16 SEO Essentials Everyone Forgets

SEO can be daunting for a novice. This stereotype is not unfounded, as SEO has many aspects and even subcategories that are hard to pin down. A website that wants to climb the ranks needs to ensure all aspects are covered.

Even if you do everything right, a single and even small error can ruin your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). That's why you need a handy checklist of SEO essentials to make sure you don't miss anything important. In this article, we'll share some SEO essentials that people often overlook.

Schema Markups

Schema markups don't influence SEO directly. However, they are essential for your web pages to rank at position zero. Position zero is the topmost position on Google, the 'feature snippets' section of the Google SERPs.

In this position, websites can get traffic like PPC campaigns without spending money.

The image above shows everything you need to understand about position zero.

Getting to position zero is not as difficult as you would think. All you need is to have the right schemas set on your web pages. Click on the image below to learn the schema markup step-by-step guide.

A good practice is to add schemas to your newer web pages as soon as they go live. Alternatively, schemas can also be added after a set period to newer pages.?

Page Load Speed

Speed is essential for your web pages. Most experts suggest that a 2-second loading time can boost your revenue and traffic. Moreover, a longer time like a 10-second loading time can make your website visitors more than 120 percent likely to bounce.

Improving page loading speed can be slightly challenging. It really depends on your website's code and the content type you put up. Keep your developers in the loop and ask them to use lazy loading if there is a lot of media and all is necessary.

There are many free tools you can use to check how fast your page is loading. Use them to your advantage.

Text-to-HTML-Ratio

The next essential is ensuring you have the right Text-to-HTML-Ratio. Since, it does not directly impact SEO, people tend to forget it. However, it does impact how your page loads up. Also, more code could sometimes lead to your web page not displaying correctly.

You can check your text-to-HTML ratio on different websites. However, a rough figure states that ideally text-to-HTML ratio should be between 25% to 75%. If your ratio does not conform to this percentage, then it’s best to ask your developers to get it done.

Indexing

Indexing implies whether your web pages are included in the Search Engine’s database and whether you’ve allowed the search engine to show your web page in search results.?

You might think that every page is indexed, but wisdom says otherwise. For example, if you have people signing in to your website, all the pages visited by a user after signing in should be de-indexed for security. Similarly, if a campaign is not online anymore, then the landing page needs to be de-indexed before being deleted, to avoid a 404 error.?

You can de-index pages by editing the robots.txt file.

Blogging Quality over Quantity

Blogging is one of the best ways to get your website up the SERPs. And while quantity blogs can often lead to more traffic. However, if you keep posting content with your only focus on keywords, you're not doing it right. Besides, Google's Quality Rater Guidelines specify that your content needs to be user-satisfying.

Websites often like to go with trending topics as they garner a lot of traffic in the short term. But traffic from these blog posts ends with the trend. For a stronger SEO strategy, opt for evergreen blog pieces, to get consistent traffic throughout the year.?

A rule of thumb to help you with this factor is to ask these questions every time you’re about to write on a topic to post on your website:

1. Does this solve a problem for my target audience? Is it Helpful?
2. Can I follow Double-EAT with this topic?
3. Will it seem negatively opportunistic if a Call to action is added?

The first two should be “Yes” and the last one should be a big “No” for you to finalize a blog post.

Repurposing Content

Another thing to keep on your content SEO checklist is to routinely find opportunities to repurpose content. This takes less time, and your content can do wonders in the right format.?

For example, all these points from our SEO best practices checklist would make for a killer short, or even a full-length YouTube video. We have a whole video on how you can repurpose content too.

Alt Text and Broken Images

Alt-text is a useful feature that can help you avoid the negative impact of a broken image on your website. It is a text description that appears when an image cannot be loaded or when a user has enabled accessibility options. Alt-text can inform the user about the content and purpose of the image, even if they cannot see it.

Every image on your website should have alt text, as it improves accessibility and SEO. Alt text can boost your ranking on Google Image searches and make your website more user-friendly.

For Broken Images, you need to perform a manual check periodically. The frequency of this check depends on how many resources you have and how many pages your website contains. A good rule of thumb is to do it at least once every two months. This way, you can identify and fix any broken images that might affect your website's performance and appearance.

Broken Links

Broken links can damage your website's performance and reputation. They frustrate users and may lower your ranking on Google. The usual solution is to use a 301 redirect, which sends users to a different page instead of a 404 error.

However, the best practice is to conduct a website audit to identify and eliminate any broken links. For details on the topic, watch the video below.

URL Formation

Now this one is quite basic for your on-page SEO checklist. Your URL shouldn’t be filled with numbers. URLs need to be readable, but both your user and the search engine.?

No-Follow Links

Another important step for your SEO strategy is to get a good number of no-follow links. No-follows are often overlooked by SEOs who focus on getting do-follows, which are seen as the best type of backlink.

However, having only do-follow links and no no-follow links can raise a red flag for Google, which wants to see natural backlinks from diverse sources. This was emphasized by the link spam update that penalized unnatural link building.

Therefore, you should aim for a balanced mix of do-follows and no-follows to maintain a healthy backlink profile.

Internal Linking

Another way to improve your SEO and keep your visitors interested is to use internal linking. This means that you connect different pages of your website with relevant links. This way, you can avoid having any pages that are not linked to any other page, which can hurt your ranking.

A sitemap can help you with this task. You can also use internal links in your blog posts to direct your readers to more information on your website, if they want to learn more.

Local SEO

To optimize your website for local searches, you need a local SEO checklist. Local keywords are often overlooked by websites that aim for global rankings. However, sometimes it is easier and more effective to start with the local audience. Local SEO can help you connect with your community and build trust and credibility.

Keyword Research

Choosing the right keywords can make a big difference in how well your website ranks on search engines. You should pick keywords that are relevant to your topic and audience. Keywords are not magic words that boost your website instantly, and SEO requires time and effort, so don't change your keywords too often.

Instead, stick to a consistent keyword cluster and monitor the results over a few months. You should also remember that quality matters more than quantity when it comes to keywords. After the helpful content update, search engines prefer content that is useful and informative, rather than just stuffed with keywords. Make sure your keywords fit naturally into your content, or leave them out altogether.

Also aim to use LSI keywords to make the use more natural.

Measuring Progress

To improve your strategies, you need to track your progress regularly. This will help you identify what is working well and what needs improvement. You can use analytics and UTM tags to measure the performance of specific aspects of your strategies, such as traffic sources, content types, and conversion rates. This will enable you to optimize your tactics and achieve better results.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a valuable indicator for SEO experts. It measures how often a user lands on a website and leaves without exploring other pages on the same site. This may seem trivial, but SEOs can use testing to find out why a bounce occurs.

This way, they can identify which pages of your website are not appealing or satisfying to the users and what causes this problem. They can also see which pages have a low bounce rate and apply the same strategies to improve the performance of the other pages.

Look for the latest Google Update

One of the key essentials to remember is keeping up with Google Updates. Google usually only reveals major updates as there are hundreds of minor updates happening on the search engine every day. But whenever an update occurs, it affects the SERPs significantly.

Moreover, as most of these updates are announced before they are implemented, websites that are aware of this information can take timely actions to benefit from the wave and ensure their users find them while browsing the web.

Conclusion

To optimize your SEO, you need to pay attention to some key factors. This page can help you remember them easily. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments section.