SEO Checklist – 7 Essential Things to Check for Better SEO Rankings

This free step-by-step video covers everything you need to know from an SEO perspective, when you’re starting a new site, or are trying to rank your current site higher.

In an online world that is so crowded, it's imperative to give yourself the best chance to be seen by potential viewers. One great way to do this, which I'm sure we have all heard about, is search engine optimization, or SEO.

If you want to get on the first page of a google search, you'll want to follow this checklist and make sure each step is incorporated in your SEO plan.

1. First, you want to be sure that you have hooked up Google Analytics. It's going to give you powerful marketing analytics that will show you how viewers interact with your site.

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Google Analytics also offers easy website testing that allows you to change something on your site and then quickly determine the impact on customer behavior.

2. If you're using WordPress, be sure to install Yoast SEO. It's a plug-in that is going to make your life a heck of a lot easier.

It offers free optimization of your site and real-time content analysis so that your site is easily readable by Google.

3. Are you doing your keyword research? I recommend Google's Keyword Planner, but there are many tools out there that you can utilize.

This step is a very strategic action because you must know your customers' intent when researching what words, or phrases, you think they will be searching.

I recommend that you pick just 1 keyword per each of your pages and use it wisely.

4. Make sure that you have included your primary keyword, or something similar, into your page URL and also in your title tag. This is going to help search engines easily match and identify what your page is about.

Try to make your title tag as exciting as possible. You want to get people feeling curious!

5. Next, you want to make the text on your site pages as search engine-accessible as possible. This can be accomplished in a few different ways, but I recommend you always have at least 100 words on each page.

This is going to ensure search engines have a reliable amount of text to dissect what the page is really about.

6. When creating in-content links, you want to be sure they are as SEO-friendly as possible. A great way to do this is by describing the page you're linking to in the anchor text.

This is going to allow viewers and search engines to more efficiently understand what the page is about.

7. Lastly, use a free SEO tool that can audit your site and give you an analysis of your on-page optimization ranking factors.

This tool is what can give you a peace of mind that you have effectively inserted the best SEO practices.

Remember that just following this checklist is not going to ensure your site ranks #1 on a google search. The goal for you is to have the most SEO-friendly site possible to give yourself the best chance of being seen.

There are a ton more tools out there that I would encourage you all to dissect and see what works best with your site.

If you find some tools that worked great for you but aren't included in this list, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

I hope this video taught you a bit about SEO best practices and I wish you the best on your site's optimization.