Use This On-Page SEO Checklist to Optimize Your Website

On-page SEO helps web pages and blog posts gain visibility on search engines by making your content easier to recognize, analyze, and rank.

To aid you throughout this process, we’ve created a simple checklist that will allow you to never miss out on an opportunity to optimize whatever you have to offer to your audiences.

1.   Find the Best Keywords

On-page SEO begins by searching for the best keywords in a particular category of content. The best keywords include terms or phrases that:

• Are relevant to a theme or topic of interest

• Are searched regularly by the ideal target audience

• Help your website rank higher than competitive websites

2. Pick a Different Primary Keyword for Each Content

Ideally, primary keywords shouldn’t be used for over one page of content on your website. For this reason, try to make an editorial calendar for the latest content and then assign target keywords to each page of that content.

3. Choose 3 to 5 Secondary Keywords

Secondary keywords are semantically related keywords or synonyms of the primary keyword. These are also referred to as LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing), and all you need are 3 to 5 words.

4. Lay Down a Content Plan

Once you’ve found a primary keyword, your next step is to lay down a content plan for using it. Decide whether your keywords should be used for a landing page, evergreen content, or scheduled blog posts. While you’re at it, decide on how long each piece of content should be and how it would fit into your marketing strategy.

5. Make Sure Your Title Uses the Primary Keyword

Your title needs to be appealing to both audiences and search engines. Try to serve search engines by including a primary keyword at the beginning of your headline and then serve your audiences by being concise and still explaining why your content is relevant.

6. Use an H1 Tag

Add a title at the top of your page ad then make sure to wrap it in an H1 title tag (for example, <H1>On-page SEO </H1>). An H1 tag is a tag that explains to search engines that the particular content copy is the title and holds a very important description of your content.

7. Write Over 300 Words of Body Copy

The number of words in content varies depending on your page’s purpose and the depth of each topic. However, we recommend publishing content with over 300 words of content in the body. When possible, aim for approximately 800 words since detailed content has a stronger chance of ranking.

8. Produce Original and High Quality Content

Craft content that is not copied and pasted from your website or competitor websites and is completely original. Search engines tend to penalize your website if their content is duplicated or copied from other websites.

9. Write Using Simple English

High quality content attracts more netizens and consumers to your website. However, this doesn’t mean that you start publishing research papers. On the contrary, the best content is, ideally, writing for 8th grade reading level.

10. Proofread Your Work

Before you all-out publish your content, make sure to always proofread your handiwork for grammatical and spelling errors. This is a very important part of content writing and it helps make sure that your content is authoritative, of high-quality, and worthy of appearing at the very top of search engines.

Beyond On-Page SEO

Nowadays, marketing-savvy companies need out-of-the-box thinking and experience in all forms of digital marketing.

On its own, on-page SEO isn’t enough to make your website look attractive on search engines. You need a technical SEO strategy, off-page SEO, and a cutting-edge digital strategy to produce a competitive advantage. This includes website development, SEO, mobile marketing, paid search, email and social media marketing.

If you’re worried about driving traffic and revenue to your business, Rob Garay and his team of digital experts can help your brand win digitally.