A SEO Checklist, making a good habit…
Right, you’re ready to go and I have a few good tips for a SEO Checklist that you should consider and culture yourself into for some good internet marketing habits. Simple common sense basic tips that will keep your ideas in check and give the search engines information so that they will help rank your content to the many hungry readers.
Researching Your Keywords
It’s important to think about your topic that you want to share with your readers. What is your audience interested in? Can you provide the answers for them? Will your article about this topic bring them closer to their goals? Will your article on the topic bring you closer to your goal?
Once your topic has been decided, figuring out what keywords and keyword phrases to use, is the next train of thought. These will be the tools to use for the basis of your topic and your content is formed around these words and phrases.
The importance of understanding these keywords and phrases is a basic fundamental that you will hear about often and will become second nature and part of your internet marketing culture as you travel the path of internet marketing.
Learning to do a little keyword research in the beginning will help a lot in terms of building confidence for yourself and also help your websites climb up the rankings. Figuring out whether a keyword will likely rank well or not will help you achieve your goal and will become an automatic process. Using a great tool like Jaxxy below will help immensely for this task.
Creating content with highly competitive keywords, which can make it much more difficult for your page to rank well, is a method that newbies fall into and learning to use less competitive long tailed keywords is something that will come with experience and get better results and better rankings.
Your Title
Making sure the keyword phrase is in your title is the best way to use it for targeting . The optimum amount of words when writing a title is between three to seven words with your keywords right near the beginning of your title.
Your Description
Your description at the beginning should always contain your chosen keyword phrase. Keep the description to within 160 characters. Reason we do this is so it will be visible in the search engine results panel after the title.
Your Body
Your body of content should be a minimum of 500 words. More is better and having your keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the content is best.
Using your keyword/s on an average between 1% and 5% in your content is well and truly enough.
Don’t over do it with your keyword/s because the search engines will see your content as unnatural and only being created for ranking than providing valuable content for what searchers are looking for. It may affect your article/post ranking and negatively impact your website, so try to keep it below 5%. Just remember, targeting less competitive keywords and keyword phrases will help produce better ranking results than using a single highly competitive keyword. That’s why keyword research in important to learn and understand.
Your Links
Adding a hyper link at or near the beginning of your content is not necessarily a must do thing but most internet marketers feel that it has become common practice and works well. Your links can come from within your keyword/s with linking to pages related to your keyword/s and topic.
Linking to internal pages that closely match your keyword/s is a very good idea and try aiming with this technique at least 70% of the time. No need to link directly to your homepage as you want to direct your visitors to where and what you want them to read.
As an example…
You have one post on SEO and on another page you have an article on optimisation. Linking these two posts together is a great idea and great for the search engines as you are following up more valid information for them. There is no use linking those posts to unrelated topics or to a home page.
Over use of hyper links can also harm your rankings so it is best to aim for one link to every 150 to 200 words or about 1% of your content. I prefer using links sparingly.
Your Anchor Text
Using well defined anchor text in your content will always help to strengthen the keywords on your site. Having proper anchor text will make your content look very relevant to the search engines.
When a search engine such as google find that an article you have written is keyword rich on a subject such as, tips for effective content writing, and then sees other websites link to your post through similar keywords with phrases like “importance of content marketing”, it brings the search engines to believe that your content is valuable and can help boost your ranking.
Here is another example of what a good anchor text looks like.
- Good anchor text: Read my post on why content marketing matters
- Bad anchor text: Read my post on why content marketing matters
Your Secondary Keywords
The use of Secondary Keywords will only help maximise your ranking.
If you are using say, “SEO Checklist” as you primary keyword phrase and “understanding these keywords” as your secondary keyword phrase, your page will be better optimised for the search engines. The SEOs will see your primary keyword as the most important topic/keyword phrase on the page and you more likely rank well for that keyword. The secondary keyword phrase will also be considered important but not as much as my primary.
I guess you can understand that having alternate keywords just gives a better chance of driving traffic from multiple related topics. This is a great technique for targeting additional keyword phrases that people may be searching for in order to maximise the possibility for your page to rank well in all search engines.
You Now Have The Checklist
Using and following these tips above can help you become successful and they will become normal practice for you as you journey through your way of internet marketing.
If you want more great training on the steps to building an internet marketing business then I suggest you join me by clicking the image below and get fast tracked to better SEO knowledge plus more.
John