Today I will provide you with a complete on-site SEO checklist to keep your websites healthy. You’re going to love this list, everything on it is working excellent right now so if you want to improve your Google rankings here is a definitive guide that you can use immediately. With the continual growth of the internet I recommend that you reserve some time to improve your SEO daily, this will ensure that you stay on top of your game and that you target a relevant audience. Let’s get started and make your website rank higher in organic search results!
SEO checklist to optimize on-page content
This is the largest article I have written so far, but that is good because Google likes long articles with many pictures. I have been providing on-page optimization services for many years and I can tell you that optimizing on page content is a must in order to obtain high rankings in organic search results. Today I will share with you all the golden rules. The first rule of this 2020 tutorial is to always optimize your site for users first. Some people think that optimization for both users and spiders do not go hand in hand, so I will be explaining all the on-page SEO factors to you which will enable you to rank better and stay a mile ahead. On page SEO consists of a set of techniques that are fully explained in the checklist below, and which you can either employ yourself or outsource to an SEO company. Frequently observed techniques include optimization of internal links, creation of relevant URLs, optimization of the title and description tags, and overall content and internal link improvements.
Title tags and description tags
Title tags are important for SEO if you want to know what they are and how they work keep on reading. Over the years I have optimized many webpages and it is no secret that there is a link between keyword rich title tags and first page rankings. When you look at the first page of Google you will find that many, if not all results have the searched keyword included in the title aswell. However, just using the right keyword-rich title tags will not get you on page one. When Google, or any other search engine spider, visits your website, it will check if the content is relevant, and obviously the most relevant information about a site should be in the title tag. You can use long tail keywords to discover hidden opportunities.
Description titles are useful, and while it is true that Google claims that it does not use the description metatag in order to determine the content of your site, it is also true that visitors see the description tags listed in search results. Consequently this means that you audience clicks on a link based on what you write in this description tag. Be creative and call to action so more people will land on your page.
Use important keywords early in your page
When optimizing your website content you have to avoid keyword stuffing, however, it is important that you repeat your keywords in the first 120 – 140 words of your page. Before you decide on which keywords to add, you should know the real SEO vallue of each keyword. Additionally you want to place your most important links towards the top using revelant link text. This is a very important part of SEO and if this is not done right you may want to consider editing your existing pages. Why is this important? Simply because engines like Google and Bing put more weight on terms that show at the beginning of a page.
Page Loading Speed
A website’s page loading speed is an important factor for SEO. How fast does YOUR website load, and is it optimized for mobile users? With more phones than desktops connecting to the internet in 2020, page loading speed and super light pages optimized for cellphones are a must. If you are using WordPress than it is easy to apply such changes, but if you have a website that is coded in HTML then it may take a considerable amount of time and money to get ready for the race.
Other factors for page loading speed are the server and network you are on. Servers located within the US are usually connected to fast networks, something which is not always the case for foreign web hosting service providers. Thing such as processor speed, memory, and the amount of sites hosted on a server will also impact a website’s performance. If you think slow loading speeds are affecting your SEO then you should consider our managed hosting solutions. We provide fast WordPress managed hosting solutions starting at only $14.95/month, let us do all the work and manage your database so you don’t have to worry about a thing. Our hosting services are blazing fast guaranteed or your money back. If you are looking for a lower price tag make sure to check out this Bluehost review.
Bounce Rates
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that lands on a website and then immediately leaves. High bounce rates are caused by irrelevant content, borring content, many ad placements, sites with sales pitches (landing pages) etc. You can retain your visitors by placing something on your site that will keep them occupied for a while. This could be photos that slow down their browsing behavior, or even puzzles or small games that keep them busy. Remember, you could simply enable comments on your blog. Doing so gives people something read and interact with which will keep them on the page for longer.
Use titles and descriptions
When creating a page you want to always start the page with an H1 header, then at least one H2 header (use your keyword here once), and if you like you can also use the H3 and H4 headers, however, it is of vital importance that after the H1 and H2 header you do not keep stuffing keywords because this may provoke a penalty. Besides from in header, appropriate descriptions with keywords should also be present below pictures, and your picture and descriptions have to be 100% original. If you use recycled content there is a good chance that Google will notice and that your pages will be excluded.
Create SEO friendly URLs
Be careful with this one, prevent including too many keywords in your URLs, but do ensure that each URL contains at least one. For example the URL for this page is the-complete-on-site-seo-site-list.html which has the word SEO included once so that’s OK. Since this website has as title “Affordable SEO Services” I do want to avoid URL’s that repeat this ful keyword combination. So rather then using the full combination I would include the word “affordable” or “services” next time. Mixing up the order like this “SEO Services Affordable” also works.
Targeted outbound links improve ranking
Targeted outbound links improve ranking. Alhough it is not recommended to go and place outgoing links on all pages of your site, you should have least have resource section for your site where you provide links to authority sites. I have tested this many times and the websites that do have a resource page with relevant links always rank higher.
Original Content is King
Always make sure to write original and unique content, and to compliment this with fresh images or original photos. Many people think they can get away with copying or rewriting texts from other websites, but Google has become pretty smart, and they will catch on if you dont use your own vocabulary. It is very important for those who wish to rank well, that your content provides for something that is not out there yet. Whether this are tips and tricks, new graphic designs, videos, photos or anything else is of lesser importance, as long as it’s unique and raw.
Treasure your content
You may have already found that writing good content is not enough to rank high in the organic search results of Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. So what is it exactly that is needed in order to improve your content? Well for starters visual synesthesia will help. What is visual synesthesia? Visual synestesia happens when the shapes and colors of the images on your website match the overal feeling and “mood” of your site. Beginners may find it difficult to create such images, but you can practice by making a ‘moodboard” on sites such as canva. Canva.com additionally gives you the oportunity to create original ebook covers and other cool graphic designs. At the time of this writing you can try a fully functional version of their online tools for free.
In order to boost your SEO try to improve your writing so that your content is more engaging. You want visitors to leave a comment so make sure to ask them about their interests and give them an incentive to respond. Remember, content written by someone with experience is always more valueble than copies received from a content writing service. While there are some really good writers out there, experience cannot be immitated. You further want to frequently update your pages to add new images and new examples which will quickly be spidered and indexed by the search engine crawlers.
Delete unrelated pages
According to Google, websites that have tons of pages are not necesarily good for SEO. To improve your organic rankings you want to delete all pages that do not center on your main topic. This means that if you have ad pages or guest blog pages that are simply off-topic then it is better to drop those. You want to spend your efferts on getting quality traffic only, which means you must drop everything that is not related or getting traffic from the wrong keywords.
Keep things simple
In order to exceed in SEO you don’t want to make things to complicated. After all, both users and search engines will have to understand what you are talking about. Some changes you could make is simpler formatting and adding more compact content to the site. Your site has to be exactly the way Google searchers want it to be so all the information you claim to have in your title and description tag better be there. If you make it to the second page than you should know that you are losing out on the 98% of visitors who click on links on the front page. It really pays off to spend that extra time in order to end up on page one.
Question title tags and why you should use them
What is a question title tag? It simply a title that is turned into a question. And how can this help me you might say? Easy! I have visited thousands of websites in the top 10 of Google to figure out why some websites rank well and others don’t, and I came to the conclusion that part of the secret is question based title tags simply because they have a higher click-trough-rate. Obviously not every title has to be a question, but you want to keep this in mind because high click-through rates are another one of Googles ranking factors so this will affect your SEO. On average question title tags have almost a 16% higher CTR. You can also increase your CTR by adding some zest to the title, but be careful that you don’t overdo it or it will look like spam and potential visitors will choose a different result.
Internal Linking
Internal links on your site are a major part of SEO. If your link structure isn’t up to status then you will see an overall weak ranking for your site. With internal links the idea is to link from highly relevant pages to pages that can use a boost. Obviously you will be using the most relevant keywords in those links, and remember, links towards the top of the page have more “weight” compared to the links on the bottom. Take Google for example, or Bing, Yahoo, or all those other search engines that have PR10 or PR9 or PR8, they all contain many links with highly relevant anchor text and the keywords are repeated in the descriptions.
Be Conclusive
You want your website to be EVERYTHING a user on the first page of Google is looking for so make sure to include as much relevant information as possible, and try to be as conclusive as possible. I even make sure that the main keywords appear in the first few words of the title, as it seems that Google puts more weight on keywords that appear closer to the start of the page. Adding the current year (2020) will further narrow down search results and will ensure that your content is preferred over content webmasters have published last year or the year before.
Making your content easy to read is a must, visitors do not read everything and will skim through your content. If you don’t use paragraphs and spaces readers will skip larger portions of the information you provide and your bounce rate will be higher. In order words people will leave with less information then you wanted to provide them with.
You can spike interest with a dash of controversy. Many readers welcome skeptic comments that go against everything you have to say. Don’t be affraid to include them on your. Doing so will amuse people and create trust since you are showing not to be affraid to take some heat.
Don’ts
Some of the things that you should never do? Do NOT use article spinners, recycled content WILL BE discovered by Google. It is not worth ruining your website over.
Be careful with free SEO tools. While there are some excellent free tools out there you should know that there are also tools that will harm your website, or which are solely intended to close a sale. If you are unsure about whether an SEO tool is legit or not it is better to avoid it.
Bing Webmaster tools is often recommended by SEO consultants but I admit I am not a big fan of tracking code. There is something honorable in providing your visitors with an anonymous browsing experience. IMHO Bing Webmaster does not offer any data you can’t do without.
Every SEO expert will recommend Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools but why remove the mysterious veil so soon? If you are just getting started it may be better to keep Google partly in the dark about your stats. They will still gather data from users that visit your website with the chrome browser, but at least your site remains its enigmatic touch.. I recommend that you first get some traffic going before you choose whether you will use Google or other tracking software.
Be careful with Adwords campaigns. Unless you are 100% aware of your conversion rates you could be fooled into buying ads from Google and lose a lot of money. Many people think that they can make money with Adwords but it is really not as easy as you might think. It will take in-depth analysis of traffic, keywords and convertions.
Don’t load large pictures on top of your blog post. I enabled this as an experiment and was able to confirm that this increased the bounce rate. People who get to your website from page one quickly want to be able to access the information they have been looking for. Loading a large photo first will not only slow down the page speed but additionally requires users to scroll down in order to find what they are looking for. This is NOT recommended.
Avoid third party javascript. Third party scripts slow down your site and can cause errors. And yes, this even goes for Google Webmaster, Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster. You also want to keep your site code as clean and compact as possible.
Important Stuff
Last of all I can’t stress enough how important original images are, and why you should focus most of your time on proper internal link structure. I have already touched these topics but this will really makes all the difference in the world, and in Google. I always use a tool such as Ahrefs in order to define which page has the most weight. Once I know this I will start creating links to other pages with the keywords that I wish to target, making sure that these keywords also appear frequently in the pages I link to. As much as the images is concerned, you want to use compression and should be aware that .png and .jpg are not the smallest files anymore.
The use of LSI keywords is also important. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing which are basically synonyms for keywords that search engines use to better understand the meaning of your website. As such it is always good to pull up the online dictionary to find some related words and topics. When Google just started out they only used keywords and metatags to determine what a website is all about, but those times are over so you should keep this in mind. For example LSI keywords for “internet” are: access provider, adsl, bitcoin, blogosphere, blackberry, browser, cybersecurity, deep web, domain. e-business, internet banking and so on. I frequently use the Cambridge Dictionary SMART thesaurus, but you can also find related terms by copying the Google or Bing search suggestions for the keyword you are looking for.
Looking towards the future to see what new technology has to bring is important. One example of new technology is AI and voice search. Voice search has been increasing over the past few years and has already surpassed desktop search. One thing we know about Google voice search is that it loves to list frequently asked questions so updating your FAQ page and answering questions about the business you are in is important.
Once you are done optimizing your site and everything looks good make sure to submit your website for free to 102 free stat sites and 41+ major search engines that will immediately increase your traffic. You can use this on page checklist to perform your own SEO audit, use the free SEO audit tool at Woorank, or contact us for a consultation. If you still have questions you may submit a download request for the PDF file or send us email at debby48@protonmail.com
I hope you enjoyed this 2020 on page SEO checklist, please take a moment of your valueble time to answer the following questions, and remember, if you need on page SEO services keep us in mind. We also provide off page SEO services at affordable prices. Below are the questions:
Have you used our free submission tools to add your website to directories and search engines? How did you like it?
Are you currently using original images on your blog or website?
Are you, after reading this article, going to change your website title and description? Why?
Do you think Voice Search is going to completely take over mobile search and desktop search? Why?
Have you repaired your website before in order to meet SEO standards?
Let me know by leaving your comment below right now.
SEO San Francisco 
I did enjoy reading it though not to apply. I blog for myself and yes for others but I don’t think I would have the patience to try to do any SEO
LikeLike
If you are new to SEO the amount of information can be overwhelming, in such case it may be beneficial to look for a reliable SEO agency. Either way, even if you apply only one tip at a time you’re still working towards a better optimized website, just a thought 😉
LikeLike
Very useful
LikeLiked by 1 person