Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is fundamental for any website. SEO is a long-term process. Its results are rarely immediate. The first steps that you take after you launch a new website can have a huge impact on the potential Google rank of your website in the Google search. The SEO checklist will guide you through the process of SEO.
The goal of SEO is to create a great, seamless experience. It helps your website to communicate with search engines with your intentions which would help it recommend your website to relevant searches.
With the ultimate goal of making your site a great place to visit, you can implement the following steps mentioned in the SEO checklist to achieve this. Below are a few things to keep in mind while doing the SEO of a website.
SEO Checklist - General things to know before launching a new website
Google Analytics setup. You’ll want to start monitoring your website and measuring the traffic from the day it is launched. So setting up the Google Analytics account should be the first step in the process. You will want to know what blog posts are generating traffic, the region you are having visitors from, and much more. You’ll get this information with the help of Google Analytics.
Without Google Analytics (or any other analytics tool), it becomes impossible for you to measure whether your marketing is working or failing. If things are not going as planned, then Google Analytics will help you identify the problem so you can improve.
Add a Facebook Pixel, as sooner or later you will want to do marketing of your website sooner or later. By having Facebook Pixel on your site, you can start building custom audiences at a later stage. This helps to easily retarget people who have visited your website through Facebook Ads.
Set up Google Search Console completely by verifying WWW, non-WWW, or HTTPS if you use it. Set your target country in international targeting also set a preferred domain name, link Google to get search console data in your Google Analytics account, submit the Sitemap.xml and click on Fetch as Google. Also, submit the site to Bing as it won’t take long.
Do a crawl with a crawler tool and check your links. You’ll probably find a bunch of broken links or placeholder pages that you can either fix or remove.
If you run a membership or an eCommerce site, go through the checkout process on both desktop and mobile sites and make sure it works smoothly. There is nothing worse than making any sale simply just because you’ve left your payment gateway in sandbox mode.
You should implement user-friendly URLs. You should select the URLs that are best for the search engines as well as the users. If your URL is ambiguous, the search engines will not understand it and neither will people.
Craft proper meta titles and meta descriptions about your website. After the meta title, the description is the first thing that people will see when they see your content on the Google search results.
Encourage inbound links to your website. The more relevant inbound links you have to your website, the more your website will be benefited through those links. You can generate inbound links by writing guest posts, creating case studies, reviewing books, creating infographics, and creating free resources.
Content is the king. So publish killer content. Do not encourage to add low-quality content on your website. The era of keyword stuffing and black hat techniques is over. Now you need to publish the content that would add value to the human readers.
And finally, share your content on social media. Advertise your business on different social media platforms. Through Facebook Ads, you can even target the audience relevant to your product or business.