Free search engine traffic is an amazing thing. It can grow your targeted traffic, bring you new subscribers and, best of all, increase your sales. But the thing is, you have to work at it. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, bookmark this practical SEO checklist to steadily grow traffic.

For Your Off-Page SEO

These are things that will affect your search engine rankings from outside of your web page. These are very important for growing the overall popularity of your site and make it easier for you to rank well for your chosen keyword phrases.

• Create excellent content because it affects the following:

• How much your content is shared on social media…this provides important clues to search engines about the quality of your content.

• How long a search engine user stays on your site. If searches on a search engine and finds your site, but clicks back right away, it will tell the search engine that you may not be very relevant for that phrase.

• How often your content is linked to. If you have good stuff, people will link to it…but beware, search engines can detect quality links.

• Ways to ensure you’ve got quality engaging content that attracts users and search engines:

• Each page should be on one unique topic.

• Your navigation is clear and all your content is easily found by humans and search engines.

• Use attention-getting headlines to grab your visitors’ attention and so they know they’re in the right place.

• Make your content easy to read by using short sentences and paragraphs. Keep your words simple.

• Break up your copy with subheads and bullet points, so viewers can scan it easily…instead of having them click away.  

• Use images to draw the eye in and tell a story with your content. Humans are visual creatures and photos and other images can help retain their attention. If you need help with this check our free opt-in offer on the side bar.

• Don’t forget to connect with other website owners in your niche. Friends tend to share the content of others, so this is just a win-win for all of you.

For Your On-Page SEO

In addition to the big overall picture of creating great content that makes its way around the web, there things you can do on each page you post to your website. Here is a list of quite a few things that can affect your rankings, but remember…don’t overdo it. Keep your optimization natural and make sure it makes sense. Otherwise you might alienate your visitors and search engines can sniff out attempts to game the system.

• Some experts recommend you make sure your content is at least 300 words long. I would actually increase that to at least 500 words. People like meaty content.

• Conduct keyword research to find a highly targeted phrase that gets decent traffic, but doesn’t have too much competition. Try a tool like WordTracker.com.

• Use your keyword phrase in the title of your post and in the title tag, but make sure it will be appealing to website visitors.

• Use your keyword phrase in the description tag for your post. Make sure the description not only includes the keyword phrase, but is interesting enough to make people want to click.

• Incorporate the keyword phrase into the URL of your page. For example: fun-family-vacations.html

•  Add the keyword phrase and other useful description to your images with the use of ALT tags.

• Employ the use of H2 and H3 tags. They make your content easier to scan and are also a good place to include your keyword phrase and variations of it.

• Include the keyword phrase and variations of it in a few places in the body of your content. Try to include it in the first paragraph as well.

• Show you are a hub of useful information and link out to a related page on another website.

I hope you found this practical SEO checklist handy. Remember to keep track of your rankings and tweak things as you go along. Just remember, it can take a bit of time before search engines update their listings, so give your changes time to come into effect.

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