The Beginner’s SEO Checklist

I recently stumbled upon a great SEO Checklist for new websites and thought I’d write up an overview of it here. So you’ve just created a website, but how will anyone ever find it? You need a SEO checklist. After creating a website, people tend to feel a bit lost and ask questions like, what are the first steps I need to take in order to start ranking? What order should I do those steps in? Are there specific things that I shouldn’t be doing? Like with many tasks that we endeavor in in life, it is helpful when launching your business or personal website to make a to-do list of SEO musts. In today’s post we’ll provide that to-do list and hopefully it proves to be a helpful reference.

1. Make your site accessible – It is important to keep in mind that you want both users and search engine crawlers to be able to easily reach your site and all of its pages. There are a few typical mistakes which can harm your sites accessibility such as using 302 redirects vs. 301 redirects, having duplicate content on your site, or having thin content, which looks bad both to users and crawlers.
2. Decide which keywords you need to target – This step is all about looking at what people are searching when looking for sites like yours, and deciding which of those keywords you want to rank highly for. Google Adwords is a great place to turn for specific keyword data like searches per month and level of competition for a given keyword search.
3. Content quality assurance – When users to begin to find your site, you want them to stay there, and the best way to ensure that is by having the highest quality content possible which actually answers the questions they have. Great content can truly make up for a lot of other missing SEO elements.
4. Is your site appealing and user friendly? – This links somewhat with the quality content step, as you want people to like your site once they find it. Ask you users, friends, and colleagues what they think of the design and usability of your site. If the responses are poor, you may want to look into hiring a site designer to help out.
5. Social media accounts - Social media and SEO go together like bread and butter. Get your site registered on the leading social media sites, namely, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google +. All of these medias have literally hundreds of millions of users, and the search engines use social media presence to more accurately rank sites, so utilize them to get your brand out there.
6. Building quality links to your site – This is the most critical step to not cut corners on. Your site will only suffer if you go down the road of acquiring a whole bunch of lousy links, as Google is getting very good at recognizing this and booting sites from their results pages.

About author: Matt Green

Matt is the Director of Client Operations at Ethical SEO Consulting, a premier Denver SEO Company. Matt specializes in SEO project management and conversion optimization. More About Matt Green+