For those who want a simple checklist to help with your SEO efforts, you’re in luck as we’re bringing you that today. So without further delay we’ll jump right into it and present our top ten SEO best practices Checklist.
- Be sure to completely fill out your meta tags. Pay special attention to the title and description tag. Your title and description tag will form your online ‘billboard’ when your site appears in the search engines. Be sure to include your main keyword phrase in both, and keep your title tag to 66 characters or less and description tag to 155 characters or less.
- Use your keyword phrase in important places. Opening sentence of a paragraph, opening paragraph on the page, closing paragraph, title, subtitles, etc.
- Create a sitemap. You can create a free XML sitemap here.
- Be sure your site loads fast and accurately with no errors. Search engines hate errors, and also hate slow sites. If you have lots of flash or images that make your site load slow, a redesign may be in the cards for you.
- Quote authority sources in your niche. This may seem counter productive, but as search evolves this is going to help your site. If there is a great post or article about your niche, mention it and provide a link to that site. If you are quoting facts or figures, give credit to the resource you used with a link.
- Build links naturally. It is not natural to build 100,000 links to a new site the first week it is up. Create a game plan for your link building and stick to it so that you are building links on a consistent and regular basis. You want a constant flow of links coming into your site, not lots of peaks and valleys if it is viewed on a chart.
- Guest post on authority blogs in your niche. Contact other site owners in your niche and offer to write unique posts for them in exchange for a link back to your site. Not only is this great link building, but it is also great authority building as you are posting on authority sites within your niche.
- Get social. Sign up for and use Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin at the very least. Engage your audience and post content to these sites on a regular basis. Eventually you can get to a point where you can drive much of your traffic from these social sites and you will be less dependent on your search engine rankings.
- Participate in forums. Forums within your niche are great places to participate. Find a couple forums in your niche that allow signature links and participate at a high level in these forums. Add to the discussions, answer questions, make yourself helpful. It will benefit you in the long run.
- Get video on your site. Pull in on topic videos from YouTube, or better yet create a YouTube channel and start posting your own quality videos. Video is huge and growing, and it must be a part of any online marketing campaign these days.
For more on SEO, please download our free SEO guide today. If you are in need of SEO services, please feel free to contact us. We are based in Californiaand are a Bay Area SEO company that specializes in working with small businesses.