Top 5 SEO Checklist for Your Website.

Making sure your site ranks at the top of search engine rankings is essential to getting your online business seen. That’s why here at the Internet Business School, we’re always keeping an eye on the top SEO techniques small businesses can use to get the edge over their competitors. So what should you be keeping in mind when optimising your site?

1) Find the Best Keywords for Your Website

Make sure to know what your customers are searching for before you optimise your site. There’s no point spending time and money on something that won’t even bring you more sales. There are multiple tools out there which will tell you how often people are searching for select keywords. Many of these tools are absolutely free and offered by the search engines themselves. Google will even calculate how successful your keyword choice is when you choose a listing. Investing time into finding the best keywords that generate the most leads is essential for increasing your reach.

When using any SEO tool for keywords research start with ambiguous searches, create categories and drill down to create smaller more specific groups of keywords. These groups can later be used as clusters of keywords for any Sponsored Ads you create. With SEO, these groups can also be used as directories of the content who will want to have on your website. Long tail keywords are ideal for generating sales. Rather than short vague keywords such as ‘kindle’, ‘brown shoes’ or ‘laptop’ use longer more specific keywords, for instance ‘buy used amazon kindle’ or ‘nike brown shoes size 10’.

2) Do Competitor Research

Search engines analyse incoming links to your website for their rankings. Therefore knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you an edge over their businesses. Of course the first step to this is knowing who your competitors are in the first place. When analysing your competition you should consider these very important linking criteria:

Competitor rank in the search engines
The quality and quantity of their incoming links.
What keywords are they using in the title of their linking page?
What percentage of links contain specific keywords in their link text?
The Google PageRank or MozRank of linking pages.
The popularity of the linking domain and the linking page (measured by links and mentions.)

Many SEO tools will provide you with quick and easy competitor research options. However here are some other factors you should consider when scouting out the competition:

Click on the link to their Site Map page and see what keywords you can find their links.
Look at their XML Site Map to find keywords in their page names.
View the HTML title and meta tags of your top competitors and make a list of what you need to target.

3) Write Content People Want to Link and Share.

Just writing a generic article full of keywords isn’t going to automatically get you a high ranking. Link-building is essential for building up a good reputation with the search engines so it’s important to get people interacting with your content and sharing it. Keep the following checklist in mind to get a higher ranking in search engine results, many of the suggestions came straight for Google.

The content educates the reader.
The content is original.
It’s exciting to share.
There are supported facts and references.
There’s enough detail that people will link it to come back later.
There’s fun and interesting videos or imagery.
It’s relevant and topical.
It’s controversial enough to grab attention.
There’s a discount or offer involved.
It’s easy to link on social media.
It establishes you as a figure of authority.
The site thanks people for sharing or linking it.

4) Optimise your title and meta tags.

HTML titles and meta tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for search engines to list them in their search results. Google does not use the meta keywords tags in their ranking. Google accounts for 64% of all searches, so do not dwell too long on your meta keywords tags.

Google only shows the first sixty-six characters in their search titles. Therefore it may be best to keep your titles to under sixty-six characters whilst still keeping the title relevant to the content. When it comes to the meta description, include your top terms in a description that reads properly and doesn’t look like spam. It should give a clear indicator as to what your site is about. Amazon’s meta description is a good example of a clear explanation that includes many keywords:

“Online shopping from the earth’s biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, jewelry, tools & hardware, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, beauty & personal care, broadband & dsl, gourmet food & just about anything else.”

5) Optimise Your Headings and Subheadings

Headings play an important role in organising information for search engines, so make sure to include online one H1 tag when creating a page, and optionall using one or more subheading (H2-H6). You can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), to make your headers more appealing. Here’s a piece of code you can use in your heading:

h1 font-size: 18px;

h2 font-size: 16px;

h3 font-size: 14px;

</style>

Since a page full of headings would be completely useful, add content between them, 400+ words per page is recommended.

SEO has never been more important for businesses of every size. From small start-ups to big corporations, everyone needs to rank highly on Google and they’ll pay large amounts to learn how. SEO experts are desperately needed to keep up with this demand. Now it’s your chance to make money off this panic. Discover everything you need to become an SEO consultant and learn all the tricks of the trade with our Professional SEO Consultant training course. Visit the course page to find out more! You can even get 50% off this amazing course with the code SEO50