shown on Google and other Search Engines.
- URL Structure – keep your website URL’s Short, keep hyphens as best separators, you can use some aspect of the keyword (max. 4 to 5 words ). Don’t use special characters, better use keywords than numbers. The URL should signify the product or the service which we are offering.
- Meta Description tag: when you search a query on Google, the listing will have 3 components, page title, page url & page description. A description is a 3 line snippet that shows in the SERP, where it’s all about telling what that particular page is all about in 300 characters. Make your content very appealing and interesting, mainly use your primary and secondary keywords, so it increases your CTR.
- Heading Tags should be used on every single page of the website. There are 6 heading tags, From H1 to H6, the only difference between them is the font size, H1 is the biggest and h6 is the smallest. On every page, there should be min. 3 heading tags. H1 should be used only once and use your primary targeted keyword. H2 and H3 use synonyms. Make sure your heading tags are not more than 60 characters.
- Content is King in SEO, Make sure your content is of high quality, Make your content actionable, Google likes the website that is content rich, try to write lengthy content, of 1000 words, Try to use the primary keyword in the first page of the paragraph. Maintain a keyword density of 2%, and having your website content 80% unique.
- Internal Link building, is one of best on page techniques, try to interlink pages, so that the page rank( link juice ) will pass throughout the website. Don’t use too many exact match keywords as anchor text. Try to link common words also. So writing blog articles consistently and link to your main pages to rank faster.
- Google or other search engines like to see outbound links also. Where the backlinks are coming from and going to, make sure to give backlinks to authoritative domains. But don’t give too many, as it may lead to increase bounce rate & decrease customer engagement.
- Alt Text for Images, Giving an extra description about the images, Where search engines can’t understand what that image is about, give alt text, help search engines understand what that image is. It also helps in ranking on Google images.
- AMP – Accelerated mobile pages are for making your websites load faster on mobile devices, it is done by AMP as it removes all the unnecessary CSS and JS files and makes the website load very fast. The major disadvantage is it that it will increase the bounce rate, as sidebar links will be removes in mobiles. AMP is recommended for Blogs.
- Off-page SEO is all about getting more backlinks to your website, these links act a vote or recommendation to your website, but these links are not treated all equal, some links will be of high quality and some of low. Now if you want to rank your website in 2018, Make sure you are getting high-quality authority contextual do-follow backlinks to your website. Search engines are deeply interested in the quality and the number of backlinks that are pointing towards your website. There are so many off Page Techniques to get backlinks.
- Don’t do any Black Hat SEO, like keyword stuffing, hidden text, content spamming, Blackhat SEO is never recommended as a long-term strategy. Bust still in 2018 BlackHat SEO Works
Best Strategies for Increasing Organic Traffic:
- Social Media Marketing:
Social Media is the ultimate way to massive global outreach in the present day. Story-telling through Social Media has outdone a sleazy sales and marketing. People online want to see and hear real brand stories, and of practical examples of how a product or service can be of use to them. Social Media Marketing is also a way of showing who you really are, where you’re located at, and of the tools and methods by which you provide customer service. Through Social Media Marketing, you are free to market your content, and wares in a social-friendly way through story-telling and your followers will actively follow and spread the world. Here are the best Social Media strategies to instantly make your online presence available to potential customers and visitors online:
- Picking the best suited Social Media Platforms for you:
Social Media Platforms are many and varied. But each Platform has its own unique way of audience engagement. Find out the best platform through which you can realize the goals of your organization with regards to customer outreach. For instance; Instagram is a platform where you can share high-quality photographs. So if you sell photography ready products that users can view and get a better insight into its appearance, then Instagram is a worthy platform. Or if you run a salon, you can share photos of your studio or videos of the services you provide in action to attract customers.
- How to Share:
Each platform has a unique way of sharing to keep your followers interested without spamming their feed. If your Business is on LinkedIn, you can share interesting articles or useful resources to help job seekers/fellow entrepreneurs access vital information for advancing in their own career or business. Having a complete profile with accurate contact information and being professional is the best way to have an effective presence on LinkedIn. Only share posts that are engaging, relevant, and informative. Spamming puts your followers of so you need to control the frequency of your posts. Follow the current Social Media trends and use appropriate hashtags to make your profile reachable to the target audience. Use premium business tools to monitor your outreach and learn how well your campaigns are doing. Modify your Social Shares accordingly.
- Content Optimization:
Optimizing your online content for Search Engines is the foundation for driving healthy organic traffic. While creating content, maintain a healthy balance between search engine optimization and creating human readable, engaging content. The idea is to incorporate SEO strategies while writing content fit for online users.
- The Power of Long-Tail Keywords:
Keywords are everything when optimizing for search engines. In the insanely competitive world of keyword optimization, use of long-tail keywords is your safest bet in upping your search rankings. Long-Tail Keywords are a long-term investment which will reap huge organic traffic in the future. Long-Tail Keyword targeting is the hottest SEO strategy currently for the simplest reason being that users rarely search a single word or phrase when they’re looking for something specific. The biggest advantage of using long-tail keywords is that you’ll rank for that keyword as well as for slight variations of the keyword resulting in doubled organic traffic. Find high-volume long-tail keywords to use in your optimization strategy. Long-tail keywords are easy to integrate into your content but their placement shouldn’t appear forced.
- Quality wins over Quantity:
Search Engines won’t your content to be significant if it contains too many keywords and isn’t high quality and precise. Use simple language to clearly express your point across. After all, real human users will consume your content rather than search engines. Its useless if you churn out a million blog posts for the sake of SEO if your articles don’t serve a purpose and don’t link to related pages. Quality Content is your ultimate weapon to receive organic traffic because quality content attracts users more than any strategy or tricks. Never compromise on quality and you will eventually see good results.
Your website must be updated regularly if you expect an exponential increase in organic traffic over time. Whenever you get more information, add to your site. Check if links work and whether all the products and services are updated.
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