The 9-Step SEO Checklist for Better Google Rankings

Building any website or blog takes research, hard work, and dedication. It can be hard to build SEO and know what steps you should take. I built this checklist for myself, and the returns on clicks and reads I’ve received have been well worth the effort.

Without any further ado, here’s the checklist you should be running your blogs through before hitting Publish.

Keyword Research

Once you have a topic, please do a little bit of research. It’s better to rank #1 for a keyword that’s searched 100 times per month than to rank #11 for something that’s searched 100,000 times per month.

It’s important to notice how saturated the internet already is for the content you are going to write and whether you can use a variation of the keywords you were originally thinking of incorporating to stand out in your specific niche.

I like SEMrush for discovering the keyword overview. The overview will tell you everything from the keyword difficulty (how difficult it would be as a new website to rank on page 1 for your keyword) to the volume (the average number of monthly searches for your keyword).

Headline/Title

Another super important thing to look at to rank on Google is your headlines. Remember, headlines are a critical element because they’re what draw the reader into the body of your post.

Should never be over 70 characters

Aim for 50 characters long

Use target keywords

Below are some great resources for creating SEO headlines:

110 Headlines Examples

Blog Title Generator

Call to Action

As with any piece of marketing material, a blog post should be designed to get someone to do something.

Here are a few popular calls to action:

Bring people back to your website — You can encourage people to continue to other parts of your website and help your bounce rates.

Share — “If you liked this post, tweet it out.”

Implement — I believe the best result of any blog post is for a reader to take your advice and implement it.

Subheading

Similar to images, subheadings break up the content and make blog posts easier to read. They also have big-time SEO benefits.

Just don’t bold or italicize the subheadings and everything will be fine. When a search engine robot hits a page, it reads the headline/title tag first. Then it reads the H2, H3, and H4 tags.

When you add subheadings to your content, proper HTML is:

<h2>Subhead level 1</h2>

<h3>Subhead level 2</h3>

<h4>Subhead level 3</h3>

Note: The headline/title tag should be automatically wrapped in <h1></h1>.

So… Stop simply bolding and italicizing your subheads.

Images

We all know that images grab your attention, break up the content, and supplement your ideas. But they also add great SEO benefits, as long as you follow these steps:

Save your images as [keyword-phrase.png] before you upload them to your site.

Add alt text as [keyword phrase].

Add title tag as [keyword phrase].

These rules apply to your featured image and the images within your posts. For the images within the content, however, use other similar and relevant keywords. (Literally describe the picture.)

Videos

Google understands that adding a video to a blog post makes it a more complete resource. If they aren’t already boosting blog posts with videos, they will eventually.

Start making videos for your posts, upload them to your channel, and embed them in the actual post.

Consider embedding other peoples’ videos in your posts.

Links

Another important step that most people forget is interlinking between your blog posts. Before you publish a new post, read through it, and try to find two or three related articles from your own blog to link back to. This keeps both readers and search spiders on your site longer. Interlinking will reduce your bounce rates.

Also, look for opportunities to link to other bloggers. The SEO benefits of external linking are clear. Find organic ways to link to sites that are reputable, like CNN, Forbes, Huffington Post, etc. Linking to other sites is also a good way to build relationships with other bloggers.

Meta Description

In a search result, your meta description often shows up as the little blurb beneath the blue link. In writing your meta description, you need to keep some things in mind:

It needs to be fewer than 155 characters so Google will display the whole description.

It needs to include your keywords because Google bolds them in search results.

It should be an actual sentence from the post because people look for that sentence once they arrive.

Try to include a CTA.

Write in active voice.

Tip: Summarize the post with the keywords in the last sentence of the introduction and use that as the meta description.

Use this page if you’re still confused.

URL

Make sure you are only using hyphens to separate words in the URL.

Use only lowercase letters.

Keep the most important keywords at the beginning of the URL.

The post slug is what shows up after the domain for every post or page. When you type a headline, your site automatically generates the post slug by placing every word in the headline into the slug. This clutters it up with lots of small words. Instead, change your post slug to your primary keyword. (See the example below.)

Default: developingworth.com/blog/10-seo-blog-post-publishing-steps-that-most-bloggers-forget/

Ideal: developingworth.com/blog/seo-blog-post-publishing-steps/

While there are still other SEO points to consider that will help increase your blog’s performance, these are the main points I’ve used to keep my blog indexed.

With perseverance, following these steps will make sure that your blog climbs to the first page of Google.