Technical SEO Checklist – How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO

Technical SEO Checklist

1

Keywords in <title>
tag

That is one of the maximum important places to have key phrases which are reflecting the content
material of your post. What’s written within the <title> tag suggests in search outcomes as your page title. The identification tag must be short (6 or 7 words at maximum) and attempt to preserve the keyword close to the start.

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Keywords in URL

Key phrases in URLs assist plenty – Example – http://domainname.Com/search engine optimization-services.Html, where “search engine optimization offerings” is the keyword phrase you try to rank well for. However in case you do not have the key phrases in other elements of the file, don’t depend upon having them inside the URL. Keyword in URL should be the principle keyword for that you
need to come on the pinnacle in the search end result.

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3

Keyword density in document
text

Another very crucial component you want to test. Three-Six % for predominant key phrases is exceptional, 1-2 for the minor. Key-word density of over 10% is suspicious and looks extra like keyword stuffing, then an evidently written textual content. Well, Google hates key-word stuffing. So attempt warding off that.

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4

Keywords
in anchor text

Also very crucial, mainly for the anchor text of inbound links, due to the fact if you have the keyword
within the anchor text in a hyperlink from some other website, that is seemed as getting a vote from this website online not simplest approximately your site in preferred however about the key-word in particular. This facilitates your internet site to rank higher for that keyword.

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5

Keywords in headings
(<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)

One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the
particular keyword. Try getting the keyword in H1 or H2 tag in your post with the relevant content about the keyword. Only mentioning the just the keyword in H! & H2 tag will not give a better result.

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6

Keywords at the beginning of a document

Also count, though now not as a great deal as anchor text, name tag or headings. However, have in
thoughts that the start of a file does no longer necessarily imply the primary paragraph – for instance, if you use tables, the first paragraph of textual content might be in the 2nd half of the table. Try to say the keyword with within the first paragraph of your post.

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7

Keywords in <alt> tags

Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you
have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them. Mention your main keyword in all the images related to that post.

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8

Keywords in meta tags

Much less and much less crucial, especially for Google. Yahoo! And Bing nonetheless relies on them, so in case you are optimizing for Yahoo! Or Bing, fill these tags nicely. Anyways, filling these tags well will not hurt and will now not impact your Google ranking.

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9

Keyword proximity

Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately
one after the other (e.g. blog writing”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “blog” in the first paragraph and “writing” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “blog writing” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable
for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.

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10

Keyword phrases

Further to key phrases, you may optimize for keyword phrases that consist of numerous words – e.G. “SEO offerings”. It is fine whilst the keyword terms you optimize for are famous ones, so you can get a variety of specific suits of the search string but once in a while it makes feel to optimize for 2 or 3 separate key phrases (“SEO” and “offerings”) than for one word that would once in a while get a precise fit.

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11

Secondary keywords

Optimizing for secondary key phrases can be a gold mine due to the fact whilst everybody else is
optimizing for the maximum famous keywords, there might be less opposition (and probably greater hits) for pages which are optimized for the minor phrases. As an instance, “real property new Delhi” would possibly have a thousand instances fewer hits than “real estate” most effective however in case you are running in New Delhi, you may get much less however appreciably higher-centered traffic.

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12

Keyword Stemming

For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.

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13

Synonyms

Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account when calculating rankings and relevancy.

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14

Keyword Mistypes

Spelling errors are very frequent and in case you understand that your target keywords have famous
misspellings or alternative spellings (i.E. Christmas and Christmas), you might be tempted to
optimize for them. Yes, this might get you a few more site visitors, however, having spelling mistakes in your website does no longer make a terrific influence, so that you’d higher don’t do it, or do it handiest within the meta tags.

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15

Keyword dilution

When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.

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16

Keyword stuffing

Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting
banned from search engines.

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Links – internal, inbound, outbound

17

Anchor text of inbound links

As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is
best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don’t, it is still OK. However, don’t use the same anchor text all the time because this is also penalized by Google. Try to use synonyms, keyword stemming, or simply the name of your site instead

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18

Origin of inbound links

Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally, sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable. Links from poor sites and link farms can do real harm to you, so avoid them at all costs.

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19

Links from similar sites

Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important
than their number. Also important is their anchor text (and its diversity), the lack/presence of keyword(s) in it, the linkage, etc.

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20

Links from .edu and .gov sites

These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info,
etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.

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21

Number of backlinks

Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important
then their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc.

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22

Anchor text of internal
links

This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links.

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23

Around-the-anchor text

The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates
the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.

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24

Age of inbound links

The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.

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25

Links from directories

Could work, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory
and similar directory is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless or even harmful because it can even be regarded as link spamming if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.

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26

Number of outgoing links on
the page that links to you

The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important.

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27

Named anchors

Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors to look like this: <A href=“#dogs”>Read about dogs</A> and “#dogs” is the named anchor.

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28

IP address of the inbound link

Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of
addresses, so for Google, the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, Bing and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs.

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29

Inbound links from link
farms and other suspicious sites

Presumably, this does not affect you, provided the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is
beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don’t get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault. However, some recent changes to the Google algorithm suggest the opposite. This is why you must always stay away from link farms and other suspicious sites or if you see the link to you, contact their webmaster and ask the link to be removed.

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30

Many outgoing links

Google does not like pages that consist mainly of links, so you’d better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse.

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31

Excessive linking, link
spamming

It is bad for your rankings when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a crosslinking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case, only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings.

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32

Outbound links to link farms
and other suspicious sites

Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa.

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33

Cross-linking

Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site
A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.

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34

Single pixel links

when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.

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Metatags

35

<Description> meta tag

Meta tags are becoming less and less important but if there are meta tags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that meta tags still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results.

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36

<Keywords> meta tag

The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all meta tags it gets almost no attention from  Google and some attention from Bing and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don’t stuff the <Keywords> tag with keywords that you don’t have on the page,
this is bad for your rankings.

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37

<Language> meta tag

If your site is language-specific, don’t leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the <language>meta tag but they still consider it.

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38

<Refresh> meta tag

The <Refresh> meta tag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the <refresh> meta tag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through 301 is much better.

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Content

39

Unique content

Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in
wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings.

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40

The
frequency of content change

Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.

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41

Keywords font size

When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.

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42

Keywords formatting

Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise, you might achieve just the opposite effect.

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43

Age of document

Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.

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44

File size

Generally, long pages (i.e. 1,500-2,000 words or more) are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short (500-1,000 words) rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones. On the other hand, pages with 100-200 words of text or less are also disliked by Google.

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45

Content separation

From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but
for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.

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46

Poor coding and design

Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.

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47

Illegal Content

Using other people’s copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes
legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.

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48

Invisible text

This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don’t be surprised by the penalty.

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49

Cloaking

Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see
one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.

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50

Doorway pages

Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.

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51

Duplicate content

When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look
larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.

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Visual Extras and SEO

52

JavaScript

If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it
more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can’t follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.

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53

Images in text

Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is an SEO sin. Always provide in the <alt> tag a meaningful description of an image but don’t stuff it with keywords or irrelevant
information.

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54

Podcasts and videos

Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search
engines can’t read them, so if you don’t have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines.

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55

Images instead of text links

Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don’t fill in the <alt> tag. But even
if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site.

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56

Frames

Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.

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57

Flash

Spiders don’t index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don’t forget to give it an alternative textual description.

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58

A Flash home page

Fortunately, this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.

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Domains, URLs, Web Mastery

59

Keyword-rich URLs and
filenames

A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing.

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60

Site Accessibility

Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is inaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site
simply can’t be indexed.

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61

Sitemap

It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.

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62

Site size

Spiders love large sites, so generally, it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don’t split your size into pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.

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63

Site age

Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just popped up and might soon disappear.

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64

Site Theme

It is not only keywords in URLs and on the page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.

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65

File Location on Site

File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.

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66

Domains versus subdomains,
separate domains

Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate
blablabla.com domain.

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67

Top-level domains (TLDs)

Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular
TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old .edu
or .org domain.

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68

Hyphens in URLs

Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL.

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69

URL length

Generally doesn’t matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable).

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70

IP address

Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted by a free hosting provider when the IP or
the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices.

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71

Adsense will boost your ranking

Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings.

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72

Adwords will boost your ranking

Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring
more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.

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73

Hosting downtime

Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can’t be indexed. But in practice, this is a factor only if your hosting provider is really unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime. Try using a reputed hosting provider such as Hostgator for hosting.

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74

Dynamic URLs

Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case, you’d better use a tool to rewrite dynamic
URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly.

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75

Session IDs

This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don’t use session IDs for information that you’d like to be
indexed by spiders.

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76

Bans in robots.txt

If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the non banned
part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.

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77

Redirects (301 and 302)

When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.

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