On Page SEO Checklist: 17 Ways to Optimize Your Page

If you’re just getting the hang of all the things that go into an optimized webpage, there’s no doubt the list can be overwhelming.

What is on-page SEO?

On-Page SEO refers to the process of making your pages appeal to both search engines and human. It reviews and improves both the public face of your website and the behind the scenes coding and technical set-up that only search engines see.

on-page SEO is the foundation on which your website must be constructed for better search engine ranking.

In this article, I’ll show you an On-Page SEO Checklist and This checklist can help you improve organic traffic, drive leads and improve your position in search engine results?

1. Title Tag

Ensure each page has a unique and descriptive title. A title is the most important on-page SEO element and usually target keywords present in title type helps return relevant pages on search engines.

Advice: Title Tag Should be 55-65 characters including spaces.

2. Description Tag

The description tag should include the most important keywords within 156 characters including spaces.

The description tag is important for your site visitors as they are the summary of the page content that they see on search results. The keywords in meta description used to help websites rank in the earlier days, but not much anymore because of manipulation of this element for SEO, in the past.

Advice: Ensure each page has a unique description.

3. Heading Tags

Unlike title and description, The heading tag is visible on the web page to the human visitors. It is also important from search engine point of view as search engine bots acquire the information about the page from the heading tag, especially h1 tag.

H1 tags are meant for the Headline and therefore, your Title should be wrapped around this tag. However don’t over optimize your page by adding keywords to sub-headings which are H2, H3, and H4.

The purpose of H tags is to tell Google how the content is structured for readability. E.g. Our title describes the topic of this post, followed by sub-headings which further explains and goes into detail about On-Page SEO.

Advice: Place your targeted keyword in the h1 tag.

4. Write High Quality Content

The page content is what makes it worthy of a search engine organic result position. It is what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to the search engines. As such, it is important to create good content. And All the on-page optimization in the world won’t help you if no one finds your content useful.

The content of a page must contain keywords chosen for a particular page. These could be targeted keywords or long tail keywords or synonyms. Just make sure the keyword density is not too high, which means use them only when they make sense to the human reader.

5. SEO-Friendly URLs

Keep the URLs clean and fill them with keywords or words that aptly describe the content. The URLs say a lot about a site’s architecture and often is considered important for SEO as well as usability.

URL structure is important because it helps the search engines to understand relative importance and adds a helpful relevancy metric to the given page. It is also helpful from an anchor text perspective because people are more likely to link with the relevant word or phrase if the keywords are included in the URL.

6. Optimize Images

When you see a picture of a baby crying, you instantly recognize what’s going on in the picture.

The problem is, this instant recognition isn’t possible for search engine spiders at this time. Instead, you must help the spiders understand each of your images with HTML alternative text attribute called alt tags.

What is image alt text?

The short answer is, it’s the text that the search engine uses to understand images.

7. Content Length

Page content length gives search engines ample text to crawl and plenty of keywords and context clues to help them understand what the article is about. For your written posts, 1,500+ words should be the minimum.

Advice: Improve content to match/better content on competitor websites.

8. Internal Linking

Internal Linking help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same goes for linking internally to other pages on your website. For instance, if you've written about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on another blog post, ebook, or web page, you should link to that page. That will not only help retain visitors on your website, but also demonstrate the other relevant and authoritative pages to search engines. It

• helps readers find what they’re looking for 
• helps your audience get to know, like, and trust you 
• helps search engines crawl every page on your site 
• helps search engines create an accurate sitemap

9. Site Map:

Every site must have a sitemap. However, even if sites don’t have one, they get indexed by search engines. The presence of a sitemap makes it a tad easier to find and index pages, for the search engines.

Every site should have an HTML sitemap, and every page should link to that sitemap, probably in the footer for your website user.

10. Text Navigation:

Verify there is text navigation, not JavaScript or Flash navigation that spiders can’t see. Make sure you at least have text navigation on the bottom of the page if there aren’t any spiderable navigation links in the top nav.

11. Robots.txt:

It’s important this file exists, even if it’s empty. The Robots.txt file tells the search engine spiders what not to index. Also make sure the file doesn’t accidentally exclude important files, directories or the entire site (this has been known to happen!).

Advice: If you have your robots.txt file, Check it with Google Webmaster Tool Robots.txt Tester. The robots.txt Tester tool shows you whether your robots.txt file blocks Google web crawlers from specific URLs on your site.

12. Loading Speed:

Google has stated on the record that page loading speed is an important SEO ranking signal. You can boost your site speed by using a CDN, compressing images, and switching to faster hosting.

Make sure it doesn’t take more than 4 seconds for your page to load: MunchWeb found that 75% of users wouldn’t re-visit a site that took longer than 4 seconds to load.

Advice: Check Google PageSpeed Insights or use tools like Gmetrix.com to analyze and improve a website’s performance.

13. Use of MultiMedia:

Visuals are a great addition to any Page. The use of multimedia enhances the search engine positioning of a site and add visuals. Engaging images, videos and diagrams can reduce bounce rate and increase time on site: two critical user interaction ranking factors.

14. Use Social Sharing:

You need social media share and like icons on your webpage, especially if you generate content at regular intervals in the form of blogs or press releases.

Although, Social signals not play a direct role in ranking your site. But social shares generate more eyeballs on your content. And the more eyeballs you get, the more likely someone is to link. So don’t be shy about placing social sharing buttons prominently on your site.

Learn How To Manage Your Social Media.

15. Outbound Links:

Outbound links have a small role to play on search ranking and they are totally under your control. This is an easy, white hat SEO strategy to get more traffic. Outbound links to related pages is a relevancy signal that helps Google figure out your page’s topic. It also shows Google that your page is a hub of quality info.

16. Fix Mobile Usability Issues:

Google is invested in providing users a great mobile experience. See how your site is performing on mobile devices with the Mobile Usability Report, located within Search Traffic section of Google Webmaster Tools. This report lets you know if your touch elements are too close, if your content is sized to the viewport, your flash usage, font size and more.

If you want to check your website mobile usability issue , you can use Google’s mobile friendly test tool.

Advice: Learn How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues.

17. Use Structured Data Markup:

Giving search engines as much information as possible about your site and the information it offers can only enhance your performance, so it’s become key for pages that want to outrank their competition to use structured data markup (also known as rich snippets) to enhance their search engine listings.

Structured data can have a multitude of benefits, ranging from improved CTR in the SERPs to better SEO performance overall. Here’s what you need to know about adding structured data markup to your site.

Tools for Adding Structured Data:

• Schema Creator by Raven – http://schema-creator.org/ 
• Schema Generator by 51 Blocks – http://www.51blocks.com/tools/schema-generator/
• microDATAgenerator by 630 Marketing – http://www.microdatagenerator.com/

What is your On Page SEO Strategy? Let us know in comments how much time and expertise you provide to on page SEO of your site.

How To Write SEO Friendly Blog Post

I think that your post should focus on what matters to your audience, not search engines. That said, there is no harm in optimizing it for search engines to help it get discovered. In fact, SEO is a great way to get your blog discovered by relevant people without spending your budget.

In this post, I would like to give you some tips on writing blog posts that are both very readable as well as SEO-friendly.

Optimize your Post Title: 

Use Google Keywords Planner to learn what people are searching for online. If there are many people who are searching for the phrase that is included in your title, and the competition for that phrase is low - you have a better chance to rank higher and have many people click into your content.

Optimize your Post Description:

Post Descriptions play a major role in search engine ranking, and description act as sales copy for your blog post. The Description has to be a short text which indicates the main topic of the page. If the meta description contains the search term people use, the exact text will be shown by Google underneath your URL in the search results.

Research long tail keywords:

Find 1-2 long tail keywords and use them a few times inside your content, preferably in the title and the first 100-200 words. Don't force it! Only use the keywords if they naturally fit the test you're writing.

Use SEO Plugin:

Use an SEO plugin, like Yoast for Wordpress, to optimize your content.

The most popular blog SEO tool for WordPress is the WordPress SEO by Yoast. Yoast has a wide variety of SEO tools for blog articles and website pages. The image shows one of the Yoast tabs for a recent blog article. The plugin analyzes the blog article for 18 different SEO factors and rates it while providing a “street light” style ranking of Red – Yellow – Green based on the articles ranking on each SEO factor.

Create Engaging Content:

Make sure your content is engaging - the longer people will spend with your content and the lower your bounce rate will be, the higher search engines are likely to rank your page.

Use and Optimize images:

Your blog posts shouldn't only contain text, you should also have images that help explain your content. But search engines don't just look for images. Rather, they look for images with alt text.

You can figure out an image's alt text by placing your cursor over an image. A small box will pop up that describes your image and, therefore, helps search engines interpret the meaning of the image. As you can see below, the alt text is "related-search." Think of alt text as an interpreter for search engines. Search engines cannot interpret what an image means without the text to explain it.

You can also use Infographics, videos, and slides which might give your reader excellent visual supplements.

Post Length:

Post Length gives search engines ample text to crawl and plenty of keywords and context clues to help them understand what the article is about. For your written posts, 1,500 words should be the minimum.

Keyword Diversity:

Use different text every time you post a link to your content. Google doesn't like duplicates, so make sure that on every forum or article you include a link to your content from, you will use the different text.

Link internally when possible:

Internal links to your content help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same goes for linking internally to other pages on your website. For instance, if you've written about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on another blog post, ebook, or web page, you should link to that page. That will not only help retain visitors on your web site, but also demonstrate the other relevant and authoritative pages to search engines.

Internal Linking

• helps readers find what they’re looking for 
• helps your audience get to know, like, and trust you 
• helps search engines crawl every page on your site 
• helps search engines create an accurate sitemap

To find more Internal Linking, you can read more about Internal links and It's importance in SEO?

Link to External Helpful Resources:

Linking out to authoritative, trustworthy websites like Wikipedia, known thought leaders in the field, or any domain ending in .edu or .gov creates a better user experience and shows search engines you truly want to help searchers. They’ll reward you with higher rankings and more traffic.

Use Categories and Tags:

One of the best things about blogs is how organized and interconnected they can be. Taking advantage of that with categories and tags helps both readers and search engines. A few rules of thumb to keep in mind:

• Use keywords for categories and tags where possible. This strengthens the keywords in each post and builds keyword-rich tag and category pages. 
• You should have no more than 12 to 24 categories total. 
• Each post should be in 3 categories or less. 
• Tags should not be the same as categories because it confuses search engines. 
• The sweet spot for tagging blog posts appears to be 5 to 10 tags per post, but you can have as many tags total as you want.

Post Regularly:

Adding actual and functional information to your website will give the search engine the idea that your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, the search engine will crawl it less often and it might become less appealing to the search engine to include the page in the search results.

What other blog writing tips have improved your SEO? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Read How to promote your blog posts?

Beginner's Guide: Common Mistakes in Content Marketing

There are many mistakes that marketers make with content marketing. They too often equate clicks and traffic and downloads as buying signals, which they can be. But they can also turn into nothing if you haven't attracted your ideal customer with the right motivations.

In my experience, here are the critical mistakes that content marketers makes:

No Content Marketing Strategy:

Content marketing only works if it fulfills actual business goals, whether that’s more customers, a larger email list, or more search engine traffic. What are your business goals for your marketing, and specifically, your content marketing? What’s your strategy to achieve those goals? Is your content marketing following suit?

Not Using an Editorial Calendar:

Do you take a few moments to Google how to come up with topics and wonder just how people keep their ideas together? They make an editorial calendar! Once a person as come up with topics, they can implement them into a calendar for the month, half of the year or the whole year. This can help keep a campaign on track, and make sure you are getting some awesome success from your content.

Duplicate Content Issue:

Duplicate content is a trap many beginners fall into because it is just so easy! You write up some great content, feel that it is perfect, and wham-bam, you have all you need, right? Unfortunately, no. You cannot have duplicate content if you want to rank on search engine. That is one of the biggest no-no’s, yet one of the easiest traps to fall into. Train your brain to say, “Danger, Will Robinson” when you even consider using duplicate content.

Not Using Keyword Research: 

Content marketing and search engine optimization complement each other; each technique should inform the other. Don’t get too far ahead in your content planning (or even write a headline) without pulling out your favorite keyword research tool. Confirm that what you want to create is something people actually want.

This is easier than you’d think. There’s a terrific free plugin to make your keyword research a snap: Try the free version of Inbound Writer. It includes a competitiveness measurement, too, so you can make the most of long-tail keywords.

Know about Your Audience:

You Don’t Know Who Your Audience is or are Writing for One Type of Person. Another mistake beginners make is not knowing who their audience is or only writing for one specific type of person. You need to do audience research to learn about who your clientele and readers will be. In addition, you need to make sure you write to a broader type of person to get the most reach. You will quickly lose readers if you aren’t writing for everyone as best as possible. Don’t worry, this blog will show a few ways to write for a broader audience!

Not Publishing Enough Content:

Another major pitfall for beginners is when it comes to content creation. Sometimes people will create a website and have some decent content, but they don’t publish or create enough. This makes their website stale and can drive people away. On the other side, oversaturation of created content can chase people away just as quickly because it comes across as spam and not genuine. Try to find the perfect middle spot for your business and website.

Not Deliver The Right Mix of Content:

This is a massive mistake that many beginners make. Why are multiple content formats important? Because we all will consume content in different ways when we get on a website or social channel. Some people enjoy infographics whereas others prefer in-depth articles. Others prefer memes and many enjoy seeing photos with their social media posts. Videos, podcasts, photos, blogs, and other formats are vital because they will reach different types of people and broaden your reach.

Copy Editing:

An area many beginners need help in is editing their content. Some people simply write and post without reading it. However, you might be one who goes over your copy over and over to catch mistakes. This is great, but the chances are very high that you will miss something in your proofreading. This is why having a copy editor is vital to all businesses. They can catch the small typos you look over and they are simply another set of professional eyes that can look over your piece to make sure it is the best it possibly can be.

Website Navigation:

Website Navigation is a major part of proper website design and is even important to SEO. However, another major pitfall for the newbie content marketer is not making a website easy to navigate. Create a web page that your clients can easily navigate by following a few simple steps and listening to client feedback. This will help improve the traffic to your site and could be what starts making you some incredible revenue. Know, How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues.

Not Using Meta Tags or Writing Them Poorly:

Another mistake that can really hurt your content is not using your meta tags by leaving them blank or using them poorly. When you write these tags, it will help improve your ranking and make it a link people want to click on. Use those tags and use them well!

No Call to Action:

This is yet another way to make sure you execute your strategy. What do you want people to do after they’ve viewed your content? Buy something? Sign up for something? Share something? Decide what you want them to do, and then make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

Not Measuring Your Analytics with Google Analytics:

Analytics are a vital part of content marketing because they can show you want content is successful and what is failing at bringing people in or converting them to leads. A great way to measure your analytics is using Google Analytics, which can help you find out just how well you are ranking. It will also show you the basics that will help you improve your content. Read How To Automate Your Google Analytics Reporting.

Not Using Social Media or Using it Incorrectly:

Many businesses can get themselves set up and follow some basic guidelines for SEO and successful content. However, many of them don’t utilize a great way to get their content out there and bring in new people through social media. It is important to all businesses, brands, and individuals because it can act as a form of networking and will help bring in great clicks for your business. Make sure, when you are using social media, that you follow some basic hacks to get the most out of it! Tips to Manage Your Social Media Efforts.

Not Promoting your Content Enough:

You can’t just build it and expect them to come… even if you invite them via email and Twitter and Facebook. Aim to spend at least (at the very least) a third as much time and money promoting your content as your spent creating it. Read More About How to promote your blog posts?

Avoid these mistakes and you will be ahead of the game. Read a lot, re-read your older stuff, rewrite, ask why, look for assumptions, question, question, question. Good luck! The world seriously could use some better content marketing.

How to Promote Your Blog Posts?

Being relatively new to the "blogosphere", I am no expert on the best methods of blog post promotion. Firstly, I do not believe that quantity is necessary strongly correlated to quality blog posts.

I think that promoting your blog post can almost take too much time away from the actual writing. So it is a personal choice on how much time you devote to writing and promotion your blog.

Nevertheless I have read plenty of articles and hope the below can help you promote your blog posts.

Ways to Promote your blog posts:

Create Great Content:

More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites? 

Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?

Get your content right, and you’ve created a solid foundation to bring traffic on your blog posts. If your posts are really good, most likely people will link to, read, comment, and share it.

Be Active in Social Media: 

The vast majority of experienced bloggers will say use Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc to share your posts. However this takes time and effort to build up a significant or valuable following. It takes time to maintain your presence across these sites. Read More about, How to Manage Your Social Media Efforts.

Submit to Blog Directories: 

Add your blog to directory sites like Best of the Web Blog Search, EatonWeb Blog Directory, and OnToplist.com. Here is a list of 23 Blog Directories To Submit Your Blog To.

Use Feeds: 

Utilise RSS feeds. RSS readers remaining a popular method of readers keeping track of news from various sources. There are some great directory lists like this one from TopRank Blog that you can submit your blog or RSS feed to.

Participate in Forums/Communities: 

Participate in online communities relevant to your blog is an highly effective strategy. Forums/Communities that are close to your market/niche and have an active community can be a great way to build traffic to your blog.

Being an active and useful member of niche related forums is a fantastic way to find targeted traffic for your site.

Use Tools: 

Use tools to Publish posts automatically to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For example, whenever you post a blog on Wordpress, Everypost can spread the word through all your other social channels automatically! Read More about Content Creation and Marketing Tools.

SEO: 

Use your blog content to appear in search engine organic results, and avid Pay Per Click Service. This can be achieved by simply being smart about your existing content and new content. Writing a well structured and informative blog post can achieve higher search engine organic rank.

Use Analytics: 

Use analytics to work out where your most of the traffic is coming from and Know your conversion rates. You are trying to make the most of those visitors who actually visit and stay on your site for more than 2 seconds.

Use Mailing lists: 

Good old fashioned email is still massively powerful in pulling in traffic. Email marketing is a very effective method in getting your blog articles seen and clicked on. Sending a email to your list as soon as you publish a new post is the best way to get a fury of traffic to it.

Branding: 

Be sure to include your blog URL in all your messaging (email, social media, business cards).

Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging has long been an effective tactic for building a community, a way of growing visibility for both your website and your byline, a means of driving traffic, increasing the exchange of ideas and a method of building inbound links to your website.

Follow these steps to ensure your guest blogging efforts are well-received by the search engines and new audience:

1. Only Post on High Quality and Relevant Websites
2. Contribute Original, Quality Content
3. Link with Value in Mind
4. Build Engaging, Long-Term Relationships

Deliver The Right Mix of Content: 

On your blog, you need to deliver the right mix of content Regularly. Include Images, Infographics, Audio and Video in your blog posts. It helps engage your visitors to your post and encourage them to share your posts.

Bend the Rules: 

Leveraged paid advertising, mass marketing (spam) and/or guerilla marketing to build early traffic.

Offline Activity: 

Get out the building. Attend conferences, meet people face-to-face. Often people read a blog because they discovered them in the flesh.

Good Writing: 

Writing and sharing personal and real experiences is always popular.

Ignore Frequency: 

I don't believe posting regularly is important. Many of the good blogs I find are from discovering brilliant articles published years ago.

Knowing how to promote your blog posts is essential if you want to get more blog traffic and build your audience. In summary you need to spend an extensive amount of time across many methods to successfully promote your blog.

You can't simply publish and hope for the best and only sharing with your email list and social media profiles is NOT enough as they are limited in numbers.

You have to reach out to authorities in your niche, syndicate your content, share with others and put in some work to get links, shares and new readers.

When you spend more time promoting you get rewarded with a more engaged community who in turn tell others about your site causing a snowball effect.

Following steps above is a good start but if you're looking for more advanced methods that can bring more visitors to your blog.

How to Optimize your Facebook posts to Maximize Engagement?

Whether you are a small business, a large agency, or even a top retailer like Walmart and Target, Maximizing engagement on Facebook is all about content.

Here are 7 Best Types of Content for Facebook Marketing:

1. Create useful content 
2. Visuals visuals, and more visuals 
3. Infographics 
4. Current events 
5. Humor 
6. Statistics 
7. Quotes

1. Create useful content. 

Lend a hand to your audience. Share articles that your customers will find helpful and relevant to their business. Make most of your content about the customers as opposed to promoting your products. Useful content should predominantly be shared on blogs such as WordPress or your website. Valuable content includes (but is not limited to) tricks of the trade, tips, how-to guides, ebooks, webinars, etc. Save short, helpful blurbs for Twitter. You can also tweet useful links to your followers. Rely mainly on images for Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Why you ask? Take a look at the next point.

2. Visuals visuals, and more visuals. 

According to Facebook, photos and videos posted to Facebook create anywhere from 100% – 180% more engagement than the average post. That’s a whole lot! On ecommerce sites, 67% of consumers say that quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product. It’s an easy way to quickly grab the attention of current customers and possible leads. Photos entertain with minimal effort. Visual content is very effective in grabbing the attention of your viewers.

3. Infographics. 

Are a different type of visual. Infographics are visually appealing, while containing information, data or humor They provide complex information that can be easily interpreted in a short period of time. A diverse assortment of infographics are a great asset to your blog, Pinterest or Facebook. Also try adding links to your infographics on Twitter to see how your audience engages with that type of tweet. 

4. Current events. 

Topics that are freshly surfacing the web are prime because people are currently thinking about them. Contributing to holiday buzz is also great content. Get your Facebook fans to send in pictures of their Halloween costumes or their carved pumpkins. Make sure you find a way to comfortably relate it to your business. You can keep on track with newsworthy topics by subscribing to your industry’s emails, RSS feeds, Facebook Page, put them in your circles on Google+ and following them on Twitter. 

5. Humor. 

Laughter is a great way to connect people to your business. People are more likely to share your content if they find it comical because they become emotionally attached to a certain extent. Sharing humor that relates to your target market is a priority on Facebook. It’s refreshing for both yourself and your audience to see some hilarity once or twice a day. The trick is to relate to your audience without offending or disrespecting anyone. Take a look at The Worst Types of Content to Post on Social Networks for guidelines. 

6. Statistics. 

Statistics are perfect for Twitter. Short, informative pieces of data are useful and easy to process. Those facts may entice readers to think and perhaps research more into the data. In turn, your fans are learning from you and they will appreciate it. It’s a great idea to credit the association or person that was responsible for the statistic (internet etiquette).

7. Quotes. 

Are perfect for Twitter, just like statistics. They’re also a quick go-to if you’re short on time. They can provide inspiration, sentiment or knowledge in a matter of seconds. Provoking emotion is a huge part of marketing. Having the reader feel something about your content causes them to associate a positive feeling with your brand or business. Quotes are also great content for Pinterest, especially atop a photo or in the caption of a pin.