The Ultimate SEO Checklist

Get ready to unlock the secrets to boosting your website’s visibility on search engines!

We’ll take you through a range of items to setup to help you optimise your website for search engines.

Plus, we’ll even answer some common SEO questions in FAQs section. Let’s dive in!

SEO can be a lot of work, but it’s worth it.

The best way to get people to your website is by making sure your content is optimised for search engines. The more visible you are, the more likely you’ll be found and the more likely people will click on your link. Also, that means more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.

But there’s a lot that goes into SEO, and it can be overwhelming. That’s why we wrote this SEO checklist—to give you all the information you need to optimise your web pages so they come up in search results.

We’ll cover SEO basics checklist, Technical SEO checklist, On-pge SEO checklist, Content checklist, Keyword research checklist, and FAQs.

We’ve broken down each step into easy-to-follow sections. So you can easily find what you’re looking for, or refer back to the whole checklist later if needed.

So let’s get started!

How To Use This Checklist

This SEO checklist is a diverse resource that will help you understand the ins and outs of SEO and optimise your website. Use it to stay on track and accomplish your goals.

Check off things on the list as you do them or cross off tasks that you’ve already completed. You can also add notes to any section of the checklist. This can help you keep track of your progress and make a note of ideas you have for future content campaigns.

But remember – this checklist isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a guide for your long-term SEO strategy, and as time goes on, it will become increasingly important to keep up with these best practices. We’ll be keeping track of any changes so we can keep our site up-to-date as best practices change.

You’ll also want to keep track of what’s working for you and what isn’t, so that when you do need to revisit this checklist again, you don’t have to start from scratch.

SEO Basics Checklist

If you’ve never done any SEO before (or if it’s been a while), this checklist will help you get up to speed. It pretty much covers the tools and plugins needed to rank in search engines. They don’t impact ranking – at least not directly. However, they’re more like housekeeping tasks that will set you up to rank higher in Google.

Set Up Google Search Console 

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor your website’s performance in the search results. The performance report tells you: 

• Which queries are sending the most traffic
• How often users click on your site
• What your average position is for each query.

You can use Search Console to: 

• Optimise your site for search
• Submit a sitemap 
• Check for crawl errors.

The data can help you understand how people find and interact with your site, as well as how to improve it.

Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service that allows you to manage your site’s presence in Bing’s search results. It’s more like Google Search Console. You can use Bing Webmaster Tools to:

• Create a Sitemap
• Submit sitemaps
• Monitor indexing status and crawl rate
• Track keywords and traffic
• Manage site reputation and more.

Set Up Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) is one of the most popular tools for SEO. It’s particularly useful for getting insight into your competitors and tracking your own performance.

This free tool gives you access to vital information about your website’s performance, including:

• Site Search Analytics: See how many people are searching for topics on your site, what they’re searching for, and how often they’re doing it.
• Keyword Difficulty: Find out which keywords are easy or difficult to rank in Google. So you can focus on the ones that’ll bring you more traffic and leads.
• Organic Referral Traffic: See where your organic search traffic is coming from. This can help you identify gaps in your content marketing strategy, find new sources of traffic, and optimise existing content to attract more visitors from organic search engines like Google or Bing.

Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows you to track your website’s traffic, engagement, and conversions. By setting up Google Analytics, you can gain valuable insights into how your website is performing and where you need to make changes.

You can use this information to see what’s bringing people to your site and then create targeted content that will keep them coming back.

Note: We recommend linking Google Search Console to Google Analytics. This will make importing data from Google Search Console to Google Analytics easier.

Using WordPress? Install Yoast SEO

Installing Yoast SEO is a no-brainer if you’re using WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS). It’s the most comprehensive, easy-to-use plugin for optimising your website for search engines.

There are lots of reasons why this is important, but here are just a few:

• Yoast SEO makes it easy to create a sitemap and submit it to Google
• It helps you optimise your content and metadata for search engines
• It gives you a better understanding of your site’s performance

Technical SEO Checklist

Technical SEO is the process of making your website as technically sound as possible. This means optimising your site in a way that makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content.

Technical SEO is one of the most important elements of your digital marketing strategy. But it can also be one of the most challenging. 

This checklist will walk you through everything you need to know about technical SEO. It will give you a practical guide for getting started on your own technical SEO audit.

Fix Crawl Errors

Crawl errors are pages that Googlebot could not successfully crawl or render. Check your crawl errors regularly to fix them, so they do not impact your website rankings.

Use Google Search Console to identify and fix errors that are specifically affecting your web pages. It can be Server Errors (5xx HTTP status codes) or Soft 404 errors.

Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Over the past several years, there’s been a rapid surge of traffic from mobile devices to websites. And it’s not just limited to a few industries or website types — it’s happening across all industries and types of sites.

With that in mind, it is crucial to make sure your website is set up and ready for mobile users. The good news is that most WordPress-based websites are ready for mobile out of the box. For other content management systems or custom-built websites, you want to make sure your site follows these best practices when it comes to mobile compatibility.

The first and most important step you can take to increase your site’s mobile usability is to make sure that it meets Google’s mobile-friendly criteria. There are several ways to check whether your website is mobile-friendly.

One way to test whether your site is mobile-friendly is to use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. Another way to evaluate whether your site is mobile-friendly is by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool.

Improve Page Speed

Would you want to wait for a page to load? Of course not!

A slow website is a recipe for disaster. Studies show that 40% of users will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Page load speed is also a ranking signal. Google has confirmed it, and we’ve seen it in practice. If your site loads slowly, it will be more difficult to rank highly in Google’s search results—or even show up at all.

Here are some tips for making sure your site is loading fast:

• Delete unnecessary files from the server: This means images or videos that aren’t being used on the page (and yes, even those stock photos!).
• Use CSS instead of JavaScript for animations: This will keep them running smoothly without slowing down the page load time.
• Optimise images for size: This means using compression software so that your images don’t take up too much space on the server (and therefore take longer to load).
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are networks that are geographically dispersed and cached with the same content. They improve page speed by allowing users to access your website from the closest server, increasing performance. You can use a CDN for all static assets like images and videos or just for specific ones.

But how do you check for page speed in the first place?

There are several ways to check your site’s page speed, including third-party tools like Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights. If you have an e-commerce site, Pingdom also has a tool specifically for checking the speed of your checkout process.

Use Structured Data (Schema Markup)

Structured data is the future of SEO. You’ve probably heard that before, but what does it mean?

Not only can structured data help you optimise your site for Google. It also helps users find your content more easily. 

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say you want to write an article about a restaurant called “Pizza Hut.” Well, you could use structured data or schema markup to specify that they have a location in New York City and another in Chicago. Also, you can include other details like their address and phone number. 

This helps users who are looking for Pizza Hut know where to find them, even if they don’t know the exact address yet (which could be helpful when using public transportation).

Structured data is also important because it helps search engines understand the purpose of each page on your site. Which means they can give them higher rankings in search results. 

Check for Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is harmful to SEO, and it’s important to find and fix it quickly. If your site has duplicate content issues, you’re literally spending time and money to compete with yourself instead of focusing on the competition.

Check for duplicate content by using a tool like Siteliner. This can help you check if there are multiple pages on your site with the same or very similar content.

There are a few reasons why this might be happening. You may have accidentally created two separate pages with similar content. Or you might have pagination issues so that the same URL is getting indexed twice.

Siteliner will show you how many words on each page are duplicated. This will help you identify where the duplicate content is coming from.

Secure Your Site With HTTPS

The internet is open to all sorts of dangers and threats. 

Some hackers want to steal your passwords or credit card information. Also, some websites have been compromised by malicious actors who want to use them as platforms for spreading their own content.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself from these threats is to make sure your website is secure. And the easiest way to do that is by using HTTPS.

HTTPS is a secure version of the HTTP protocol. It encrypts the connection between your web server and your visitor’s browser, adding an extra layer of security to your website.

When you use HTTPS on your site, you’re telling search engines that you care about the security of your site’s visitors.

Check for Broken Links and 301 Redirects

Broken links are an SEO nightmare. If you don’t keep close tabs on your site’s content, you can end up with a lot of dead pages. These pages cause your overall site to rank poorly, as they’ll be less likely to show up in search engine results. 

If you find a broken link on your site, fix it immediately by either replacing the URL with another article that doesn’t link to this one or creating a 301 redirect so that Google will update its indexing accordingly.

Don’t know what a 301 redirect is?

It’s a way to tell search engines that the URL of a certain page has permanently moved. This helps you keep your SEO rankings high because it tells search engines where that page has moved to. Without this, you could lose all the traffic and link juice from people who used to go to that page.

Start by creating a list of all the URLs that are currently linking to your site. This can be done using a tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Then, check each URL to see if it’s still active. If not, set up a 301 redirect so that visitors are directed to your new page instead.

Create a Robots.txt File

Each page on your site should have its own unique URL so that Google can crawl it easily and rank it appropriately in search results. 

But sometimes, you want to prevent search engines from crawling or indexing certain pages. For example, when you’re testing a new layout or CMS system or when you’re redesigning the entire site. 

Robots.txt is the best way to tell Google not to index your site’s pages. It’s like a set of rules that the crawler follows so it knows what to look for, and what not to look for. A robots.txt file is placed in the root directory of your website, for example, www.example.com/robots.txt.

A good robots.txt file will help you prevent duplicate content issues, keep bots from crawling sensitive information like passwords or payment details, and generally ensure that your content gets indexed in the way you want it to be indexed.

If you are using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or others, you will probably have a robots.txt file with your site. If not, you might have to create one using a text editor and then upload it to the root of your domain. Also, you can use free robots.txt.file generator tools, such as SureOak Robots.txt File Generator.

Generate and Submit a Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. It’s what Google and other search engines use to crawl your site.

You’ll need to install an XML sitemap generator plugin on your website to generate one. Once installed, you can create a sitemap from your WordPress dashboard.

If you’re using a different CMS other than WordPress, you may need to generate your sitemap manually.

Once you create your sitemap, you’ll need to submit it to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Note: When submitting your sitemap, also ensure to reference it in your robots.txt file

On-Page SEO Checklist

We’ve found that most people don’t know what on-page SEO is. So we’ll start with a quick definition.

On-page SEO is the process of optimising your content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). But it’s not just for better rankings. On-page SEO is also about ensuring your website is easy to read by improving the user experience.

Use Your Focus Keyword In The URL

If you’re not using your focus keyword in your URL, you need to take a step back and evaluate what’s going on. The URL is the first thing people see when they land on your website. So, if it doesn’t match what they’re looking for, you will lose them before they even get started.

Using the focus keyword in the URL makes it as descriptive as possible. It reinforces the core topic and shows users that your content is relevant.

Though one of the most basic on-page SEO checks, it’s also one of the easiest ways to get a boost in rankings. In fact, a keyword-rich URL will significantly increase your click-through rate (CTR) for organic searches.

Let’s say our target keyword is “SEO ChecKlist,” and our website is “bigworld.com.” From this, we can make the URL: bigworld.com/seo-checklist. Notice we’ve included the focus keyword “SEO Checklist” in our URL.

Use Short URLs

Short URLs are better for SEO than long ones. They’re easier to remember, and they don’t take up as much space on a page.

Do you know what else is great about short URLs? Well, they rank better. That’s right. Short URLs rank best in Google because they’re easier for people to read and easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index.

To prove it, Baclinko analyzed over 11.8 million Google search results. The report shows that Google rankings decline as URL characters increase. (backlinko.com)

So how do you get a short URL? It’s easy! Just go to the Bitly shortener tool and create one for your website. With this tool, you can even track how many people click on them!

Here’s how to use it:

Step 1: Go to bitly.com and sign up for an account by clicking “Get Started.” You’ll need to give them your email address and create a password.

Step 2: Click “Shorten” from the left-hand side of the page.

Step 3: Enter the URL you want to shorten into the box provided and click “Shorten.”

Step 4: Copy the shortened link and paste it wherever you’d like!

Use Target Keyword In Your Title Tag (Front-Load It)

When it comes to on-page SEO, the title tag is one of the most important elements. This is because Google and other search engines use this information to determine what your page is about. 

The first thing you should do when writing your title tag is to use the target keyword at its beginning. This is called front-loading, and according to Moz, it has more impact on search rankings.

It helps users know what to expect from your page before they click on it, improving click-through rates. Also, according to user experience research, people tend to scan as few as the first 2 words of a headline. And this is why we recommend putting the keyword closer to the beginning of your title tag.

Write A Compelling Meta Description That Includes Your Keywords 

Meta descriptions are the brief snippets of text that appear under the URL in search results. If you haven’t written a meta description for your site, you’ve likely got something generic like “This is my website” or “Read more here.” This isn’t good enough.

Instead, you should write a meta description that includes your target keywords. This will help search engines understand your content and increase your click-through rate.

However, don’t try to stuff too many keywords into a single description—you’ll end up with something that doesn’t make sense or sounds spammy! Also, try putting a few related keywords at the beginning of the description. They’ll be indexed by search engines more easily, but they won’t take up too much space in the description itself.

Embed Title Tag Modifiers

Title tag modifiers are words and phrases you add to your title tag. For instance, when writing an article on choosing tents for camping, you can use modifiers like “best,” “top, ” or even “year.” It helps you emphasize that yours is the best article on choosing tents. 

In the example above, we’ve used “best” and “Year (2022)” as our title tag modifiers. Did you know? Modifiers also help your title tag rank for more long-tail variations of your target keyword. Plus, they make the title more interesting for readers and search engines.

Use Your Primary Keyword Once In The First and Last 100-200 Words

We’re pretty sure you’ve heard this one before. If not, it’s time to start paying attention! This is a tried and true technique for boosting your rankings in search engines like Google. It’s been around for years, and it works!

You want to make sure that your primary keyword is present in your content’s first and last 100-200 words. It helps Google understand your page and gives it context for all the content on the page. It also helps with SEO by making sure that you are telling Google what the page is about right away. In fact, Google tends to give more weight to the first 200 words of your page body section.

Alternatively, you can use your focus keyword in the first paragraph, which pretty much constitutes the first 100-200 words.

The first paragraph of any document is arguably the most important. It’s not only where you have the best chance to grab your reader’s attention and make them want to keep reading. It’s also where you can give them valuable information about what they’re going to learn.

Use Your Keyword in H1, H2, or H3 Tags

H1, H2, and H3 tags are used for organizing content and identifying the most important sections of your page.

H1 tags are used to give an overview of the page’s topic and are typically the page’s title. H2 tags are used to divide sections within a page and should be used at least once per section. H3 tags can also divide sections within a page and should also be used at least once per section.

It’s important to make sure that your site is optimised for keyword phrases relevant to your site’s content. This means putting the keywords in H1, H2, or H3 tags. It will help search engines understand what your page is about and give them a better idea of how to rank it.

Image Optimisation

The image you use in your article can be just as important as the words. In fact, you can often achieve better results by focusing on optimising images rather than text.

Use alt tags on all images used on your website. The alt tag is the alternative description for an image that pops up when someone hovers their mouse over it. It should be descriptive and relevant to what the image represents in terms of content on your site. 

For example, if you’re using an image as part of a blog post about how to fix your car engine, it would be helpful if this was reflected in the alt tag such as “how-to-fix-your-car-engine.”

Also, we recommend using a relevant keyword in the alt image tag. But don’t force or stuff keywords – use them naturally.

Moreover, ensure all images have been appropriately sized and optimised for web use. Any image on your page must be properly resized so that it doesn’t take up too much space and slow download times. Still, it should maintain its original quality without losing detail or clarity.

Essentially, image optimisation helps improve page load speed, boost websites’ SEO ranking, and improve user experience.

Include Multiple LSI Keywords In Your Content

You’ll need to include multiple variations of the same keyword in your content. This is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

You should use long-tail keywords because they tend to have higher search volumes than broad keywords. Also, they are less competitive and make your content more relevant to users.

For example, if you’re writing about how to make banana bread, don’t just throw in the word “banana” once or twice. Instead, make sure that you include other words that relate to bananas—like “fruit,” “vegetable,” “dessert,” and so on.

So how can you find LSI keywords?

LSI graph: One of the best tools for this is the LSI graph, which gives you a visual representation of all of the words that are associated with any given term. It also shows you how closely related those words are. This means that you can use it to find new ideas for keywords that are similar but not exactly the same as what people are already searching for.

Serpstat: Serpstat gives you access to a wide range of keyword suggestions based on the competition level for any given term. It also provides information about how many times each keyword has been searched over time. You can sort by keyword difficulty so that you don’t waste time trying to rank for terms that are too competitive for your site or blog.

Google autocomplete: You can find lots of good LSI keywords by looking at Google’s suggestions when you start typing in a phrase. For example, if you were trying to find keywords related to “banana,” you might see suggestions like “banana cake, “banana calories,” or “banana bread.” This is a great way to get started with your list of LSI keywords!

Google-related searches: You can also use Google-related searches as an LSI keyword tool. You can find this feature by typing in a search term and then clicking on the “related searches” option at the bottom of the page. This will show you other searches people have been making around the web for similar topics.

Use External Links

External links are links from your website or blog to other websites, blogs, or social media. External links help to spread awareness of your brand or product.

If a site has many quality external links, it will more likely be perceived as a credible source, and people will return to your page. It also helps search engines determine how your website or blog ranks on the list of search results. In fact, SEO experts believe that external links are easily the most important source of ranking power.

For instance, if several pages link to a page, the page is more likely to rank high. If a few pages link to the page, it has less chance of ranking high. No links and you’re nowhere.

You should consider linking to other relevant websites and getting them to link back to you. It gives readers of your website information they might not otherwise have been able to find.

Use Internal Links

Internal links show visitors how to get from one page to another inside the website. By linking to other pages, internal links make your website easy to navigate, and users can find what they need quickly and easily.

For instance, when you’re writing a long piece of content, you need to think about ways to provide your readers with shortcuts to the key parts of your content. Internal links will help the readers jump right into the information they are looking for rather than having them go through the entire article.

Search engines also use internal links to come across your content, crawl, and index it. So be sure you have optimised your internal links for your web pages.

Adding internal links is also a great strategy to improve user engagement metrics such as bounce rate and time-on-site. 

Use Featured Snippets

First, what is a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a box that appears at the top of the search results page and contains information about your site or product. It’s not just any old snippet; it’s one that Google has deemed more relevant than other results in its database.

If you Google “Structured Data” for instance, you’ll get a featured snippet like the one below:

So why use featured snippets for on-page SEO?

The main reason you should use featured snippets is that they can help boost your click-through rate (CTR). In fact, a study by Search Engine Land shows that featured snippet makes up approximately 8% of all clicks. So, it’s something worth tapping into if you want to give your organic CTR a serious boost.

There are generally five types of featured snippets: Table, Video, List, Paragraph, and Accordion. Out of these, lists (37%) and paragraphs (50%) are the most common types of featured snippets. (moz.com)

So, how do you win featured snippets? Click here to learn more at Moz.

Optimise For User Engagement

User engagement is a measurement of the number of users who are interacting with your site at any given time. It’s a metric that can be used to gauge how well your website is doing, and it can help you make changes to improve your user experience.

User engagement is important for a number of reasons: 

• First, it provides users with an enjoyable experience. This increases the likelihood that they will continue to use the product and recommend it to others. 
• Also, it helps companies learn what their users like and don’t like about their products. This allows them to improve those products.
• Moreover, user engagement provides an opportunity for brands to build relationships with their customers through collecting data about them. This information can be used for things like targeted advertising campaigns and customer service improvements.

So, what strategies can you use to improve user engagement?

• Post interactive content: Interactive content isn’t just fun—it’s also eye-catching and memorable. It creates an experience for users that makes them want to come back again and again. This can be done through videos, games, and other visual elements.
• Provide live chat support: The great thing about live chat support is that it allows users to ask questions about products and services without having to wait for an answer! It also makes it possible for them to speak directly with representatives from the company instead of having conversations with automated bots or call centers where there may be long wait times between calls.
• Encourage sharing with social media buttons: People love sharing their favorite content, and if they can do it with a click of a button, they’ll be more likely to do it. Include buttons for popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest—but also include other less-common platforms like Reddit and Google+.
• Offer incentives for leaving comments and feedback: The idea behind this strategy is simple: if you give people something in exchange for their time and effort, they’ll be more likely to engage with you in the future. You could offer discounts on products or services. You could also offer prizes such as gift cards or tickets to an event.
• Personalize all customer communication channels: This can be as simple as adding the user’s name to the subject line of an email. Or it can be as complex as using artificial intelligence and machine learning to build a personalized customer experience that takes into account every aspect of their behavior and preferences. The benefits of this strategy are two-fold. First, it helps you build trust with customers by making them feel like they’re being listened to. Also, it helps you stand out from your competitors by offering a more customized experience than your competitors can provide.
• Ask questions to encourage engagement:  Use structured questions to get feedback from your users. Also, create an environment that encourages people to share their thoughts and feelings. Ask for a response, but don’t force it

Note: These are just but some of the top strategies you can use to improve user engagement.

Content Checklist

This guide is designed to help you create the best content for your website. It covers the basics of what you need to know about SEO writing, and it includes strategies for optimising your content for search engines.

Know Your Audience

Your audience is the most important aspect of your content. Without them, there is no point in writing anything!

Therefore, know who your audience is and understand their needs. Connect with them on a personal level by understanding what they like, dislike, and are afraid of. Then Use this information to create content that will resonate with them.

Write for Humans First

We’ve all heard the saying, “write for the user, not for Google.” SEO is about writing for people, not search engines. If you want to create great SEO content, you’ve got to keep this in mind. That means writing in a way that is:

• Clear and concise
• Easy to understand
• Uses actionable verbs

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Use keywords in your text, but don’t go overboard. Use them naturally, sparingly, and strategically.

Use “The Skyscraper Technique”

The “Skyscraper technique” is creating content that goes beyond what your competitors are doing. This gives you an edge over them when it comes to ranking on Google and other search engines.

The basic idea behind “the Skyscraper Technique” is that you should look at your competitors’ most successful pieces of content and then create something even better than theirs!

Write a Killer Meta Description

Meta descriptions are often the first thing a searcher sees when they click through from search results. So it’s crucial that your meta description is compelling enough to entice them to click through.

Here are some tips for writing killer meta descriptions:

• Keep it short and sweet: Google will truncate your meta description if it’s too long, so make sure you don’t go over 250 characters.
• Don’t forget keywords: The first sentence of your meta description should contain the primary keyword for the page—that way, it’ll be picked up by search engines (and human readers!) who are scanning down their results pages.
• Add a call-to-action at the end: Make sure to include a strong call-to-action at the end of your meta description that prompts people to click on your link and take them directly to the content on your site that answers their query!

Write a Winning Intro

Your introduction is the first impression your audience will have of your content. It’s also the part of your content that’s most likely to be read. So it’s important to make it engaging enough that readers want to keep reading.

Here are 5 ways to write a winning intro:

• Make sure it’s clear what the topic of your post is and why it matters
• Get straight to the point with an attention-grabbing opening sentence
• Use some type of hook to draw in readers who might otherwise skim past your introduction
• Describe how this information will help them or answer their questions
• Make sure you’re clear about what you offer (your product / service / blog) and why they should care about it – and link back to that information at the end of the post

Use Header Tags To Break Up Content 

Header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are important because they help search engines categorize the page and make it easier for users to find your content. They also help you create a hierarchy of information on your site, which makes it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

For example, if you want to write about how to make spaghetti sauce from scratch, you could organize this content into sections like “Ingredients” and “Cooking Instructions.” If you use headers for each section on your page, search engines will be able to understand what content is related and which parts are more important than others. This helps them deliver more relevant results when someone searches for information about spaghetti sauce making!

Use Short Sentences and Paragraphs

When writing for SEO, it’s important to keep your content reader-friendly. A reader who is going through a long, rambling sentence is more likely to get bored and stop reading your content. 

One way to make sure you’re writing compelling content is to use short sentences and paragraphs. Shorter sentences are easier to read and understand than long ones, which means they’ll help you achieve your goal of keeping readers engaged with your content.

Improve Readability

Readability is a metric used to gauge the difficulty of reading a text. It’s important for SEO content because it affects how well readers understand what you’re saying.

It’s also important for SEO content because Google uses readability as one of the factors in its search algorithm. The more readable your content is, the better your rankings will be.

Here are some tips for improving readability score:

• Use short sentences: A sentence should only be one idea. If you need more than two sentences to explain something, then break it up into bullet points or paragraphs.
• Break up long paragraphs into smaller ones (4-6 sentences): This makes your content easier for the reader to digest, and it also helps with SEO because it allows Google to index your content more easily.
• Use lists or bullet points whenever possible: Lists help readers quickly scan information and understand what they’ll learn from reading (and they also help with SEO).
• Use active voice instead of passive voice wherever possible: Active voice helps keep the reader engaged with the subject matter. Hence, they’re more likely to retain what they’re reading and remember it later on down the line.
• Avoid big words: Use simple, everyday language that anyone can understand!
• Use transitional words and phrases: linking words like “however” or “on the other hand” when you’re comparing two things or ideas with each other—instead of just listing them in sequence with no connection between them at all! This helps readers see how one thing relates to another so they can better understand what you’re trying to say. Lso, transitional words like “therefore”,  “hence”, “moreover”, etc., help create flow in the content.

To check the readability score, enter the text of your document into this free online tool: http://www.readability-score.com/. Also, there are other great tools like Yoast Real-Time Content Analysis.

Use Multimedia 

Use compelling images and media to support content and boost engagement.

Images can be more than just a pretty face. They have the power to draw in readers, tell a story, and make your content more user-friendly. The key is to use images that are relevant to your content and that will engage your audience.

You’ll want to include images in most of your posts, but don’t just throw them in there haphazardly—make sure they’re relevant! If you’re writing about gym equipment, for example, a picture of a gym might not help anyone understand what you’re talking about. 

Don’t forget to add alt tags and captions where appropriate. It makes images more accessible to people with disabilities or who are using screen readers (like those with visual impairment or blindness).

Where possible, include videos that explain how something works or how someone uses it, such as tutorials.

Keyword Research Checklist

When you conduct keyword research, you’ll be looking at a list of keywords that are popular with your target audience. By analyzing these lists, you can figure out which words and phrases are most likely to bring traffic to your site.

This checklist will help you conduct keyword research for your website. It includes everything from finding relevant keywords and performing a competitive analysis to creating an action plan for implementing the results of your research.

Well, we already covered this in another blog. For a comprehensive keyword research checklist, click here

FAQs

What Are The Best Tools For SEO

There are plenty of SEO tools on the market, but these are some of the most useful for on-page SEO.

Moz On-Page Grader

If you’re looking for a free on-page SEO tool, Moz’s On-Page Grader is one of the best options out there. It helps you improve your website’s visibility in these search engines by giving you an overall grade on how well you’re doing on-page SEO. You can get a free report by entering the URL of your site. 

Google PageSpeed Insights

This tool will analyse your website and give you a score based on how optimised it is for speed. It will also show you what needs to be done to improve this score. Google PageSpeed Insights is pretty straightforward – just enter your page URL and click “Analyse.”

Ahrefs Site Audit Tool

Ahrefs Site Audit Tool gives you a complete list of your site’s backlinks, broken links and much more. You can also use it to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you don’t have any content about. The tool will tell you if any of these are relevant to your business or not.

It’s important not just because it helps with SEO but also because it gives you an idea of what is wrong with your site and how you can fix it. The tool will tell you which pages need more content or need some work done on them so that they rank higher in Google searches for specific terms.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

If you’re looking for a tool that can help you optimise your on-page SEO, look no further than the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool. This advanced crawler is ideal for anyone who wants to get an in-depth view of the content on their site and make sure it’s optimised correctly. It will crawl through every page and every file on your site, giving you all sorts of information about what’s wrong with it and how to fix it.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool has some really important features, including:

• The ability to filter results by status code or redirection type
• Ability to export reports as CSV files, HTML files or XML files
• The capability of exporting all URLs from a given directory or subdirectory

The only downside to this tool is that it’s not free—but if you’re serious about improving your website’s SEO, it may be worth shelling out some cash for this software!

Semrush Topic Research

Semrush Topic Research will show you what topics are trending in your industry and what keywords are being searched most frequently.

Semrush is one of the best tools for on-page SEO because it shows you:

• How many people search for certain keywords
• How many websites rank for those keywords
• The average amount of traffic they get from those keywords

This information can be used to help you determine what topics are popular and whether or not it makes sense to create content around them.

SEOCrawler

SEOCrawler is a powerful set of tools that can help you optimise your site and make it more effective.

It has a number of features that can help you to find errors, assess how well your content is performing, and even determine which keywords people are using to search for your site.

SEOCrawler offers a free trial, so you should definitely give it a try if you’re looking for some on-page SEO options!

SEO Writing Assistant – SEMrush

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant helps you create content that meets all the requirements of Google’s On-Page SEO Checker, so you can focus on writing engaging and interesting articles that are optimised for search engines.

Copyscape

Copyscape Plagiarism Checker is a tool that helps you make sure your content is unique. It will perform a search of your content and compare it to other websites’ content. So you can be sure that no one is stealing what you’ve written!

Does Keyword Density Help On-Page SEO?

No, keyword density doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword appears in your content compared to the total number of words. A higher keyword density means that you’re using that word more often. But it doesn’t mean that you’re using it in a better way or in more relevant places.

In fact, keyword density is actually an outdated SEO tactic that can be harmful to your site’s rankings. Google has been telling us for years that they are no longer using this metric as one of their ranking signals and there are other factors that are much more important.

The best way to improve on-page SEO is by focusing on creating compelling content for your users and not worrying about keywords or key phrases.

Is On-Page SEO Different From Technical SEO?

On-page SEO is the work you put into optimising the content of a web page. It’s the on-page elements that determine how well your site will rank in search engines and how much traffic it will get.

Technical SEO is the back-end work you put into getting your website up and running in a way that’s optimised for search engines. This includes things like:

• Making sure all pages have descriptive titles, meta descriptions, and H1 tags (headings)
• Ensuring that important content is easily accessible to search engines by using keywords throughout the text (if appropriate)
• Providing useful information about who you are and what you do on your About page or other pages where people might be searching for information about your business
• Ensuring that there aren’t any broken links on your site (links to pages that don’t exist).

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve made it through the entire SEO checklist, and you’re now ready to publish your content.

Now that you’ve taken all the steps necessary to optimise your content for search engines, it’s time to get out there and start showing up in search results.

And don’t forget: this is only the beginning—you’ll have to continue monitoring and improving your SEO over time. That’s why it’s important to have an analytics tool like Google Analytics installed on your site to keep track of what works and what doesn’t.