An On-Page SEO Checklist For Any Website

As I work with small business owners to give their digital marketing a boost, I often need to have a demystifying conversation about SEO. Just about anyone knows what social media marketing is, because they see the ads.

They can figure out what a content strategy is, because they’ve read the blogs and listened to the podcasts.

But how do you get search engines to read your site better and push it higher up in the search results? One way to do this is by addressing all of the critical items when building a new page on your website.

This post is designed to act as a checklist that you can refer to allowing you to be confident your on-page SEO is in good shape so that you don’t have to go back and “clean up” the back end of your site when you want to devote more time to a steady and free stream of visitors to your site.

(1) URL

The URL for any of your pages should tell visitors what the page is about. For landing pages, the URL should be similar to the page title and the first heading (H1).

This helps with communicating to web crawlers what the page is about. People also like looking at a clean URL as opposed to an unrecognizable string of letters and symbols. This is akin to crossing all your t’s, or making sure that your shirt is freshly ironed…