For any website/blog, search engine optimization(SEO)is one of the key factors. Today Google search has become de facto search engine with more than 3 billion searches(approximately) per day. Since 80-90% of search engine traffic of any website comes from Google alone, SEO targeted towards Google search engine is of utmost importance.
For any website or blog SEO can make or mar the traffic and thus the revenue and user acquisition. There are mainly two type of SEO practices namely black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Though black hat SEO was being practiced by many and few websites even reaped the benefit too yet with Google strengthening it’s algorithm and adding more and more human factors like Google +1, it’s better to stick to white hat SEO to reap long term benefits of SEO.
Numerous websites have suffered because of Google’s Panda or farmers update to its search algorithm. These websites were either not having good quality content or were having content duplication or some other issues.
Here we’re sharing a basic checklist of things you should follow to get better indexing and avoid such issues in future because of any future algorithmic change to search. No matter whatever algorithm Google applies following things will only help you survive.
Basic SEO checklist
- Add H1,H2, title, meta description tags to your web pages keeping following conditions in mind:
- Write H1 and H2 having keywords relevant to the page content and of search engine importance
- A meta description of around 160 characters having content related to web page and covering keywords you want to rank your website for
- A Page title not more than of 70 characters and having keywords of SEO importance
- All URLs should be in small case
- Make sure that all images have alt or title tags
- Avoid content duplication and use canonical tags wherever necessary to specify preferred version of URL in case content duplication is there and can’t be avoided
- Use rel=nofollow for external links for which you don’t want to pass on page rank juice
- No single web page should be accessible from two different URLs. For Google example.com/index.html and example.com/Index.html can two different URLs having same content
- Always define your preferred domain name. If you prefer www.example.com, always redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com
- Indexable content should be out of Java script tags so that search bot can access the content
- All dead URLs or pages which do not currently exist on your webiste should return 404 status
- Do take care of page speed. Google’s latest algorithm do take page load time into account
- Use Google plus one button to let people recommend your webpages
There are lot of free SEO resources available online which can help you accomplish this SEO checklist.
Google has also published quite informative and illustrative SEO starter guide which every beginner should follow:
In a nutshell key is to write original quality content, avoid duplication and pasting content from other websites or blogs, take care of page speed and user experience, help search bots easily find and index your content to get better indexing and more and more search traffic.
