Simple SEO Marketing Checklist For Newbies

When optimizing your website for search engines, it is wonderful if you can just follow a step-by-step guide as a newbie. How do you build a web page that gives the best results through SEO Marketing? There are some basic features that you or your SEO analyst should include when you set out and finish your SEO marketing tasks

1. Page Title

Using the keyword term as the very first term in the page title has the highest correlation with page rankings. An example could be, ‘Car accessories | John’s Car shop’. However, using a long title is not advisable. Ensure that your title is limited to 70 characters, the number that search engines display in search results.

2. Meta Description

Meta descriptions are tags used by search engines to provide preview snippets for a given page. Use keywords in your Meta description, an element responsible for the ‘bolding’ effect that occurs in the visual snippet of the search results. Although these don’t generally affect the page ranking on most search engines, they do affect the click-through rate.

3. Get An Informative URL

A shorter URL will do better for your website when it comes to the search engine results page (SERP). Use keywords as sub folders, pages in your URL rather than sub-domains. E.g. goodcars.com/caraccessorries rather than caraccessories.goodcars.com. This is mainly because search engines changed their search algorithms to make sub-domains less relevant as they were being abused. Your keyword density also makes a difference on your URL . For example a.com/cars rank higher than abc.com/cars- if cars is the keyword. That’s because cars take up a higher percentage of the URL in the former so it has a positive effect on ranking for that keyword.

4. Keyword Density

Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears in every 100 words. For small web pages, keyword density use should be used between 2% or 2 keywords in every 100 words while 4% is acceptable for large pages. Keep your keywords within the first 50-100 words of your content or earlier. Take heed that having too many keywords on your page is called keyword stuffing and can have a detrimental effect on your ranking.

5. Create Compelling Content

Good content is compelling, attractive and shareable. Good content should also be linkable. People should link to your content which will lead to search engines also ranking it better.

7. Use The ‘Alt Attribute’ Well For Your Images

Descriptions in the Alt Attribute have a strong correlation to better search results. It is strongly advised that pages have an image on each page with content and the keyword employed in each Alt attribute of the IMG tag.

6 .Finally, Market Your Content

As unfair as it seems, a good marketing drive online using online advertising tools has the power to attract more links than the content may deserve.

By Dr. Ataollah Etemadi