On Page SEO Checklist
2015
On page SEO is the
foundation stone on which your website must be constructed for better search
engine ranking. On page and off page SEO are interdependent. If you do not have
either one of them, your website’s chances of ranking high in search engines is
meagre.
Off page SEO consists
of link building strategies the results of which are not always in your
hands. The good part about on page SEO, however, is that it is under your
control. On page SEO is applied to content that consist of both
the visible and the coded part of your webpage. It is applicable for both
user and the search engines.
1. Title
Title is the most important
on page SEO element and usually target keywords present in this content type
helps return relevant pages on search engines.
Example Of Title Tag As Seen In SERPs
Checklist:
Do you have your most
important keyword in your website title?
Do you have the keyword placed towards the beginning of the title tag?
Is your title tag within 70 characters?
Is your title content unique?
Do you have the keyword placed towards the beginning of the title tag?
Is your title tag within 70 characters?
Is your title content unique?
Explanation:
Title tag is a
standalone tag and is often confused with meta title. Incidentally both have
the same function, location and some sites use the same content for
both. Even if you do not have the meta title tag, it is a MUST to have the
title tag.
You must have the most
important keyword in your website’s title and the keyword should be placed
towards the start (within the 70 characters). Having not more than 70
characters is not compulsory but it is just for usability reasons. Do not
duplicate title content anywhere else, the content should be unique and
understandable by humans.
2. Description
The description tag is
important for your site visitors as they are the gist of the webpage content
that they see on search results. The keywords in meta description used to help
websites rank in the earlier days, but not much any more because of manipulation
of this element for SEO, in the past.
Checklist Questions:
Does your meta
description tag contain your targeted keywords?
Is your meta description content within 150 characters?
Do you use synonyms in the description content to help users understand better?
Are they unique to every webpage?
Is your meta description content within 150 characters?
Do you use synonyms in the description content to help users understand better?
Are they unique to every webpage?
Explanation:
Similar to the title,
the number of characters is not compulsory, but if it exceeds the number the
extra content will be displayed as an ellipsis and is of no value to anyone.
And you must use either the keywords or synonyms in the description as it
usually highlighted in relevant search results.
It is not known to
what extent the keywords in description help SEO, but the description itself
helps a lot of sites to improve the click through rate on search results. What
you could not describe in your title, you could describe in the meta
description as it allows more characters than the title. Lastly, just make sure
you do not duplicate your meta descriptions and keep them unique.
3. Heading
Unlike title and
description, The heading tag is visible on the webpage to the human visitors.
It is also important from search engine point of view as search engine bots
acquire the information about the page from the heading tag, especially h1 tag.
Example Of Heading Tag As Seen On Website
Checklist:
Do you have a h1 tag?
Do you have your targeted keyword in the h1 tag and is it placed towards the beginning of the tag?
Is the heading tag content unique?
Do you have your targeted keyword in the h1 tag and is it placed towards the beginning of the tag?
Is the heading tag content unique?
Explanation:
The heading tag
content sums up the intent of the website in a few words. There is no character
limit as it occupies your website’s realestate, but it is a norm to keep it as
short as possible, to capture the visitor’s eye. To help with the SEO part, the
heading tag must contain your targeted keyword. It is also recommended that the
keyword be placed towards the start of the heading tag.
You can have more than
one heading tag, but it should be in an hierarchy of h1 to h6. A page
must have two h1 tags. Also, do not duplicate content from the title tag
onto the heading tag, although both the content’s intent is quite the same.
Sometimes having keywords in h2 and h3 (if you happen to have them) can also
pass a weak relevancy signal to search engines.
4. Content
The content of a site
must contain keywords chosen for a particular web page. These could be targeted
keywords or long tail keywords or synonyms. Just make sure the keyword density
is not too high, which means use them only when they make sense to the human
reader.
Checklist:
Do your main keywords
feature in the first few lines of your website content?
Do you maintain an optimum keyword density in the content body?
Do you have content more than 500 words?
Do you have original and unique content for each webpage?
Do you maintain an optimum keyword density in the content body?
Do you have content more than 500 words?
Do you have original and unique content for each webpage?
Explanation:
It is often a best
practice to keep your content more than 500 or 1000 words on the website as
search engines love longer content. But that does not mean that you have to
turn your business website into a blog with fillers everywhere. Keep your
content length as long as possible but also at the same time take care that the
readers get exactly what information they need without having to scroll through
a long essay.
If you see this study about content length affecting
SERPs, you will find that the threshold is higher. But we are sure Google knows
the difference between a blog and a business website while ranking them on this
particular signal. This is what Google has to say about avoiding thin content,
just to make things clearer.
As far as, keyword
density is concerned ther is no exact number to define it but all you need to
know is in your average two to four paragraph content on a webpage,
use keywords whenever they are relevant to the human reader. To know more
about keyword density we recommend you watch this video from Google engineer Matt Cutts who talks about ideal keyword
density.
You can always use
latent semantic indexing keywords that search engines also use to analyze the
relevancy of your content to your target keywords.
Lastly, keep your
content original. You do not want duplicating content from your own pages or
from third-party pages, as Google does consider duplicate content bad for SEO. When a search engine
finds duplicate content it chooses one content as the original and hides the
others. The duplicated content are omitted and displayed at the end of original
search results, as shown below:
Omitted Results Hidden Away At The End Of
Original Search Results
5. URL
Keep the URLs clean
and fill them with keywords or words that aptly describe the content. The URLs
say a lot about a site’s architecture and often is considered important for SEO
as well as usability.
Checklist
Do you have short and
clean URLs ?
Do you have keywords in your URLs placed towards the beginning?
Do you use hyphens in URLs?
Do you have keywords in your URLs placed towards the beginning?
Do you use hyphens in URLs?
Explanation
URLs are also one of
the most important on page SEO elements. In the earlier days, keyword domains
used to rank higher in search. However, keyword domains are not a factor in
search ranking anymore. What you need to have is keywords in the rest of the URL,
that goes beyond the domain name.
A clean URL that is sans
unnecessary URL parameters is great for spidering search engine bots. Also, URLs with hyphens are preferred over URLs with underscores.
And if possible you
must place your target keywords towards the start of the URL as search engines
seem to give the first few words priority when trying to deduce the
relevance of the content contained in the URL. Even if you are unable to do
that it is ok, your URL must contain words that describe the content in the
best possible manner.
Also, you must take care
of URLs that have the same content. Use rel=”canonical” tags on duplicate pages
and let search engines know which page to consider as the original location for
the content.
6. Images
Search engines cannot
access text on images but they can certainly access text about images written
between the alt text attribute.
Checklist:
Do you have alt text
for all images on your website?
Do the alt text for images on your website contain keywords?
Do your image file names contain keywords or relevant text?
Do the alt text for images on your website contain keywords?
Do your image file names contain keywords or relevant text?
Explanation:
Alt attributes for
images are not only good for SEO but also good for usability. Say your site
visitor cannot see but only hear, a screen reader would read the image’s alt
txt and the content would make sense. Say, the site visitor has disabled images
or suffers from a slow internet connection, the image’s alt attribute content
will then be visible and would make sense to the site visitor.
As for search engines,
not only are the keywords within image alt txt signals for search ranking, but
your images will rank high in Google image search as well.
7. Keyword Consistency
More than a search
ranking signal it is common sense to keep a consistency between keywords used
on various on page SEO elements of a website.
Checklist
Do your target
keywords appear in the title, description, heading, content, URL and image alt
attribute, consistently?
Explanation
It is imperative to
keep a certain keyword consistency among spiderable content on your website.
Although, it is not compulsory, it just considered as a best practice.
.
8. Internal Links
Internal links allow
the smooth flow of link
juice.
Check Your Indexed Internal Links On Google
Webmaster Tools
Checklist:
Do your internal links
ensure a smooth flow of link juice?
Do you use targeted keywords as anchor text on internal links?
Do you use targeted keywords as anchor text on internal links?
Explanation:
Your internal linking
architecture must ensure that is allows a flow of link juice through every
inner webpage. Although there are ways to popularize your inner pages by linking externally,
internal linking is also essential for easy crawling and indexing of all
webpages on your site.
And if you want
to improve the search ranking of a certain new webpage on your site, you must
ensure that it is linked to other popular pages on your site. As it is your own
site, you can choose the anchor texts for the internal links. So instead of
using generic words such as ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ you can use
target keywords in your anchor texts.
9. Sitemap
Every site must have a
sitemap. However, even if sites don’t have one, they get indexed by search
engines. The presence of a sitemap makes it a tad easier to find and index
pages, for the search engines.
Checklist:
Do you have an XML
Sitemap?
Have you submitted the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools?
Have you located your sitemap on your robots.txt file?
Have you submitted the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools?
Have you located your sitemap on your robots.txt file?
Explanation
A sitemap helps tell
the search engines two important things: the location of all the internal links
and the priority of different pages in a website. The former improves indexing
of all internal pages hence paving way to search engine visibility to internal
pages while the latter helps understand the information architecture.
A sitemap location can also be specified in robots.txt file,
which is usually the first file a search engine crawler looks for while
crawling a site.
10. Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file
which, if present, on your website is the first file to be crawled by search
engines. This contains information about pages that should not be indexed. It
generally consists of information for search engines to guide them to crawl and
index the site efficiently, including the sitemap location.
Checklist:
If you have your
robots.txt file, have you checked it for any incorrect blocked pages or blocked
search bots?
Explanation
The presence of
robots.txt does not directly affect your website’s SEO. If you do have a
robots.txt, make sure that no page that you want to be indexed, is blocked. If
you have crawling issues reported on Google Webmaster Tools, make sure you
double check your robots.txt file.
Also, to increase the
crawl rate of search engine bots, you can avoid unnecessary pages from being
indexed by specifying them on your site’s robots.txt file.
11. Page Speed
Google announced back
in 2010 that it was using page loading speed in search ranking. This leaves you
with no choice but to make and maintain the loading speed of the website
to a couple of seconds.
Checklist:
Does you page load in
four seconds or less?
Explanation:
Removing code-bloat,
optimizing image sizes, optimizing caching, reducing DNS lookups are some of
the many things that affect the page loading time of a website. Improving page
loading speed improves the user experience on a website. According to an
article in The Guardian, the attention span of the internet customer is decreasing with increasing
technology. A faster loading page can capture the attention of the
site visitor efficiently, thus enriching the user-experience. Also, search
engines such as Google takes rich usability of a site into consideration to
rank high on search (you will see that in point 20 below).
12. In-Page Links
In the earlier days,
Google recommended that websites must not have more than 100 links on a page,
on account of crawling limitations. But there is no definite recommended number
of in-page links on a website ever since Google has acquired sophisticated and
well-equipped technologies to crawl and index links.
Checklist:
Do you have more than
100 to 200 links on a webpage on your site?
Explanation:
Eventhough search
engines such as Google have removed the threshold of 100 links on a webpage, it
is important to note that lesser the number of links on a page, the more
concentrated will be the acquired link juice. If you link unnecessarily from
your page to pages on your own site or third-party site, a certain percentage
of link equity is lost.
Thus it is advisable
to keep your webpage links under 100 to 200.
13. Page Indexing
Make sure all your
site’s pages are indexed. If there are problems in indexing reported on Google
Webmaster tools, it must be corrected immediately.
Checklist
Are all the pages of
your site indexed?
Explanation
If all or most of the
pages of your site is not indexed it may indicate that there is something wrong
with your internal linking architecture. Check the number of indexed pages on WooRank
Website Review, as shown below:
Number Of Indexed Pages Detected By WooRank
Website Review
You can also check it
in Google Webmaster
Tools. You can find the indexing status under Google Index >
Index Status, as shown in the screenshot below:
Indexing Status On Google Webmaster Tools
If problems in
indexing is caused by broken links, get it fixed immediately. Problems in the
sitemap could also cause lesser indexing of site’s pages. Also, look out for
inbound and outbound links. The internal linking structure of a page determines
how well a site get’s indexed. Read this post on 11 Steps To Get Your Site Indexed On Google for more
information.
If all the pages are
indexed on your website and there seems to be an increase in indexation rate,
it can indicate that the site receives fresh content. This is a positive
ranking signal for search.
14. Text/HTML
Higher amount of
content is always encouraged in websites to rank higher in search. But is this content
the HTML content or the text content?
Checklist
Is the Text to HTML
ratio of your site high?
Explanation
Search engines focus
on user’s experience on a site. A site with a decent amount of text is
indication that it is built for people. There are sites that may have text
within image files. This would be of no use if you want that text to be visible
to search engines.
Increasing the text to
HTML ratio not only serves for better SEO but also seems to increase page load
speed with the elimination of unwanted code.
15. Use of MultiMedia
The use of multimedia
enhances the search engine positioning of a site. Multimedia is in the form of
images and videos and according to this searchmetrics ranking factor study of 2013, the higher the
number images used, the better the ranking?
Checklist:
Does your website
contain a good amount of multimedia?
Explanation:
This factor has got to
do a lot with the user-experience of the site. The images and videos improve
user interaction with the site thus also reducing bounce rates. Higher bounce rates cannot be good for
a site’s SEO and hence you must embellish your content with relevant multimedia
elements and make it more inviting for your site visitors.
Just remember not to
overload your site’s pages with multimedia as it can lower the site speed.
16. Social Media Signals
You need social media
share and like icons on your webpage content, especially if you generate
content at regular intervals in the form of blogs or press releases.
Checklist:
Have you integrated
social media buttons?
Explanation:
It is wise to tell the
search engines how many times your content has been liked or shared on social
media. You can do that on page of your site by integrating social media share buttons and social media connect buttons.
You can also go a step further and install a blog for your website to increase
social media popularity of your site. Social media is
an important signal for enhanced SEO. and this is the onsite way to
do it.
Other offsite ways
include having a presence in social media sites and getting shares and likes on
your content through them.
17. HTML Errors
There is no excuse for
having HTML Errors on your site.
HTML Errors Detected On W3C Validator
Checklist
Does your site
code pass W3C validation?
Explanation:
Faulty coding and lots
of errors in the code can indicate poor quality in a website. Although not
strong ranking factor in search, it does account to one of the many factors
that causes drop in rankings. Hence, it is important that you fix any HTML
errors in your site on a regular basis.
18. Site Uptime
Having maintenance
issues quite often from your server leads to site downtime ans is not good for
on page SEO.
Checklist:
Is your website
downtime more than 24 hours?
Explanation
Having shorter
duration of downtime is okay, but if your site is used to being down for longer
periods and at high frequency it is time to consider change of servers and
redirect to new IP.
19. Usability
Usability is a ranking
factor for search engines and is controlled by on page elements.
Checklist
Is your site easy to
navigate and understand?
Is your site’s bounce rate low?
Is your content relevant to the target search keywords?
Is the information on your site easily accessible?
Does you site have trust signals?
Is your site compatible on all browsers?
Is your site user-friendly when viewed on smaller screens (mobile)?
Is your site devoid of pop-ups and splash pages?
Is your site’s bounce rate low?
Is your content relevant to the target search keywords?
Is the information on your site easily accessible?
Does you site have trust signals?
Is your site compatible on all browsers?
Is your site user-friendly when viewed on smaller screens (mobile)?
Is your site devoid of pop-ups and splash pages?
Explanation:
Apart from the answers
to the above questions there are more factors that affect the usability of a site. How a
certain search engine user engages with the link that is returned in search is
taken into consideration.
For instance, image
that you are a searcher and you click on a link and immediately click the back
button. Your engagement with that site is poor. This may be due to poor
user-experience and such engagement metrics may cause lowering of search
ranking.
20. Outbound Links
Outbound links have a small role
to play on search ranking and they are totally under your control. These are
links that you create from your website to a third-party website with relevant
content.
Checklist:
Do you link to
authority sites in your niche from your site?
Explanation:
When your site is
linked to other sites in your niche with a higher authority, it helps search
engines understand the relevance of your content better. For instance if your
site has the keyword ‘House’ and it links to sites such as metacritic.com, the
search engines understand that your site is about House – the TV series and not
an actual house.
Having way too many
outbound links can backfire though, as it will be considered as a distraction
to the user from the main content. Also, you need not nofollow all the outbound links and give the impression
that you are PageRank sculpting.
These were some of the
most important on page SEO checklist items, that will ensure your
website is set on the right path towards search engine optimization.
There are some more factors on your WooRank Website review report that are to
be considered as well. So, make sure to follow the report and complete all the
tasks.
Before you set your
website on it’s on page SEO journey, you need to make sure that your
website is connected to analytic tools from search engines that you need
the traffic from. Google being the most popularly used search engine in the
globe, you will be benefited by setting up a Google account for your website
and installing and setting up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster
Tools. The fact that you have an account with all these free
tools provided by search engines makes it easier for the search engines to gain
access to your site’s information. Some SEO’s believe this also helps in
ranking in the search engines.
You must also have
your target keywords ready as they are the integral part of on page SEO. Learn
how to keyword research the smart way using the right tools. If you host your website on WordPress you can
benefit from Yoast’s SEO plugin that will do the SEO check on every
new content you create.
