Quick SEO Checklist for Every Website

Here is a quick checklist that pretty much every website can use to make sure the basics of SEO are covered, which will help increase your ranks.

Meta titles and descriptions – The meta title and description are used to tell search engines like Google what your website and page is about, so that it can use that information and decide where to show your website. It’s also the information that displays in the Google search results. So whatever you set your titles and description to, that is what will show to people in the search results.

Make sure that every page on your website has the title and description entered, and be sure to include the main keywords relevant to each page in them. This will help with your ranks.

H1 Headline – Each page should have a main headline, and this headline needs to be formatted in H1 (meaning Heading 1). By formatting it this way, this tells Google this is the most important text on the page, so it puts a lot of importance on this headline and the words in it. This means that by creating a good headline which contains the keywords you want to rank for, you increase your chances of ranking for those keywords.

Sitemap – You always want to make sure you have an up to date sitemap in XML file format uploaded to your website and that it is submitted in Google Search Console under “sitemaps”. You can easily find free sitemap makers online which will generate a sitemap for you from your URL, and then give you the file. You then upload this to the root folder of your website.

The sitemap tells Google all the pages you have on your website and in what hierarchy they are, so it doesn’t miss any pages (yes that can happen) and it knows what priority they go.

Every time you make any new changes to the URLs of your website, such as adding new pages, new blog posts or updating any URLs, you should upload a new sitemap.

Here is what an XML sitemap looks like:

Blog – Having a blog on your website is a very good idea in terms of SEO for several reasons.

One, it allows you to make posts which can target specific keywords, and link to relevant pages on your website which adds to their ranking (this is a very simple explanation). It is quite common for blog post pages to rank on the first page quickly if targeted properly.

Two, you are putting fresh new content on your website, and Google likes this. The newer the content, the better. And the more, the better (as long as it’s quality and relevant). If you make sure you have a blog feed on your home page, Google will see this as new content always being added and this only helps you when it comes to ranking.

Image File Names – Often times you will come across images on website named something like gfdios4545f5.jpg or IMG_54334.Jpeg. This does nothing to help your rankings. Instead, what you should be doing is naming your image with relevant keywords to what the image is.

So if it’s a picture of a mechanic fixing a car and you want to rank for mechanics in Auckland, name the picture something like “Mechanic_auckland.jpg”. Do this for all photos on your website. Also make sure not to include spaces but use underscores (_) or dashes (-) instead. If you use spaces, it will display as Mechanic%20auckland.jpg in the URL.

What this does is it adds relevance to the page for those keywords, and also increases the chances that your image will appear in the image search. This only means extra traffic so you don’t want to miss out.

Also make sure you fill in the Alt tags for each image. With the alt tags, just write whatever is in the image. So for the example above, you would write something like “mechanic fixing a car”.

One thing to note when it comes to keywords. Don’t just stuff keyword everywhere. If you try to just keyword stuff, it will be considered spam and you will actually lose ranks. Make sure the text always looks natural, like you would write a sentence. You wouldn’t write “mechanics Auckland fix car auto repairs service city central north shore” in your content, so don’t do it when it comes to keywords. And make sure you are only putting the keywords in the relevant places. If you put the same keywords on all your pages, it will make all the pages less relevant and you will lose ranks. Instead, focus on just one page for that keyword and it will get higher.