SEO

On Page SEO Checklist, while Planning a Small Business Website

Continuing the series for Small Business Website Tips, today I will share one more aspect that is important for small business websites.

In our previous article, we have focused on Web Design & UI/UX Things for your Small Business. Besides Website Design, it is important that your small business website must follow SEO things to get rank in search engine.

There are two types of SEO you have to work on while planning for a website.

On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

Today’s focus is only On-Page SEO. Let’s start with domain first.

Domain

The first thing you need to think about is your website domain name. Don’t take it lightly.

Usually, it is derived with the name of your company. If the company name is longer than usual, then you should use an acronym or something related to your key product/services (but remember to keep it short). Rand from Moz had perfectly articulated this in details on Moz blog.

SSL

If your website has functionalities that use confidential information such as credit cards information, then you must use SSL Certificate. According to Google, having SSL will affect minor boost in ranking.

Responsive & Mobile Friendly

Never underestimate the power of a responsive mobile friendly website. Why?  Because according to statistics 2017, 57% of Search Traffic is Now Mobile.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags makes your page search engine friendly and helps to classify the content of the web pages.There are number of tags to use in header section, but some of them are essential from the SEO perspective.

• Meta Content Type: Insert proper Meta content type like UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 that specifies the character encoding for the HTML document.
• Title Tag: Keep it between 60 – 65 characters.
• Description Tag: Use proper keyword rich syntactical sentence with a limit of around 155 characters.
• Keyword Tag: This Tag is no more used by Google as per declaration from Google long back. Some search engine still uses it.
• Meta Robots Tag: Add proper tag attribute like follow, nofollow, index, noindex etc... Visit article from Yoast to know more in detail.
• Facebook & Twitter OG Graph: Use Open Graph to integrate social media with your website. It helps to boost up your CTR. Know more.
• Canonical Tag: Place proper url set of similar url as canonical to improve SEO of your site.

Page Speed

Page speed drastically impacts on SEO. Here are some factors you should consider to improve page speed.

• Check Performance Tools : Use Performance Tools like GTMetrix, PingDom, Google Page Insight to know the exact reason for a site to be slow. Try to solve the issues as much as possible.
• Optimize Image: Use proper image compression tools (Try online tools also) to optimize image without losing quality.
• Minified HTML CSS & JS: Combine multiple CSS and JS files commonly used in site and then compress it with compression tools. Google also provide such online tools to minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources.
• Optimize use of Plugins: Plugins are made with a view of using it in every type of websites. It is not optimized only for your site hence it may contain unnecessary things that are not required for your website (Not in the case of every plugin). Choose plugins wisely to use on your website.
• Leverage browser caching: Implement browser caching with the proper use of .htaccess file.
• Use CDN: Make sure to implement CDN properly purging old content from CDN regularly.
• Use of performance check tools: There are many tools to measure the performance of your website. It shows where your website performance lags in order to solve it as per the issue.
• Fast & reliable hosting platform: Your hosting servers are one of the major responsible factors for the speed of your site. Always prefer quality hosting service provider to keep your page speed consistent.
• Check & Solve Redirects: Redirects unnecessarily reduce loading time. Check Redirects and solve it accordingly.
• AMP: Create an AMP version of your website to load it fast on mobile devices.

Content is King

Now, Google focuses on high-quality content and boost page rank with great content.  Further, a good content will always attract a reader to search more about your business and services. Here are some points you should consider while making a great SEO/User-friendly content.

• No Duplicate: Don’t just copy content from somewhere else. Always check your content with plagiarism check tools to verify duplicate content.
• Keyword Centric: Keep the content SEO-friendly with the use of optimal keywords. Use LSI and synonyms in it to make it relevant to the focused keyword.
• Long Tail Keywords: Use long tail keywords to target visitors looking for an exact match.
• Better Internal Linking: Use Internal links in your content to ease user to explore more from your site.
• Use of H Tags, bullets, Image Alt: Use proper H tags to highlight the title, sub-title. Use bullets tag to list the items in the content to improve readability. In addition, use proper “alt” and “title” attribute for the image used in the content.

Rich Snippets/ Schemas

Rich Snippet/Schema is a structured data that helps search engine to better understand your web page. Using Schema, returns more informative results in the SERP. Use Google tools to verify the structured data used in your web page. For beginners, here is a guide to know more about it.

HTML/XML Sitemap

Create both HTML & XML sitemap on your website to help understand the flow of your site. It also helps in crawling & indexing your new web page.

Robots.txt

It helps to block Google from crawling & indexing unnecessary webpage in search page.

SEO-Friendly URLs

Keep it short & keyword enrich.No special characters to be used except Hyphens“–“ in place of space between keywords.

Check Broken Links

Check & resolve for broken links in your website.

Use of Social Sharing Button

Use the most used social sharing buttons in your blog /articles to ease the user to share your great content.

Optimize use of Pop-ups

Limit the use of popups in your website as Google now start penalizing site with annoying pop-ups. Refer this guide if you want to use popups on your site.

Security

Majority of the search engines will penalize your website as “attacked website” and drop your ranking in SERP, once your site attacked. It takes long to regain the rank. Hence, routinely create a backup of your site and routinely check the vulnerability of your site through online tools.

Don’t use video from your server

Instead, use YouTube or other video hosting platform to reduce the load on your server.

That’s all for this On-Page SEO Checklist. Hope this will help you to plan for your small business website. Kindly share your thoughts on this article in below comment section.

In fact, if you are looking for an in-depth guidance regarding any of these topics? Shoot your queries in comment section or connect us through Skype: vishalmba08 & our SEO experts will help you to overcome your issue related to SEO.