FREE SEO CHECKLIST HOW TO

Here’s how to check (and edit) your title tag: Title tag contains “modifiers” - these are words like “best”, “2018”, etc these won’t help rankings directly but they can help to increase CTR (which is a proven ranking factor) and map to intent at each stage of the funnel.Title tag starts with keyword - not 100% necessary but works well for some pages don’t force it at the beginning if it doesn’t make sense!.Title tag contains keyword - again, this is good practice but not 100% necessary (thanks to Google’s Hummingbird update).Title tag too short - this will tell you if any title tags are under 50 characters in length.Title tag too long - this will tell you if any title tags are over 70 characters in length (and thus, may be truncated) it’s usually worth shortening any title tags that are too long.Title tag exists (or not) - add the title tag to any pages without one present.Here’s the title tag-related information the sheet shows you for each page: Get this part wrong and you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.Īnyway, here’s what the very same study found to be some key on-page ranking factors:Īgain, there’s some debate about whether or not placing your keyword at the beginning of the title tag has any additional weight, so this is up to you. On-page SEO falls in this bucket because it’s what search engines like Google use to understand the context of content, determine relevance for different search queries, and gauge user experience. While this study shows “keyword in title” as 4-5 times less important as “referring domains”, it’s important to remember it takes less than 4-5 times the effort to change!īefore you start investing loads of time and money into content and link building campaigns, focus on the foundational elements. Meanwhile, a keyword can easily be added to a title tag in <60 seconds, and your internal and external link profiles optimized in minutes. I’m not disagreeing that “backlink factors” will probably always be more important than on-page factors…īacklink factors take months/years (and a lot of cash) to build. They look negligible next to those other factors, right? Looking at this, you’d be forgiven for thinking the “on page factors” listed here aren’t important at all.

Free seo checklist