Optimizing each page of your website is an essential aspect of SEO and one of the simplest to implement. Especially if you follow this on-page SEO checklist!
Before starting, I want to share with you strategic information.
A survey in September 2021 placed on-page SEO as the top-ranking factor according to a panel of 2800 experts.
This means that it should be the primary focus of your SEO efforts.
To make it easy, I wrote this checklist to ensure you don’t forget anything.
And there are a few extra tips at the end, don’t miss them!
For now, let’s focus on the basics.
How to implement on-page SEO easily
Nothing complicated at all, you want to check that you have included your focus keyphrase in:
- The headline (title)
- The first 100 words of the post
- A subheading (H2 tag)
- The meta (SEO) title and meta description
- An image alt tag
Done? Great.
You can stop here.
Yep, for real. Simple, isn’t it?
Alright, alright, you can do a few other things.
But if you already have a lot of content and little time (yes, I know how it is!), do this, and you’ll be good.
If you are motivated to go the extra mile, keep reading!
The next level on-page SEO checklist
Now we talk.
Let’s get you to the top of the game in on-page SEO.
To start, here is a clever way to rank for more keywords: use related keyphrases in other subheadings. I can’t remember whom I learned this from. But it is coming from a recognized SEO expert.
Of course, it has to be natural. You don’t write for robots.
The easiest way to do this is to check your favorite SEO tool for related questions. You can then use the questions as subheadings very naturally.
Something you have to know is that using your keyphrase too much can hurt the page's ranking. It is called keyword stuffing and leads to “over-optimization.”
I don’t like those terms, but you will see them elsewhere, so you want to know what it means.
Anyways.
Once you hit the publish button, your work is not finished if you want to level up your SEO game. I bet you want, right?
How to optimize further your article after publishing it
There are four more things to do:
- Add links from other posts pointing to the new one, including the focus keyphrase.
- Add links to other posts (keep in mind the SEO silo structure)
- Submit the URL in the Google Search Console to index your post.
- Promote your post (social media, email list)
Each of those things encompasses quite a few more. But you have the idea.
Since you are still there, as promised, you have a few bonus optimizations below that can help you make a difference (i.e., rank higher!).
Here they are:
- Add a video above the fold to increase the time on the page
- Add infographics to increase your chance of getting backlinks. It is worth paying someone to do it because it can help rank.
- Add other types of media, such as an audio file if you have a related podcast episode, for example
- Add or structure content to get featured as a snippet on top of Google SERP.
OK, that’s it for on-page SEO.
Nothing very complicated. You can do the basics pretty quickly, and it will naturally integrate your content creation workflow.
Now, if you need help or you are too busy to do all this, just let me know 🙂