SEO

75+ Best SEO Checklist for Google Organic Ranking

seo optimization checklist for beginners

SEO Optimization Checklist for “SEO Beginners”

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first” – ‪Wendy Piersall

Google SEO is about “Keywords” and “Links”. It’s about specificity, authenticity, and trustworthiness. It’s about quality content & user satisfaction.

Step-by-step SEO learning for Beginners
Photo Courtesy:www.slideshare.net

Learn simple & best SEO tips for ranking high in Google Search Results;

  1. Follow SEO Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  2. Don’t expect ZEO too much too fast
  3. Your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML sitemaps or RSS for instance)
  4. Abide by Search Engine rules and official SEO guidelines for inclusion
  5. Be smart & cautious while building SEO links to your site
  6. Links from other websites trump every other signal
  7. Unique content or original copy is written specifically for a given page
  8. Original quality links lead to chances of generating inbound quality links
  9. Use nofollow carefully. The search engine needs to understand a link, is a link
  10. Submit your site to search engines (rarely dependent; CLICK HERE)
  11. Check the quality of incoming links
  12. Avoid spam content or pages for affiliate purposes
  13. Including highly specific target SEO keywords for each page or in links pointing to your page/site
  14. Improvise SEO PageRank with quality incoming links
  15. Google doesn’t understand ‘good’ content, but it does understand the popular content
  16. Use XML sitemap on your website; Google will use that file to find or index all the other pages on your site
  17. Rank for specific keyword phrase by having the keyword phrase or highly relevant words on your page or in links/hyperlinks pointing to your page/site
  18. Mirror, how hard your SEO targeted keywords are competing
  19. Increase quality links to your site to increase Page Rank
  20. Build links to your site to acquire more Google juice or links to have high DOMAIN AUTHORITY or TRUST. Google is a “Links based Search Engine” – it doesn’t quite understand ‘GOOD’ content – but it does understand ‘POPULAR’ content
  21. Get links within page text directing to your site with Keywords in the link
  22. Do internal linking i.e., linking text to your other pages within the site
  23. Too many low-quality pages on your site will impact your overall site performance in Google
  24. Unique pages, unique page titles & unique meta descriptions
  25. Google & Bing ignore meta keywords or use them as spam signals
  26. Avoid keyword stuffing in the content of the page. Better to have keywords in links, page titles and text content
  27. Believe in natural and steady link growth for your website
  28. Who links You, Quality of those Links, & Who you Link to – determine where you rank
  29. Google decides, which pages on your site are important or most relevant
  30. Important to spread all that real ‘PageRank’ – or link equity – to your profitable keywords/phrase high ROI pages
  31. Link to important pages on your site from your Home page
  32. Google Panda – a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.
  33. Google Penguin – first announced on April 24, 2012. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines with involvement in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page
  34. Important for SEO expert to be page-centric, instead of just keyword centric when optimizing a web page for Google
  35. Proper SEO keyword research, text content on a page, keywords in external & internal links determine the rank of your webpage in either Google/Yahoo/Bing
  36. Google doesn’t rate a given page higher than a competition – problem with the content or backlinks of the page
  37. Find, which pages are necessary or important for you
  38. Find, which links are necessary for your given pages
  39. Find, which pages are acquiring the link juices
  40. Find, which pages or keywords to be ignored
  41. The less domain authority you have, the more text you’re going to need for your web pages
  42. Keep it SIMPLE, STUPID; (KISS)
  • Don’t build your site entirely with Flash, or HTML Frames
  • Build your site with CSS & HTML. Then if required, you can embed media files such as Flash in HTML
  • W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium
  • HTML5 is the preferred option over Flash
  • Site built entirely in Flash could affect your rankings, and esp., in mobile search results
  • KISS philosophy – Keep It Simple, Stupid

  1. Perfect Page Title tag in Google is dependent on a number of Factors;

  • Meta Title should be of 65 characters
  • Important keyword phrases should be in the first few words of any Meta Title
  • Fit up to 12 words, and your important keywords in the first 8 words
  • Some Meta Title do better with Call-to-Action
  • Unique meta titles for each page, less duplication esp., for larger sites
  • Think ‘keyword phrase‘ rather than ‘keyword‘, ‘keyword‘, keyword in meta title

 

  1. Unique Meta Description for each page of your website

  2. Include Robots.txt file

  • Valid values for Robots Meta Tag ”CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“, “FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“.
  • NOINDEX – prevents the page from being included in the index
  • NOFOLLOW – prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page.
  • NOARCHIVE – prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results
  • NOSNIPPET – prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page
  • NONE – equivalent to “NOINDEX” / “NOFOLLOW”
  • Google Spider name “GoogleBot
  • Yahoo Spider name “Slurp
  • Bing Spider name “BingBot
  • Ask.com Spider name “Teoma

 

  1. Add all the above meta tags in the [Head] section of an [HTML] page
  2. H1 tags to be used once on a given page, and not to make H1 tag exact same as your Page titles tag
  3. How much content do you include in a page to rank for a certain keyword? The answer is “no optimal amount of content per page.
  4. Character Counter & Word Count Tool
  5. Is there a particular number of Keyword Density? The answer is “NO”. For e.g., If I’ve 5 para’s, they can have 4-5 keywords as long it’s unique and doesn’t look like Keyword Stuffing
  6. Don’t link out links to other sites from a HOME page
  7. The links from Home Page should be shared with the internal pages of your website to have the PR residing on your website
  8. Don’t link out to other sites from Category specific pages too
  9. Link to other relevant sites from Individual or Static pages; not to worry about PR Leak
  10. Take care of “Redirect ‘ Non-WWW’ to ‘WWW’ “ (another name for it is Canonicalization)
  11. It’s important to redirect all the Google backlinks juice to one canonical version of a URL
  12. ALT tags are counted by Google and Bing too
  13. ALT tags are used to describe an image in your page
  14. Use clean URLs on your site, as well as simple
  15. Using of Boldness or Italics in your content or for keywords can give some slight impact on the performance
  16. Prefer Absolute URLs than to Relative URLs;
  1. Is Subfolders or Files, best in supporting Google rank? Few say, don’t go beyond 4 levels of folders in your file path!
  2. PHP, HTML or ASP coding? PHP is more preferred along with HTML
  3. Valid HTML & CSS are foundations of best practice website SEO optimization
  4. 301 permanent redirection for 404 error pages to add any backlinks or internal link power that a given page might have
  5. Audit any pages backlinks before you redirect them to an important page
  6. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, and it’s a footprint of most spam sites
  7. Avoid broken links and 404 errors; to identify this error refer your Google Webmaster Account
  8. Link to your important web pages often internally, with varying anchor text in the navigation & in-page text content
  9. Google says, “XML and RSS is still a very useful discovery method for them to pick out recently updated content on your site”
  • What is an XML Sitemap? The answer is, “A file on your server with which you can help Google easily crawl & index all the pages on your site. This is evidently used for very large sites that publish lots of new content or updates content regularly”
  1. Google depends on links to find all the pages on your site, and links spread PageRank, that help pages rank
  2. Does the second anchor text link on a page count?
  3. the rel=canonical link element is important
  4. What Google tells you to restrict or avoid in this SEO Started Guide PDF file;
  • Don’t choose a title that has no relation to content on the page
  • Never use default tiles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
  • Never use a common single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
  • Never use extremely long titles that don’t help the users
  • Never stuff keywords in your title tags
  • Never create a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
  • Never fill the meta-description with only keywords
  • Never copy & paste the entire content of the document into the meta-description tag
  • Never use a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
  • Avoid using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
  • Avoid choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
  • Never use excessive keywords like “baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseball-cards.htm” for your page URL
  • Never have deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”
  • using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
  • having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/page.htm” and “xyz.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content
  • Avoid mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
  • Avoid creating complex navigation links on your website e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page
  • Avoid letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
  • Avoid creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them
  • Avoid allowing your 404 pages to be indexed by search engines (refer Google Webmaster tool to identify 404 errors)
  • Avoid providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404″, or no 404 page at all. Instead, we can add “Site Under Construction” or “Coming Soon”

        Don’t make these simple but dangerous mistakes

  • Avoid duplicating content on your site copies or referred to other sites
  • Don’t hide text on your website. Google may eventually remove you from the SERPS (search engine results pages)
  • Google loves natural link growth
  • Don’t get everybody links to your site pages using the same “anchor text” or link phrase. This could flag as a ‘rank modifier’
  • Build quality backlinks than to quantity of links for your website
  • Don’t buy many keyword rich domains, fill them with similar content and link them to your site.
  • Do not constantly change your site pages names or site navigation without remembering to employ redirects
  • Avoid developing a site with a JavaScript navigation that Google, Yahoo, and Bing cannot crawl
  • Do not link to everybody who asks you for reciprocal links. Only link out to quality sites you feel can be trusted.

You can also view my previous best practices to rank well with SEO in Google Organic Search

Additional resource for your reference;

 

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