Information is power, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing. SEO has been around for decades but keeps growing in terms of how it’s practiced as well as the realms it has spread to. The worst part of any evolving concept is finding all the information you need about it in one place.
With the various specializations, subcategories and methods involved in SEO, it’s almost impossible to find a complete guide to what exactly you have to do to improve your SEO.
We’ve curated a list of all the essentials you’ll need to keep your SEO efforts in check. Here’s an overview of the main aspects of SEO we’ve covered:
Basics
- Use Google Search Console (they’ve got tutorials as well)
- Keep up with any messages that Google sends you. Check Google Search Console for 404/500 errors, duplicate content, missing titles, and other errors that Google may have found.
- Set up Google Analytics to monitor your traffic
- Have a variety of traffic sources
- Have a regularly updated twitter account for your business
- Run check-in deals to increase walk-ins
- Embed a “Find Us On Yelp” banner on your website
- Use plugins like Yoast, Local SEO,etc to optimize your wordpress blog for SEO
- Add a review widget or “Write a Review” CTA to take your customers to Google+ reviews
- Monitor and respond to reviews
- Engage with the other members in the industry by commenting on posts and websites
- Build a good rapo with your fellow bloggers to get more content shared and also increase your chances of them linking out to your site
- Embed testimonials on your site and refer to their original source to authenticate them
- Report your competitors if you see them breaking Google guidelines.
- Perform a citation audit on your competitor and list yourself wherever they are listed
- Continually follow up on your SEO as a long-term tactic
- Use Google’s free Tag Manager to manage your JavaScript code and keep your page
- Penalties are based on the SEO work on your site, and you better be following all the rules if you want to rank.
- Take Advantage of Holidays
- Do a press release for anything newsworthy
- Call people to maintain your online relationship with them (phone calls are much harder to ignore than emails)
- Ask your local partners to link to your site
- Participate in local forums and communities
- Get your CEO to contribute to your site. It increases your site’s credibility when he/she is a part of the conversation
- Donate to charity and perform CSR.
- Use PPCs wisely
- Don’t count on AdSense to improve your rankings
- Use Adwords for your paid search, but don’t expect it to help your natural search rankings
- Have clearly defined calls to action
Local
- Make sure your NAP is available on every page of your website
- Your NAP must be consistent throughout the web. Use a tool like Synup to check for consistency.
- Don’t blindly copy SEO strategies because every company and website are unique
- It is better to use a local number than a toll-free number
- Geo-tag any videos you post on Youtube
- Include NAP in the description section while using photo sharing sites
- Include NAP on videos as well
- Check to see if your content is properly schema-ed using the Local Schema Scanner
- Create a Google+ page for your business to improve your rankings for local keywords
- Make sure you have an active Google My Business page. (You can read about creating a Google My Business page over here.)
- Select the right category for Google listings
- Keep your business profile updated with accurate information, photos, work videos, etc
- Ensure that your profiles on major local directory search sites including Google+, Yelp and Yellowpages are claimed( Here’s a DIY Step-by-Step Guide on claiming your listing)
- Make sure you are listed in all major directories as well as industry specific ones
- Have you considered getting yourself listed on niche-specific directories?
- Get listed on OpenStreetMaps.org
- Be listed on Apple maps
- Make sure your pin on any map is accurate
- Claim and remove any duplicate listings
- Spread your business info through data aggregators
- Update your address and phone numbers if you have any old citations
- Claim your venue on Foursquare
- Create a Facebook business page
- Use the review handout generator to generate more reviews from customers
- Use a tool like Grade.us or GetFiveStars to request customers for reviews automatically
- If you’re a restaurant, use an indexable menu.
- Message all of your customers who’ve left you a review on Yelp and offer them an incentive to come back.
- Make your Google+ local business profile even better by implementing a panoramic view. Not only does this provide users with a way of “seeing” your business before they get there, but it also makes your business stand out
- Learn from the Local SEO Experts
Content
- Create a blog on your website to provide quality content
- Go beyond just written content. Create videos, podcasts, social content, news, etc.
- Add fresh content to your site on a regular basis to keep getting crawled
- Your content should be for people, not search engines.
- Avoid writing content in JavaScript, it makes it harder to rank.
- Avoid duplicate or similar content.
- Gamify your blog to increase interactions
- Don’t make many tiny changes to your content because a search engine will think you’re just trying to change your last update date
- Use videos to keep your visitors engaged on your page
- Use product images with captions to explain your value proposition
- Use unique descriptive titles for each page so that humans and search engines can understand
- Create community focused content
- Track how users interact with your content using SumoMe
- Always strive to create evergreen content
- When you optimize your blog post, optimize your title and title tag separately
- Make sure the text in your RSS feed is optimized
- Create a video sitemap and add it to your Webmaster account on Google to increase the visibility of your videos for crawling.
- Make sure you have your videos on sites like youtube, yahoo, msn, etc to get them into SERPs
- Make sure the videos on your page are surrounded by keyword rich text. Search engines look at that content when defining your video.
- Don’t create content that is different for different IP addresses, OS or browsers. It will look like you’re trying to show the search engine something other than what your readers see
- Search engines can ban your site if you violate copyright laws (or any other laws)
- Try to create viral content that can easily be shared, rated, reviewed, and commented on.
- Maintain the same theme for all your content
- Run Copyscape on your site to test for duplicate content
- Invest in building a content calendar.
- Try these 25 not so conventional ways to generate content ideas
- Do a quick scan of outdated content and find places where you can add fresh content.
- Use title generator to come up with better headline ideas.
- Check how far people get into your content. Use Content Analytics to find it.
- Run an A/B test on your blog for your pop up messages and see which one works better.
- Try the Content Marketing Stack to help you get your content out there.
- Build free resources and make it easy for people to link you. You can let users embed them to their sites.
- Show the read time of a piece to give readers an idea of the depth of your content. Medium is a great example of it.
- Run a quick scan on Grammerly to see if you have made any spelling or grammar mistakes.
- Make your content reusable. You can convert content into slides, infographics or videos.
- Submit your content on LinkedIN.
- Submit your content on Medium.
- Make sure you interlink pages within your website.
- Use crowdsourcing to get influencers contributions to your content. This is a great way to create a better content and also get the featured influencers to share it.
- Run a survey on Facebook/Survey Monkey, collect the data and convert it into a post.
- Find content ideas using KeywordTools.io. This tool shows what exactly people are searching for on the Google search. Also it’s a great alternative to Google Keyword Tools.
- Promote your content on premium websites using tools like Outbrain that has a wide reach on the web.
- BuzzSumo is a great tool to generate content ideas and this guide explains how.
- Send emails to all of your friends asking for content ideas.
- Post on specific Facebook Groups related to your market asking them about what they have trouble with and how you can help.
- Interviews are great for blog content
- Create a case study on how things could go wrong. Everybody has studies on things going great.
- Create a guide for your favorite tool. (Check to see if there’s any around first! )
- TrapIt is a great tool to help you curate stuff from the web that could provide inspiration for content ideas
- Brainstorm with your whole team. The person with the most number of ideas gets a cash bonus. This is a great way to make content ideation more fun and generate more ideas!
- Use Advanced Search Techniques on Twitter to come up with content ideas
- Design your copy for scanners
Content Outreach
- Use Content Marketer.io to find influencer email and connect with them.
- Invite other influencers to write on the similar topics.
- Reach out to sharers of similar content.
- Check out these excellent content outreach email templates.
- Try searching email ids on Google by using different varitation. Eg. jon@example.com, don [at] example.com, @example.com
- BuzzStream is one of the popular tools that could make it easier for you to outreach relevant people.
- Reach out to authors with similar content.
- Mention influncer on Twitter when you cite them in your article.
- Tag influncer on Facebook when you mention them.
- Scrape Google Search result for a relevant topic using ScrapeBox and outreach to them about your content piece.
- If you aren’t able to find email Ids, go to whois.domaintools.com and enter the domain name to get the email ids.
- Use EmailHunter to help you find email IDs.
Link Building
- Create content for other sites so that you can get more backlinks and traffic from them.
- Don’t use low quality links or backlinks and get penalized!
- Have more relevant backlinks to improve your rankings
- Build ethical inbound links from different sources.
- Try to build links from trusted sources; it shows that you are also a trusted site
- Start off-page optimization and begin building links, as they are the most important aspect of SEO.
- Aim to get links from local news, events etc. for displaying press coverage
- Screaming Frog is great for finding broken links, errors, and crawl problems.
- Try to incorporate your main keyword (or a related word) into your page URL
- Build links slow and steady. There is no maximum number of links you should have on your website
- The best backlinks take a lot of effort to get. So be ready to work hard for them.
- Links from .edu and .gov domains are a great asset to your website. Try to find any non-profit .edu or .gov sites that are looking for sponsors
- Your backlinks should be from a wide network of IP address
- Keep track of any bad links through link audits.You can use tools like removeem to make it easier to identify and remove bad links
- Use relationships to build backlinks – you can always ask your customers, partners or suppliers to link to your site
- Get in touch with other small businesses in your industry so you can mutually benefit from links to each other
- Try to get links from websites who link to your competitor.
- Always try to get branded backlinks. A website without many branded links tends to be associated to manipulative link building
- Search engines usually don’t include pages that are neither externally nor internally linked to.
- Your homepage should link to your most important pages
- Be careful when linking out to other websites. Only link to sites that are relevant to your content
- Linking out to relevant sites or blogs can bring you backlinks
- Don’t get caught on link farms
- Avoid link circles (cross-linking)
- Pages containing mostly links aren’t favoured by search engines because they aren’t considered good content
- Ever tried building links using broken links?
- Send outreach emails for every piece of content you create
- Is there an alumni directory that you can get your client into? Harvard lists all alumni started companies under sections like Rock 100 and Drexel has it’s 40 Under 40.
- Why don’t you consider converting brand mentions to links?
- Have you tried promoting your content on Reddit?
- Quora’s great for links, and traffic too!
- Disavow links that may get you into trouble.
- Why not harvest links using Scrapebox?
- Give out gifts, maybe?
- Using Infographics to build links still works!
- Why not offer pro-bono services in exchange for a link or mention?
- Reclaim some of ‘em links!
- Sign up for HARO. It’s a great source of press opportunities and eventually, high-quality links.
- Fix 404s and redirect them to appropriate pages
- Promote your existing content using networks like Outbrain; this drives traffic and also results in potential backlinks
- Do you or does your client offer Wi-Fi on premise? Submit to Wi-Fi friendly directories
- To quote Agnus Martin – “I think everyone is born 100 percent ego, and after that it’s just adjustment.”
- Who knew that typos could result in backlinks?
- Create a roundup
- Expired domains can be a great link building strategy if done right
- Interview the experts; go forth and build links!
- Ask and you shall receive links from brand evangelists.
- Find similar piece of content to comment on and really engage with the community.
- Use meetup sponsorships for local link building.
- You can also outsource this task by using an outreach wizard to build links for you.
Technical SEO
- Use rel=canonical where appropriate
- Use 301 redirects for URLs that are not canonical
- Even if you have robots.txt setup, use the META robots attribute to block needless pages from being crawled
- Run the cloaking checker on your website to ensure that you’re not going to get into trouble.
- Set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools
- Setup automated monitoring on Pingdom to know when your page load time goes up
- Implement ExtendCache to improve caching on your site
- Check your website for outdated flash objects
- Use Browserstack to check for cross-browser validation
- Use something like PaperRater to check for grammar automatically
- Avoid IP detection for search engine bots since most Googlebot queries will come from US servers.
- Don’t get your 301 and 302 redirects mixed up. You could actually use something like Redirect Checker to make this easier.
- Use URLitor to ensure that you’re not redirecting many inner pages to your homepage. This appears manipulative.
- Use ScreamingFrog to check your HTTP header codes at scale.
- Do a bulk title tag check and eliminate anything that’s over 75 charecters as much as possible
- You can use tools to bulk-check your outbound links to double check to ensure that you’re not looking like a link farm to Google
- If you have a fairly large site, use something like IndexChecking to check if all pages are indexed; if specific pages are not indexed, you need to do something to get them picked up
- Check your website for iframes by running a ‘<iframe> site:{site.com}’ query on Google. If you have iframed content, you should attempt to publish this on your website to get more juice from Google-bots
- Use these hacks to better support cross browser validation.
- Create a custom 404 page.
- Redirect www.xyz.com/index.html to www.xyz.com
- Make sure you do a CAPS redirect www.xYz.com to www.xyz.com.
Google Penalties
- Check to see if you’ve been hit by Google Penguin
- Take the quiz to see if your site has been hit by a penalty.
- Check your website for thin content pages that could result in a penalty.
- Setup email alerts to check for Google algo changes so that you can get a headstart
- Setup an automated Google Analytics alert when your traffic drops
- Authorize your Google Analytics to find if your website has ever been hit by Penguin.
- Use Removeem to get rid out of bad backlinks.
Social Media
- Create a WCA (website custom audience) on facebook to retarget visitors who have visited your website
- Use Facebook’s ID Scraper tool to extract the email IDs of your competitor’s Facebook page
- Make your content shareable through various forms of social media
- Shorten your links on posts/tweets and use more hashtags when promoting posts
- Use pictures to capture your audience’s attention (especially on twitter)
- Use Pinterest to find out who’s pinning your content and contact them
- Create lists – People love lists (top 10s, Fav 5) and this kind of content tends to go viral if it is engaging.
- Make sure your server can handle traffic for viral moments.
- Follow interesting people to get new ideas for content and marketing
- Use tools like Buffer, Tweetdeck and TwitterFeed to automate your sharing so you don’t have to spend too much time on it.
- Old is gold- Get new traffic on old content that is rehash-worthy
- Thank your readers and followers to widen your network
- Get your content on slideshare, it’s got high engagement and shareability.
- Use social media to complement your SEO strategy
- Get personal with your off-site SEO (emails, tweets, and guest posts) to improve engagement
- Youtube videos should be associated with your Google Business page
- Interview members of your local community and distribute that article on social media
- Use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to monitor Tweets and mentions for partnership and link building opportunities.
- Include links to your social profiles in your email signature
- Use Quality Scores on twitter and Facebook as a metric to measure performance
Keywords
- Use your own website search bar as a data mine for key words.
- Use these keywords in your title tags (good titles bring in more traffic!)
- Do research on your keywords before you optimize them to make sure they bring in sales
- Get keywords from sources such as your customers, suppliers, friends, partners etc
- Keep your keywords together. It’ll make it easier to rank for keyword phrases
- Use keyword phrases in your meta description
- Target your keywords with a commercial intent
- Long tail keywords are a cheaper way to get more traffic
- For smaller events, it’s always better to use less popular keywords to reduce any competition with other more known associations
- Each page of your site should focus one particular keyword you want to target
- Your keywords should be in your URL, page title, img tags, headers, and meta description
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Use keywords as anchor text. Links are given more priority on web pages.
- You can use alternate forms of your keywords such as synonyms, plural, gerunds, and active verbs to make your content more readable while still maintaining your keyword optimization
- Utilize Ubersuggest to come up with more long-tails to focus on. You never know what keywords you’ve missed!
- You can get even more keyword ideas if you use Keyword Tool
- Use Google Suggest Wildcards
Website
- You should use your website to build trust among your visitors and engage them so that you can eventually convert them
- Your site must be easy to use, navigate AND crawl
- Keep your pages close to the root directory, they’ll get priority over the ones lower on your sub-directories
- The best way to get a new website crawled is by have one high quality backlink to it
- When you buy a domain, be wary of services that block ownership information. Google might think you’re a spammer
- Don’t worry too much about PageRank. A page with a high pr can still be outranked by a page with a low pr
- Keep your load time to the minimum using Google Page Insight
- Make sure your title tags less than 65 characters, so that it isn’t shortened in SERPs
- Also try to keep your meta description tags less than 155 characters
- If your site is in a language other than english, make sure you mention it in your meta description
- Meta refresh tags don’t inform search engines why a redirect is happening, so it’s better to stick to a permanent HTTP 301 redirect
- Use HTTP 302 redirects only as a way to tell search engines that you are temporarily redirecting a URL
- Only use robots.txt to hide small sections of your site; if you overdo it, your site may be marked “forbidden”
- Use search engine accessible text on your site— at least 100 words— to enable search engines to easily understand what the topic of your page is.
- Have a separate city and state landing page
- If you have a business that has multiple locations, then link the specific location pages of the website.
- If you are a single location then link to the home page of the website.
- Use a reliable hosting company to avoid any accessibility issues
- Make sure your site is regularly backed up so you don’t lose data or rankings
- Make sure your site works on any browser and every screen resolution
- Older pages rank better, so keep your site live as long as you can
- Stick to .com and .org domains over .biz or .us to increase your credibility
- Have URLs that are simple and clear
- Hyphenate words to separate them.
- URL extensions don’t really matter for SEO (ie html, htm, etc)
- Your H1 and H2 tags can be used as a way to include alternative target keywords on your page
- You can use rich snippets to give search engines any extra information they need to improve your appearance on SERPs
- Redirect your old URLs to new ones so that any links leading to the old one will not be wasted.
- Use canonical tags, Google Webmaster Tools, or 301 redirects to alter any duplicate content that could cause your site to be indexed and penalized
- Don’t ignore your 404 pages. A couple of them here and there are normal, but make sure it doesn’t happen too often.
- Take advantage of them and use them to redirect your visitors back to your site.
- If you don’t want to redirect them, why don’t you entertain them? Or better yet, give them the reason for coming to your site… your CTA of course!
- Optimize your images with keywords in its filename and img alt tag
- Enable the “Enhanced image search” option in your Google Webmaster account to help google find your images easily and help your SEO
- Optimize your title tag with the city/cities & services you offer.
- Add product or service keywords in the title.
- Set your website to load on www or non-www
- Use Browseo to find any technical errors
- Use Google’s keyword research tool to find out what users are searching for.
- Check out your competitor’s link profiles using tools like Ahrefs Link Diagnosis, Majestic SEO, and Open Site explorer.
- Link to your internal pages in an SEO-friendly way. Give a description that allows search engines to understand it. However, avoid using anchor text in your global navigation because it will look over-optimized. It’s better to stick to in-content links.
- Create an XML sitemap to be submitted to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
- if you are worried about duplicate content on your website, you can use an HTML sitemap to highlight the URL you want to show
- Create a robots.txt file to submit to Webmaster Tools
- Use My Site Auditor Report to double-check everything once you are live.
- Avoid frames whenever possible and if you do use them, use a noframe tag
- Be careful with flash. If your site is loaded with flash elements, have an alternate version of your site in HTML so that search engines and non-flash browsers can view it.
- You may use flash for non-priority sections on your page that don’t need to be navigated by a search engine
- Spiders prefer static URLs over dynamic ones, and so should you!
Mobile Optimization
- Ensure that your website is responsive.
- Make your Call To Action (CTA) prominent and hard to miss for users
- Keep your website menus and navigation simple and easy to follow
- Use Google’s mobile friendly test
- Don’t forget the META viewport tag
- Use Modernizr for HTML5/CSS feature detection
- It’s always a good idea to support your mobile website for touch interactions
- Add iOS icons for your mobile website
- Make sure you have an accessible back button, especially for iOS visitors.
- Use QR codes on your landing pages and other collateral.
Usability
- Utilize breadcrumb navigation to make it easier for users to go around your site
- Create a sitemap not just for the search engines, but also for users
- Keep your website font easy to read. Comic Sans isn’t the rage anymore!
- Don’t distract your users with too many colors. It’s a website and not a peacock.
- Survey your users to see how you can improve your website and service. Tools like Qualaroo and WebEngage are great for running in-website surveys
- If a drunk person can test your site and find it okay, I’m pretty sure others will!
- Consider simplifying your navigation for mobile.
- Eye tracking studies suggest that people focus heavily on faces; you can use this to your advantage.
- Keep most of your stuff above the fold. A lot of users just don’t scroll!
- Ensure that all of your links are blue. People associate the color blue with hyperlinks
- See if you can keep your line-space as close to 1.5px as possible. This is ideal according to studies.
- Use whitespaces judiciously. It is estimated that use of whitespace between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by almost 20%
- If you have a website with more than 50 pages, ensure that you have a search bar. This is a must!
- Run regular usability surveys using a tool like SurveyMonkey or WebEngage.
- If you are a slack fan, you can install Chatlio to offer live support to users.
Conversion Science
- Ensure that you have author markup set up on your site
- Use Google Analytics’ “Average Position” metric to determine which pages need conversion optimization
- Always keep an eye on your Bounce rates to find out which pages aren’t performing well.
- Use the “Time to Purchase” metric of Google Analytics to find impulse buyers.
- Use emotional appeal to create conversions
- Use your brand to relate to customers and create a need.
- Studies have shown that a Serif font can improve conversions
- Using P.S. can boost your email conversion.
- If you offer chat support, display it in a way that it’s hard to miss. This can often be a clincher and help in improving conversions.
- Target users who have abandoned shopping carts, retarget them and find ways to bring them back for a purchase. Here are 13 great emails you can send to users with abandoned shopping carts.
- Use testimonials with social proof to improve conversion rates. You’re better off quoting a testimonial from Google+ or Yelp via embeds rather than posting your own.
- Use trust indicators to show users that your site is secure. Studies show that trust badges from Norton and McAfee work best.
- Make sure to keep at least two CTA button one on the top and the other at the bottom of the page.
- Use a discount badge to drive more conversions
- Create an explainer video and place it on your homepage.
- Make sure the Images on your homepage tell a user about your business/product.
- Include a logo of any popular magazine your got featured in.
- It’s better to have a dedicated landing page for your PPC ad campaigns.
- Install HeatMap to find out which part of your website is getting more clicks.
- Track every movement of a user from the moment they land on your website. Inspectlet records a video session for every single user with their movements on the pages.
Project Management
- Have you considered using Agile for SEO Project Management?
- Do you have your KPIs in place?
- Use a Kanban board like Trello for ideation.
- Use a tool like Ducksboard to create online marketing dashboards that you can review daily. It’s even better if you can have this running in your office everyday!
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