Have you created a new piece of content for your website, such as a blog or web page? You may have done your keyword research and written a great piece of SEO content, but your process isn’t done yet. To really optimize your content for SEO, you need to look at a few other areas of the page too. Make sure you can cross off each part of this checklist to guarantee you’ve done your best for SEO.
- Page Titles
Remember that the page title is what will be shown on Google search results, as well as social media (if open graph tags aren’t present). So it needs to be catchy, interesting, and to-the-point. A title that is super long will get cut off in Google, so make sure you put the most important phrases first. Incorporate your keyword or chosen search phrase into the title for an extra boost.
2. Images & Text
You may be tempted to create images or infographics that contain a lot of text in them. Static infographics that contain a lot of text are gaining in popularity, partly because they are easy to share on social media.
But unfortunately, this technique is not great for SEO, because the search engines can’t read the text in the image. A small amount of text is unavoidable, but you don’t want to hide all your content in an image.
Instead, try building out a website with images and icons instead of one giant graphic. This way, you’ll get credit for the content you create.
3. Internal Links
Linking internally within your site helps to direct visitors to other pages of content, so they stick around longer. Look for opportunities throughout blocks of content to link to key pages on your site. The key here is to make it natural and not insert links where they don’t make sense.
You can also include links in a footer at the bottom of the article, or in a category selection or “Similar Posts” box on the side or top of the page.
4. Images
Your blogs and content hopefully contain some images and custom icons, which is great to attract readers and keep them interested in the page. But if they aren’t optimized, they can slow down your page load time to excruciating speeds.
To start, you should compress all images before you upload them, which is particularly important for anyone accessing your site on a mobile device.
5. Tracking
Hopefully, you have Google Analytics or another tracking system set up on your site. Every time you create new content, you need to make sure it is set up to track the new page as well. Before you hit publish, make sure you input a GTM code for Google Analytics, and check it to make sure it’s working.
This also includes any remarketing tags your team needs for paid search or paid social. These make it easier to target anyone who visits your site, either on social or in search engines, to encourage them to come back to your site.
Before you publish any new content, make sure you go through this checklist to ensure it is optimized for search engines and SEO.