SEO is very important for your own website. We put together a checklist for you to make sure which aspects need to be covered in order for you to have a proper SEO setup on your site. There a several steps that need to be considered and we have listed some factors briefly below that are crucial for your to conduct proper SEO:
Is you website mobile friendly?
If websites are not optimized for mobile display they will not satisfy the user needs and people will start leaving your site instantly. The mobile usability of a website has been a ranking factor since 2015 already. If your want to conduct proper SEO make sure your website is mobile friendly. Google has its own mobile friendly test in which can you directly see in how far your site is optimized for mobile or not.
Do you know your relevant keywords and are they within the content of your website?
Keywords and search terms are the key to attract users to come and visit your website. In order for your to rank if people use these keywords you have to make sure that your text make use of these terms. Remember not to overuse these terms and integrate them organically within your content. You can use free tools such as Answer the Public or even use Google’s autocomplete function to find your relevant keywords.
Does each page have a meta description?
Meta descriptions enables users to see a brief description of what each page is about and is a good indicator of what the page’s content is all about. Make sure to keep these description short, precise and interesting and also use the page’s keywords.
Is the URL optimized for SEO?
The URL structure of the page should be setup logically and understandably. Be sure to name your URL according to the content of the page and try to avoid numbers, dates and other complex structures. Search engines love simple and straight-forward URL structures.
Does your website have a clear heading structure?
Heading tags, also known as h-tags are titles within your content which define the html structure of a website and enables crawlers to read the page. Make sure to structure the titles according to a hierarchy, i.e from h1-h2-h3 etc. Also add keywords within these titles.
Did you provide descriptions and alt-tags to images?
Alt-tags help crawlers identify the content of the images so that users can find images in the image search functions. You can also provide descriptions to each image to make sure that these will be indexed, crawled and displayed correctly.
Did you provide internal linking?
Behind every link is a html code, a so-called anchor-tag. This tag informs users and crawlers where the links lead to. For a better SEO it is best to use relevant keywords also within these anchors. Also make sure to interlink between your pages within the website so that crawlers can identify the connections.
Do you use a SSL certificate?
Users and crawlers prefer secured websites during the data transfer. SSL certificates actually provide a secure encoding between the user device and the relevant server. Search engines honor websites with SSL certificates and rank these higher than those without.
Is your website loading fast?
The loading speed of a website, also known as page speed, will be considered in the ranking as is a ranking factor for search engines. Make sure to optimize your website for speed so that it loads faster and enables a better user experience. You can check your site using tools such as GTmetrix or Google’s Lighthouse.
