SEO Checklist For WordPress Website For 2018
Wouldn’t it be great to have a blueprint that you can follow to get first page ranking of your website in Google?
A website, no matter how amazing it may look or how great the content be, isn’t worth if people can’t find or know that it exists. That’s where SEO generates a never ending stream of hype. A well optimized site is much more likely to get recognized through organic search.
And, if your website has been built with WordPress, then you are off to a great start with the optimization process. WordPress is built with SEO in mind and it’s flexible. That means you can built a SEO strategy that meets your particular needs.
Here is a short SEO checklist that explains each step in getting your pages optimized:
- Keyword Density
Keyword density is the most important factor of checklist, especially since recent Google algorithm updates. Keyword density refers to how many times your keywords appear in your content and is expressed as a percentage. For example, say optimizing an article for “on-page SEO checklist”, is of 1,000 words long and we mentioned on-page SEO checklist 20 times, then the keyword density would be 2%.
We would not go above 2% anymore! Google can and will penalize you for “keyword stuffed” content.
- Meta Tags
WordPress makes it very simple to administer Meta Tags. There are 3 simple fields to fill in – using the Simple Meta Tags plugin.
- Meta Title – Include your Keywords in here – this will be the main title your visitors see when searching in the search engines – so make it appealing and make it stand out!
- Meta Description – Very important. This is a short description of your content your visitor will read in the search engines. Include your keywords and again make it appealing.
- Meta Keywords – Make sure you include your keywords. This one is not so important, just reinforces to the search engines about what your page content is based on.
- Title, URL, Content and Headings Optimizations
Some real simple, quick guidelines:
- Make sure that the page title contains your keywords – preferably beginning with them.
- Make sure your URL contains your keywords
- Bold, Italicize and Underline your keywords on separate occasions
- Make sure you have both H2 and H3 titles in the page somewhere with your headings
- Alternate Text Image Tag
When you insert a picture into WordPress, you have a field option called Alternate Tag Image Text. Make sure to include your keywords in here, if you have multiple images use different iterations of keywords, for example: on-page SEO checklist, checklist for SEO, on-page optimization checklist and so forth.
- Get a Sitemap
This one doesn’t really apply to optimizing the page you’re working on, but will boost SEO for all your pages, so include this in checklist. Like all things WordPress, there’s a plugin for that – Google XML Sitemaps.This automatically builds and keeps up to date a logical “map” of your website.
It allows the search engines more efficiency in figuring out where all your pages are and leads to more of them being indexed (included) in the search engine results. Further, it creates backlinks into to each of your pages (with hyperlinks that match your page title – which should contain your keywords) – Google loves to see a site with intertwined pages!
- External Links to Authority Sites
Google loves to see natural content, and natural content usually links to other content – especially authority sites. Authority sites, like WordPress, Yahoo, CNN and even Google itself – is popular, and very high ranked pages. Try to place at least one hyperlink to an authority site.
So, in order to get officially optimized, the combination of the right theme, plugins and content strategy can make your WordPress website fully optimized for search engines. So, whether you