SEO Checklist – 8 SEO tips to improve your ranking

Last updated at 16-06-2023

Want to rank first on the search engine results page (SERP) without spending high? Well, SEO is one of the fundamental aspects of driving traffic to your website. With billions of websites competing for the top spot – it seems impossible to ensure your website shows up on the first page of Google. To be helpful, we need a comprehensive SEO Checklist that shows all the traffic in your Google Analytics account.

There are tons of ways to rank a page on Google. From sharing an article on Twitter to guest posting. In this post, we have assembled 8 SEO tips to improve your ranking. These tips can be considered as an SEO framework that provides a basic outline of improving your website ranking.

In most of the cases, SEO improves the technical aspects of your website, including – site speed, XML sitemaps, mobile optimization, SSL certificates and so on.

If you are new to SEO, we highly recommend checking out our SEO Tutorial.

Download Now: SEO Tutorial [Free PDF]

Comprehensive SEO Checklist

Let’s begin with the best SEO tips that you should employ. Remember that this SEO Checklist is unlikely to have a direct effect on the ranking of your website. These are the basics that every website owner should look into.

1. Responsive website

To begin with the most basic SEO tip – having a mobile-friendly website is important than before. ‘Mobilegeddon’, one of the major Google algorithm updates in 2015 gave increased preference for responsive and mobile-friendly websites.

You can use any of the below tools to check the mobile responsiveness of your website.

• https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
  
• https://responsivedesignchecker.com/
  
• https://websiteresponsivetest.com/
  

The above mobile-friendly tests will determine if your website meets all the required criteria or not.

2. Create XML Sitemap

A sitemap is the blueprint of your website that help search engines crawl, index and find your website. They tell the search engines which pages are most important and when they were last updated.

If you are using WordPress, you can generate XML sitemap using WordPress plugins like Yoast or Jetpack.

Once you have generated the sitemap, all you need to do it is to submit it to search console for indexing.

You can prioritize high-quality pages on the site map and block unwanted pages in robots.txt. If your website has more than 50,000 URLs – you can create a dynamic sitemap.

3. Optimize Meta tags

Do you know Meta tags and Meta description are critical in improving the ranking of your website? Although Meta description is not a key SEO factor, ignoring it may lose valuable clicks.

To optimize the Meta description of the website – you should convey a meaningful message or help readers understand what they gain by visiting the website.

The Meta tags and description are usually displayed on the SERP and help readers understand what the website is about. It is also important to make the description click-worthy.

The trick is to include the primary keyword in the description as well as at the beginning of the SEO title.

4. Image optimization

Majority of the users get distracted when going through the content on the website. The attention span of people has reduced considerably – because of which they end to shift their attention.

Optimizing the images on the webpage help you to hook the readers and boost the organic presence of the website.

If you are aiming to be on top of SERP – you should not ignore images. There are different ways to optimize images. One of the best ways is to use images related to the theme such as – objects, real people, products etc.

Another important factor is the image resolution size. The suggested image size is 1024 X 580 with less than 50KB file size. Avoid using bigger image formats like – GIF, SVG, PNG etc.

Besides this, optimize the image file name for SEO. A descriptive caption is highly recommended as search engines read captions the same as the content.

5. Internal links

The pages on the website should be properly linked with each other. There should be a hierarchy for each section and page on your website to provide users with the option to navigate and fetch relevant information.

Internal links are nothing but hyperlinks from one page to the other. One can place interlinks from images, videos, text or documents within the webpage.

The most common internal linking factors to consider include – crawl depth, page hierarchy, contextual links, link relevancy and anchor text. When one page is linked to the other – it passes some of its credibility to the second page.

On the contrary, links from high authority websites increase the authority of all the pages on your website.

5. Keyword density

Keywords play a very important role in improving the search traffic to your website. The number of times a keyword appears on a page compared to the total number of words in that page is known as keyword density.

In this regard, keyword density is an on-page SEO factor that improves the ranking factor. The future of your website lies in making the search engines understand that the terms used in the website are relevant.

There is no hard-and-fast rule for keyword density. Ideally, it should be 2% -3% of the overall content. Each page on your website should target a single keyword which can be found using Google Keyword Planner.

When SEO was an emerging discipline, the technique of keyword stuffing has become quite popular. Today, Google penalizes the sites that are over-optimized for any particular keyword.

6. Fix site errors

Broken links, 404 pages or HTTP errors on your website can frustrate your visitors. This can hamper the SEO performance of your website – as they make your site neglected and unsecured.

It is vital to fix the on-page SEO issues by running a weekly SEO audit. There are several SEO tools to scan your website for warnings, errors and issues.

The data found through Google Analytics and Google Search Console help you understand everything to maximize website traffic and conversion rates.

Check the crawling issues or technical errors in Google Search Console once in a week and fix them promptly. You can use SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz or ScreamingFrog to do a technical SEO site audit.

7. Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is nothing but exact copies of content found on other websites. It is one of the important factors that determine the quality of your website.

If your website contains multiple pages with duplicate or plagiarized content – it affects the rank of your website. There are several tools to identify duplicate content and get rid of it.

Some of the common causes of duplicate content are URL parameters, session IDs, content syndication, comment pagination, etc.

The best way to avoid duplicate content is the canonical ‘URL’.

Final thoughts

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process and need a lot of time and effort. Bedsides the above SEO Checklist, several factors affect the ranking of your website. You will be on your way to improve the organic ranking of your website by following the tips & tricks in this simple SEO Checklist.

A solid SEO strategy can help you get high in search engine ranking and drive more traffic. Looking for more SEO tips? Check our SEO Tutorial!