It’s time for an unplanned post.

Because the posts here do not cover half of what is in the complete Fast Track SEO Course it may be useful to post a checklist that includes some of the things missed out.

So, before you hit publish on your website, here is your on-page SEO checklist.

All the previous posts in this series can be found here.

For the complete version of this Fast track SEO course head over to Amazon.

It’s yours for less than a fiver!

Your On-page SEO checklist

Before we move on to look at off-page optimisation in the next post let’s just take a moment to recap exactly what you now know.

What is on-page optimisation?

On-page optimisation is all about the things you can do to your site itself to help it rank better on the search engines.

URLs and Sitemaps

Try and keep your URLs short (under 115 characters), descriptive and, above all else, make sure they contain your target keyword.
Use sitemaps to ensure your new content is crawled and indexed.

The head section

Your meta titles are critical for your site’s SEO: make sure they are keyword focussed, unique and under 55 characters.
Your meta description will influence clickthrough from the SERPs: make sure they are unique, descriptive, compelling, contain your keyword and are shorter than 155 characters.
Meta robots and robots.txt files can be very useful in preventing pages you do not wish to be indexed appearing in the search results. Take care that they are not, however, blocking content you want to actually appear.
Open Graph and Twitter Cards can be used to make sure that social shares of your content display in the most effective manner.
Duplicate content can be content that is copied from another site, content that is repeated on your site across different pages but it is more likely to be inadvertently introduced through content that is served on a number of URLs that are not canonicalised. Whatever causes duplicate content the end result is the same: it harms your ranking potential.

The body section

Make sure your keywords are used in your headings, to tag and describe your images and early on in your copy.
Make sure your content for each page:
- Stays ‘on topic’ and will be useful and informative for the reader.
- Is visually interesting, easy to read and quick to scan.
- Is authoritative and the best there is: this can often be achieved by providing longer content.
Never try and overuse your keyword.
Use Schema markup to gain rich snippets in your search results and to ensure important information, such as the location of your business, is clearly identified by the search engine.
Be aware of the increasing use of the Knowledge Graph to deliver ‘answers’ on the search page itself and target some content at securing these slots for yourself.
External links from your site are a great way to ‘anchor’ its content but take care that you only link out to quality, authoritative sites.

Site structure

Your site should be structured so that its important pages are closest to the home page and have the most internal links.
A useful way to achieve this is through content hubs that pull in other pages from all over the site into one central hub.

Page speed and mobile-friendly sites

Two things that can absolutely kill your ability to rank are having a slow site or not having a site that displays well on mobile devices.

Got all that?

Good!

Now it’s time to really make a difference.

Wave your site goodbye because we’re going off-page in the next post!

All the previous posts in this series can be found here.

For the complete version of this Fast track SEO course head over to Amazon.

It’s yours for less than a fiver!