If you’re just starting out with website SEO, you’ve probably already heard the advice, “start with SEO basics.” But what exactly should you be doing to ensure that your website is properly optimized? To help you get your website off to the right start, we’ve compiled this ultimate SEO checklist.
- Index your website
The first step to optimizing your website is to make sure it is properly indexed. Check with your web host to ensure the website is indexed and make sure that you’ve set up the proper robots.txt file. This will prevent search engines from crawling any pages you don’t want them to see.
- Use a responsive website design
Having a website that works on all devices is essential for reaching the maximum number of visitors. Mobile usage has skyrocketed in recent years, so you need to make sure that your website looks great on phones, tablet and desktop computers alike.
- Consolidate your website URLs
If your website consists of multiple pages, you should make sure to use a consistent URL structure. This will help with SEO in terms of structured data, as well as make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl through your site.
- Optimize your page titles
Your content should have an appropriate title tag, which adds to the optimization of your website. Page titles can be up to 70 characters, and should include the most important keywords that are related to the page’s content.
- Use Internal Links
Adding internal links to your website helps with SEO by creating a network of connections between your pages. This way, search engine spiders can easily find and follow your pages to analyze and index your content.
- Create content for link building
Link building is a great way to increase your website’s visibility, traffic, and overall rankings. Creating content that has high quality and is unique is key to making sure other websites want to link back to your website. This could be blog posts, helpful information, video content or guest posts.
- Monitor your website’s speed
Websites that load quickly get better rankings than websites that take a while to load. To ensure your website runs as quickly as possible, look into caching plugins, image optimization, and other ways of improving the speed of your website.
- Monitor and track your progress
It’s important to monitor your website’s performance to make sure your SEO efforts are paying off. Use tools like Google Analytics to track your traffic and see what areas need more attention for optimization.
By following this ultimate SEO checklist for new websites, you should be well on your way to making sure you’re website is properly optimized for search engines. In addition, this checklist can serve as a starting point for more advanced SEO optimization in the future.