Your essential SEO survival checklist
By: Robert Oh, SEO Specialist & Product Strategist
Improving the SEO of your website can be daunting. This SEO best practices survival checklist will guide you through the 3 essential SEO survival packs you’ll need to rank higher in search results!
Every site owner has aspirations to be the highest ranked page on search engines. Most fail to reach this summit. To understand what it takes to achieve this goal, we must first understand the objective of search engines. Let’s examine the mission statements of the top 3 search engines in the world:
Google’s mission: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Bing’s mission: “Search less and do more.”
Baidu’s mission: “Provide the best and most equitable way for people to find what they’re looking for.”
The common underlining thread in all these mission statements, is surfacing the best answers in the shortest interval. Best answers. This doesn’t imply providing answers ‘as good’ as everyone else, it explicitly means the best. A very common question asked by website owners is “My content is as good as this other page, why isn’t my page ranking as high?” Simple answer, if it is as good, why would Google rank yours ahead?!
It is important to critique your site/pages against your competitors, and strive to produce content that separates itself from the realm of subjectivity and stands alone as THE definitive best. Be the most valuable, useful and interesting. Sound daunting? Well it is, but it is also achievable.
We will dedicate this post to discussing the 3 essential SEO survival packs required to start up the treacherous journey of ranking. Ready? Let’s get to it.
SEO Survival Pack 1: Content Planning
To effectively create exceptional content, you should do some leg-work before putting pen to paper (or keys to authoring tool…doesn’t quite have the same ring to it). Let’s cover a few key tasks that should be part of your planning exercise.
▢ Identify all the topics that are relatable to your organization. From this list, target the core topics that you either have the most expertise or are the most valuable to your organization.
Do not attempt to be everything to everybody, be focused!
▢ Research keywords and phrases your potential users will be searching for to find your content (factoring in all levels of subject matter expertise). Focus your efforts on 3–5 keywords per page. Strategically target keywords that are not highly competitive. Keep in mind that the more competition there is for a keyword the more challenging it will be to rank for it, so be realistic!
Tools: There are a few free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, however if you’re looking for more advanced capabilities (ie. competitive insight) consider subscribing to SimilarWeb, SEMRush.
▢ Track the top 10 ranked sites (excluding paid ads) for each of your keywords, and focus in on what are they doing well and what they could be doing better (i.e. what details are missing?, are there usability issues?, what is the quality of their writing?, how are they using images?)
Tools: Buzzsumo provides exceptional insight on what content is performing best for keywords, who is sharing it, and what other content those people are sharing.
▢ Create high quality content on a regular basis around core topics so that users view you as an expert/authority on the subject. It is best practice to build a content calendar to effectively plan your content development effort
SEO Survival Pack 2: Content Development
Now that we have a content plan, it’s time to put fingers to keys. Below are tips you should follow to ensure your pages are optimized for search engines.
▢ Write impactful page titles that are natural and concise (under 70 characters). Make sure they include the keywords you are targeting.
Caution: do not attempt to stuff it with keywords, as search engines are advanced enough to identify these circumstances and will discount your content.
▢ Ensure keywords appear in the main content and not just the title. Keywords should be included in the natural flow of your writing, and not stuffed to attempt to increase your ranking.
▢ Ensure every page on your website has at least 250 words of descriptive text. Search engines like Google crawl and index pages based on what those pages are telling them. If you aren’t doing a good job of including enough words (and keywords you want to rank for) on each page, then you will have a more difficult time ranking for those keywords.
▢ Studies have indicated the more words you have in your content the better it will perform. This should not be used as an excuse to artificially increase your word count at the sacrifice of quality. If additional words will provide users with greater context, that would be beneficial. If additional words will just make the user just read more words, that isn’t beneficial.
▢ Organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions (using subheadings, layout separation, paragraph breaks) helps users find the content they want faster.
▢ Anchor text should be concise and contextual:
Good: Star Wars trailer, unveils new villain.
Bad: New Star Wars trailer, click here.
Both internal and external links are valuable for Google to determine context and value of a link.
This should be natural and not a method to spam hundreds of links on your page.
▢ Keep your meta-description under 150 characters. This is the text under a page title in search results. Ensure it clearly describes the page and includes keywords. The meta description does not factor into your search ranking, however it can entice users to click through to your page.
▢ Ensure your images use brief but descriptive alt attributes and filenames. Ensure keywords are presented at/near the beginning of the attribute.
▢ PDFs ideally should be converted to HTML, however search engines can still crawl these documents in a limited fashion. Images in PDFs will not be indexed. PDFs should have contextual URLs (meaning the URL and filename should provide context of what the PDF is about). Ensure you save the PDF in an older version to attain maximum viewership.
▢ Ensure you are using one, and only one, H1 tag on your pages. H1 tags should be used as the page’s main headline and they usually contain the page’s main keywords.
▢ Ensure H1 tags are used before other header tags (H2, H3, H4). Your header tags should be used in a hierarchal order and provide structure to your page. For example, H1 tag text should be placed above H2 tag text and H2 tag text above H3 tag text, and so on.
▢ Ensure URLs are keyword rich, and generally under 90 characters. The URL should provide anyone with the context of what the page is about.
▢ Try to avoid underscores in URLs and use dashes to separate words.
▢ Use canonical tags to avoid page dilution and PageRank split (and general Google confusion). More than one canonical tag on a page will result in canonical being ignored.
Example of multiple versions of a page: If you run a marketing campaign leveraging UTMs (tracking codes) this would represent an example of a duplicate version of a page and should have a canonical tag referring back to the original page.
▢ Use self-referencing canonical tags as a defensive mechanism for marketing tactics (ie. UTM) and nefarious action.
▢ Consider adding product reviews or comment features to your pages. This will add more content to your product pages and help them rank for long tail keywords. Ensure the comment/review section uses the rel=”no-follow” metatag to ensure your site’s reputation is not shared inappropriately.
▢ Ensure content is the focus and not the ads (i.e. no scrolling should be required to see content on a landing page). In addition, ensure any ads on your page are not deceptive (i.e. not disguised as content).
▢ Watch for spam/hack content on your site and remove as soon as you can.
▢ Setup redirects. Don’t delete pages without first setting up a 301 redirect. Even if a page is no longer applicable, setup a redirect so that users land on another page and any authority is shared with this ‘new’ page.
SEO Survival Pack 3: Content Marketing
In the world of SEO, you will hear a lot about link building. Link building is the act of acquiring links to your content. The more relevant and reputable links you acquire for your content, the higher the authority search engines’ will apply to it, and consequently the higher your content will rank. That said, acquiring links should be a natural outcome of your overall content amplification strategy (i.e. social media engagement, e-mail, etc.).
▢ Create a content marketing strategy. What are the business goals? What value are you delivering to your audience? Where will you reach your audience?
▢ Identify the social platforms your audience participates on, and build the appropriate profiles (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ Pinterest, Yelp). Social media engagement metrics is becoming a more prominent authoritative signal for search engines. Share only the best and most relevant content.
▢ Use analytic tools like Google Analytics to identify sources that are linking to you for the purposes of optimizing (i.e. tweaking the anchor text) and building relationships for additional/future opportunities. Magestic and Ahrefs are the two best paid tools for link analysis and competitive insights.
▢ Acquire regional, relevant, and reputable links.
Regional: If you have regional specific content (i.e. content for Spain), it is valuable to acquire links in that region. This provides a signal to search engine that you are serving quality regional content, and will help rank this content higher in this region.
Relevant: Acquire links that are relatable to your content. If your content is about travel, and you are acquiring links from irrelevant sources (lawn care services), it doesn’t send a strong signal that your content is an authority on travel.
Reputable: One of the most important authoritative signals is the reputation of the sources linking to your content. If your content is acquiring links from low value/spam sites, this will not improve your ranking and may in fact hurt it. Conversely, if your content is acquiring high value links (i.e. Huffington Post, NY Times) this will send a very strong authoritative signal.
We will discuss in a future post, tactics on how to gradually build your reputation to ultimately acquire links from high value sources.
▢ Use Google’s Disavow Tool to block links that may hurt reputation (ie. Google may view you inaccurately in collusion with a site that violates terms (ie. paying for links)).
▢ Do not attempt to purchase links, to artificially promote your site.
You Are Ready!
You’ve got your SEO survival packs, now it’s time to set forth up the ranking mountain. Do not fear, we will be your Sherpas to avoid pitfalls and help guide you to the peak. We hope to see you around for our next post where we take on the challenge of globalization.
