We’ve put together the ultimate checklist for SEO success in 2023, which includes 41 technical tips and tricks you need to know to improve your website’s SEO.
From SEO basics to what you need to know when analyzing your off-page signals, use this as a reference to make sure your site is performing at its best and catch any issues you may have missed. you don’t get
In this article, we discuss the following topics:
- How to use the SEO checklist
- Basic SEO checklist
- Website keyword research checklist
- Technical SEO checklist
- Internal SEO checklist
- External SEO checklist
How to use the SEO checklist
We have divided this checklist into sections that cover the main areas of SEO focus. Basic principles, keyword research, technical SEO, internal SEO and content creation, and external SEO factors.
There is a good chance that your site already covers many of these points, but you may have forgotten some.
However, we also know that all websites have room for improvement, and we’re confident that with a little time and consideration of this 2023 SEO checklist, you’ll simply catch the things you’ve forgotten.
Some of these tips may not apply to you, and that’s okay!
But what is very important is to keep your site’s SEO up to date and improve it with this checklist.
We suggest that in order to use this checklist, first check each and every item in this list to determine what things you haven’t done for your site’s SEO and what things need to be followed up, and what things need to be followed up. You must update.
Basic SEO checklist
This preliminary SEO 2023 checklist includes items that may seem simple and trivial but can be a nudge to pay more attention to simple but important items.
1- Activating the search console of the site
One of the most important and basic measures for your site’s SEO is to activate your site in Google’s search console. This Google tool helps you to easily analyze the performance of your website. Check the growth or decline of the website. View site errors and…
All of these things, along with solutions to predict the future of the site and prevent regression, are things that can only be done with the search console.
To activate the search console, just enter this link and activate your search console there in different ways.
In the comprehensive SEO training course, Neoseo has taught the various parts of the search console in a completely professional and specialized manner.
2- Activating the website in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free marketing analytics tool that lets you see data and insights about how many people are visiting your site, who they are, and how they’re interacting with them.
Of course, Google Analytics has limitations in Iran, but it is better to know that for the development of your website, it is better to bypass obstacles, even with difficulty, to improve the performance of your website.
The user experience (UX) that a website provides is a big indicator of site traffic and the average time visitors spend on the site.
Google Analytics can help you see what the user experience of your website is like. On the other hand, you can see how your website visitors check your site. In this way, you can make the contacts check your website seamlessly and not bother to find the information they need.
Another essential ranking factor for the site’s UX is the presence of broken pages and links on your site. Link-checking tools can help you remove such links and ensure your users don’t see them. Be sure not to forget this as one of the most important factors in the SEO 2023 checklist.
3- Installing the SEO plugin if using the WordPress platform
Another thing that you should consider in the SEO 2023 checklist is installing SEO plugins on your WordPress site. If you use WordPress as your CMS, you should install and configure an SEO plugin to easily handle some of your on-page optimization needs.
One of the most popular WordPress plugins for SEO is the Yoast plugin. This plugin has many features that help in optimizing the content and structure of a page.
But our advice is to ignore SEO tips and Yoast rules. For example, if it says that the density of your keywords is not appropriate, do not pay attention to it and check this yourself.
We only recommend that you use the tools of this plugin, such as writing meta descriptions, specifying page address names and changes on it, etc.
4- Creating a site map (Sitemap)
When you know what an SEO checklist is, you will realize that one of the most important items in it is the sitemap. The purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines decide which pages should be indexed and which pages have canonical tags.
This map is not what you think it is like Gulliver’s map. This map contains the addresses of your pages, which determines which pages are main and which are secondary pages, which pages are the target and which pages are less important, and even which pages should not be indexed at all.
Google supports different types of sitemaps, but we recommend that you use XML sitemaps. To access the site map, you will reach it from the following address:
https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
If you use a comprehensive SEO plugin for your site in WordPress, usually these SEO plugins will help you create your sitemap by themselves.
Finally, after you have created your sitemap, you should put it in the Google search console.
5- Creating the Robots.txt file
After you understand well what is meant by the SEO checklist, you come to the conclusion that you need to follow and create these items precisely and step by step. One of the first things you should create when starting the site is the robot.txt file. But in the first step, you need to know what the Robots.txt file is. This file specifies which pages should be crawled and which pages should not.
If you have not thought about this before and now you have come across the SEO 2023 checklist after a long time, you can see this file in the following way:
https://www.domain.com/robots.txt
But if you have just launched your site, there are different ways to create this file, which we will check together in the following SEO checklist.
One of these methods is to use SEO plugins for WordPress sites. But you can also place it on your host by learning how to create a robot file.
Technical SEO checklist
In the following, we plan to prepare a checklist for the technical SEO optimization of your site. All these explanations are the experiences of experts and specialists of the Neoseo collection:
1- Check and fix site errors with the search console
In the Google search console, you can see sections such as Coverage, which identifies errors for you. These errors may be broken links, errors related to structured data codes, spam created by the user, etc.
Of course, you should not forget that Google search console usually informs you of severe and new errors by email.
2- Web hosting check
The right web hosting service, in addition to server validity, makes the site more uptime and better loading speed, which can improve your site’s SEO. In each SEO evaluation, you should review the performance of your current website host and, if necessary, make changes and choose a better hosting service provider.
When you want to evaluate the performance of your current hosting provider, resources like HostingBooth can be of great help. In the ultimate SEO checklist, when you’re planning to start SEO , don’t forget to check your web hosting.
3- Uptime of the site
In evaluating your site’s SEO, you should check the uptime that your website provides to its users. Site Uptime is the length of time the website is available for its users. A website that has a lot of DownTime will cause you to lose your traffic and affect your site’s ranking. To take care of your site’s Uptime, you can use tools such as Uptime Robot, Site 24/7, and Pingometer.
4- Checking the loading speed of the website
Use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to determine the current speed of your website. When you check the loading speed of your pages with this tool, you will come across data, each of which indicates the reason for the slow loading of the pages. It is suggested that you give the errors obtained from checking the site speed with this tool to a professional programmer to increase the speed of your site by optimizing the source code of the site.
5- Google penalty review
The truth is that Google can freely penalize you for not paying attention to updates or other instructions. Google’s penalty can cause a lot of damage to your site’s reputation and make your site’s SEO more efficient.
If you are not aware of the penalty applied to your site, any effort you make to improve a low SEO score will be ineffective.
Therefore, as an important factor in the SEO checklist, you should check and see if your website has been penalized by Google. There are several tools available for this, such as Panguin’s Google Penalty Check Tool and Fruition’s Google Penalty Checker Tool.
6- Checking the security of the site
Site security is an essential factor that determines the rank of a website. If you own an online store website, the issue of security becomes even more important. Since the SSL certificate is so important to websites now, you should definitely adopt this certificate or take steps to get it when you do your next SEO assessment.
7- Updating the user experience (UX) on the pages
The first and one of the most essential items in the SEO checklist is matching the pages with the user experience criteria, check your pages with the user experience criteria of the pages, available in Core Web Vitals Search Console, among them can be the Optimization of pages for mobile phones, safe browsing, and HTTPS security, mentioned.
Important things in Core Web Vitals that you should pay attention to:
- First Input Delay (FID): FID is measured for interactive pages. To ensure a good user experience, the page should have an FID of less than 100ms.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP measures the loading performance of the largest content element on the page, which should occur within 2.5 seconds to provide a good user experience.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the change in the position of elements visually. This metric should be less than 0.1 seconds.
In the Core Web Vitals reports available in the search console, you can see the above for each page of the site and also see these statistics on the chart.
Also, to improve the user experience of the pages, you should pay attention to the following:
- Using Lazy Loading for unnecessary images.
- Use appropriate formats for images.
- Optimize JavaScript files
If you are not familiar with doing some of the above, you can get help from web developers.
8- Check internal and external broken links
Broken links can create a poor user experience for users and also cause problems for crawling search engine bots. If users click on a link on your website and find that they are not going to the correct address, it will have a negative impact on the user experience.
You should pay attention to the following and fix them if there is a problem:
- 301 and 302 redirects are correctly redirected.
- 404 error pages
- Orphan pages (pages to which no links have been given)
To fix broken links, you need to update the target URL or remove the link altogether if it no longer exists.
9- Get rid of duplicate or poor-quality content
According to the SEO checklist, you should make sure that there is no duplicate or poor-quality content on your site. The absence of duplicate content on the site is one of the most important points of SEO, the existence of duplicate content can occur for many reasons, including repeating the page from different navigations and having several versions of the site and the same content.
Another SEO tip is to have only one version of your site indexed in Google, i.e. search engines will index all of these domains instead of one website:
- https://www.abc.com
- https://abc.com
- http://www.abc.com
- https://abc.com
Duplicate content removal can be implemented in the following ways:
- Redirect 301 from the copy version to the original version available on the site. for example
- Set https://www.abc.com as the original and 301 redirects all other addresses to it.
- Apply canonical or no-index to copy pages
- Remove any duplicate or duplicate content if possible.
10- Moving the site to the HTTPS protocol
In 2014, Google announced that the HTTPS protocol is a ranking and SEO standard. So, if your site is still HTTP in 2021, you need to change it.
HTTPS protects and encrypts your users’ information to prevent hacking or data theft.
11- Creating a regular template for URLs
According to the direct words of Google: “The URL structure of the site should be as simple as possible.”
One of the issues in the discussion of how to check the site’s SEO is to check its URLs, the presence of a large number of unnecessary words in the URL that refer to the same or similar content on your site will complicate the URL and create problems for crawlers. As a result, the Google bot may not be able to index all of your site’s content.
According to the said content, we should write URLs simply, short, and without unnecessary words.
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