Download the following SEO Checklist as a printable pdf to help simplify your WordPress website maintenance and ensure you’re not forgetting anything.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves your website’s visibility and ranking with search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing with the aim of increasing traffic to your site. More traffic means more sales, and who doesn’t want that?
What do search engines want?
Search engines strive to deliver their users the most accurate and highest quality results for their search. The methods in which their “bots” search the internet are constantly tweaked and improved to keep up with developing technology and keep pesky hackers on their toes. Unfortunately, this means that SEO is a never-ending task with constantly moving goal posts. However, there are some fairly consistent and reliable principles and methods to ensure your website is Search Engine Optimized.
What can I do?
ZP Creative recommends scheduling time each month to run through regular maintenance tasks on your website. A portion of this time will be spent on SEO and the checklist that follows is a great way to keep track of the most important tasks.
Starting Out
- Sign up for a Google My Business (more on Google My Business here).
- Link your business social media accounts with your website.
- Add your business to local online directories if relevant.
Content Creation
- Use Google AdWords: Keyword Planner https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner to determine the best keyword for each page/post.
- Write for humans, not for search engine bots. In other words, don’t write your content with an unnatural number of keywords – this is called “keyword stuffing” and is frowned upon by search engines.
- Link to other pages on your website where they are relevant to the content. Internal website links indicate to search engines that your content is interrelated and relevant.
- Take the time to label your media accurately. Search engine bots are clever, but they cannot see pictures. Unless you label your photos, videos and other media, they will not be picked up.
- Keep your website up to date, if the core content of your site does not need to regular updates, blogging is another great way to show search engines that your website is fresh and active.
Website Maintenance
- Check for broken links and update them.
- Use 301 redirections to re-route links when content changes location i.e. you change the URL on a page or post.
- Check the footer, is the copyright year current? Are your business contact details current?
- Encourage customers to check in and leave reviews
Sounds like a lot of fussing around and you just don’t have the time? Consider a ZP Creative maintenance package.