seo checklist

On-Page Seo Checklist For 2021 The Complete Guide
SEO ADVICES http://darwin-gp.com
If you’re looking for an SEO checklist to help you increase your site’s organic traffic and ranking in Google, you’ve just found it. We’ve put together the definitive checklist you’ll need to be successful in SEO in 2021, covering best practice information and tasks you need to be aware of. Watch this video to the end so you don’t miss the best part! Let’s not talk too much and get down to business.

From the basics of SEO to what you need to know when analyzing your off-page signals, use this as a guide to ensure that your site adheres to best practices and that you are not held back by issues you missed.
The following items are mostly service tasks, but they form the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.
Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
The Google Search Console is an important tool that provides you with invaluable information about your site’s effectiveness, as well as a wealth of data you can use to increase your site’s organic visibility and traffic.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a similar platform that simply provides data and analytics for your search engine.
These essential tools allow you to view search terms and keywords that users use to find your site in search results, submit sitemaps, detect crawl errors and more.
If you don’t already have them, do it now and thank us later.
Without the right data, you can’t make good decisions.
Google Analytics is a free marketing analytics tool, which allows you to view data and information about how many people are visiting your site, who they are and how they interact with it.

Google Analytics is pretty hard to beat, but there are some decent alternatives like Clicky .
Just make sure you have a way to track regular search traffic and conversions. The first step is to install Google Analytics code on your site and familiarize yourself with basic SEO reports.

Create and submit a Sitemap file.
The purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines decide which pages to crawl and which is the canonical version of each page.
It’s simply a list of URLs that define your site’s core content to ensure it gets crawled and indexed.
A sitemap tells the search robot which files you think are important for your site, and also provides valuable information about those files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page has changed, and any versions in other languages of the page.
Google supports some different sitemap formats, but XML is the most commonly used. You can usually find your sitemap at https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.

Create a Robots.txt file. Simply put, your site’s robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers about the pages and files that web scanners may or may not request from your site.
It is most often used to prevent crawlers from crawling certain sections of your site and is not intended to be used as a way to de-index a web page and stop it from showing in Google.
You can find your site’s robots.txt file at https://www.domain.com/robots.txt. Make sure you already have it.
If you don’t, you need to create one – even if you don’t currently need to prevent any web pages from being crawled.
Several WordPress SEO plugins allow users to create and edit their robots.txt file, but if you’re using a different CMS, you may need to manually create the file with a text editor and upload it to the root of your domain.
Check Search Console for manual actions. On rare occasions, you may find that your site has been adversely affected by the imposition of manual actions.
Manual actions are usually caused by an apparent attempt to violate or manipulate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines – this includes things like user-generated spam, structured data issues, unnatural links, thin content, hidden text and even what’s called pure spam.

Make sure Google can index your website.
It’s not as rare as you think that a website actually can’t be indexed by Google.
You’d be surprised to learn how often sudden website de-indexing is caused by developers accidentally leaving noindex tags in place when moving code from the middle ground to the working environment. Just go ahead and start crawling; if this is blocked, search engines won’t be able to crawl or index your site either.
Double checking that the main pages that should be indexed can be indexed can save a lot of troubleshooting problems if you find problems later.

One of the fastest ways to start your keyword research is to find the terms that work for your competitors. In our opinion, time spent on competitor analysis will not be wasted.
You need to know what your main money keywords are. In case you haven’t guessed, these are the ones that will drive you leads, sales and conversions.