Instant SEO Checklist for Publishing Websites

No matter how good your content is, it would never fulfill its purpose unless the SEO is good. Search Engine Optimization of content is what gets it a high ranking when people type in keywords on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Thus, it doesn’t come as a surprise that most companies who are into content marketing are on constant look out for SEO experts, who would ensure that their content is easily retrievable on the World Wide Web.

Wondering what it takes to get your content, keyword optimized? Here is a checklist to help you out.

Technical Aspects for Kick A** SEO

For a website to be highly searchable, you need to check on some of the technical aspects that are extremely important for an efficient SEO.

How Accessible and Index’able’ is your Content?

It is very important to ensure that the content you put up on your website is accessible to all the major search engines. Lack of accessibility means lower ranks and lesser or no traffic. Equally important is to ensure that the search engine crawlers are listing down all your web pages in their index. Checking the XML sitemap, robot.txt file and HTTP status codes will give you an idea about this.

Original Content

Do you know that e-commerce websites often find it very hard to get a high ranking in search engine lists? This is because their content is often similar, thereby nullifying the need for unique content. You need to make sure that all the content on your website is original and unique.

Inbound Links

Back links and in bound links is what keeps your content interconnected to each other. In case some of the pages are deleted or changed, make sure that you edit all the links for easy traffic movement.

Speed of the Website

There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for a website to load. Keeping an eye on the speed at which your page loads is extremely important. A slow loading speed may reduce your ranking and lose you some important audience.

Titles and Tag Optimization

It is not just the content that should be unique. Headings, sub headings and tags should be too. What’s more, the length of the titles should not exceed 30–65 characters and that of the description should be within 100–150 characters. This would ensure a higher ranking for your website.

Image Optimization

Keeping an eye on the size and dimensions of the images that you use is important. An overstretched image would never solve its purpose. Additionally, the filename of the image should be informative in itself and should have an appropriate alternate text.

Compatible with Mobile Layout

With more and more people switching on to accessing internet on their smartphones, search engines have introduced a separate crawler for mobiles. Thus, in order to enhance your website ranking, you need to optimize it such that it is searchable by mobile users too.

Toolkit for SEO Auditing

Carrying out an SEO audit for a website is a tedious job and can take up a lot of time. However, there are some tools available that can actually quicken this process and make it a tad easier.

• Comprehensive Auditing Tools that help in scanning the website content, zeroing in on the errors, suggesting possible solutions and fixing certain errors
• Tools that help in analyzing your website’s accessibility and its performance
• Tools that keep an eye on the back links and in bound links and alert you when links are broken or needs to be changed
• Tools to check originality and uniqueness of content
• Tools that help analyze the speed at which your website loads

With these tools and ideas in your kitty, your website is sure to be one of the most optimized one, thereby driving more traffic to it. However, a regular rain check is important that everything is working fine and to overcome any shortfalls.