What does it mean to have a website? What are the roles and responsibilities involved? And what should you do, if you want your website to spit out money?
Can anyone believe that SEO, a simple three-letter word that is giving sleepless nights to digital marketers is the answer for every query up there?
Introduction to SEO
Even though SEO is not a hot new topic, it is necessary that we have a brief intro on the same. SEO, short for search engine optimization is the process of increasing a website’s organic traffic through legitimate ways. With a good SEO ranking, one can expect their websites to top in every search engines result pages (SERP).
A good number of leads that means you do not have to worry about the revenue. Nowadays people hardly go with good SEO practices; rather, they prefer back-door SEO techniques which are less time-consuming. True, the shady techniques will earn your website everything you have dreamt of, but only for a short time. On the other hand, good or a white hat SEO practices promise with better results even though they are time-consuming.
SEO Checklists for 2017
Some of the key SEO checklists is explained below, which, needs to be focused and addressed periodically to make your website more useful as well as productive for the target audience.
- Keyword Research-
- Is your website relevant to user’s requirement? To know, it is necessary to gain knowledge about the actual terms used and on the basis of which the website’s content is structured. The number of keywords to be used in a phrase, keyword positioning, everything, should be analyzed to know the relevancy of current keyword targeting strategy.
- An evergreen procedure, keyword analysis has always held a major authority in content development. SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, are some of the best tools that will help you in this research.
- Image Optimization-
- One of the crucial on-page SEO factors, image optimization has a major say in driving huge amount organic traffic to the website. A picture can say thousands of words, so a website should always project the visual components in a much-refined fashion.
- Image optimization is the process of compressing images to appropriate downloadable size through proper image compression techniques. Search engines have a great affiliation towards optimized images that is represented with a right name and alt text. Also, retaining the default file name for your images is not a good move, instead go with descriptive file names and keywords that are separated by a hyphen.
- Competitor Analysis-
- This should be your uttermost priority if planning for your website’s success. Conventionally speaking Domain Authority (DA) and page authority (PA) are the two factors considered if one is analyzing his competitor’s website. Both DA and PA are developed by Moz for auditing the performance of a website in SERPs.
- ‘DA’ deals with determining the ranking strength of a website based on the presence of a number of high-quality external links.
- ‘PA’ score deals with the prediction of ranking of a particular web page based on the link counts and various other factors.
- So, go with a Moz toolbar, analyze your competitor’s website from scratch and do the needful implementations.
- Technical Analysis-
- Don’t goof up the chances of scoring well by missing out this significant step. The bad news is, you have numerous factors to analyze, but on the brighter side you have Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Pingdom and Google’s website speed tools to ease out the straining activity.
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- – Webpage loading Speed
- – Keyword Cannibalization
- – Duplicate Content
- – Mobile Friendliness/Responsiveness
- – Redirect and Site Indexing Issues
- – 404 Errors & Site Optimization
- Each and every specified element will be accurately analyzed under the above-specified tools. Every setback should be uniformly analyzed and countered with proper solutions.
- Citation Analysis-
- Local search rankings are greatly dependent on local citations. Local clients will be greatly affected if the consistency in NAP-W is not maintained. NAP-W here stands for name, address, phone, and website.
- Yext, Moz Local, and Bright Local are some of the tools for auditing the citations of a website.
