Don’t know where to start when it comes to SEO? Is the thought of SEO putting you off doing it? Take 5 minutes to run through this quick checklist that I have put together after attending a training based around the topic in question.

So, take a look through the following list and check off each as you go.

FIND OUT HOW MANY PAGES GOOGLE HAS FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Simply, type site:yourdomain (with no spaces) into the Google search bar. This brings up results with just your website and restricts any others. Check how many results Google generates. If there are less Google results than website pages, then there is a problem as Google isn’t finding and indexing your pages.

If there is an excess of results than website pages then it is possible that Google is finding worthless pages. If this happens, check the URLs on the results that have popped up to see if there are pages that should not be there. It’s possible that a WordPress plugin may be creating extra pages. In order to solve this problem, you may have to deactivate the plugin.

If either of these happen you must contact the websites developer in order for the problem to be solved.

CHECK SITE DOMAIN

Click on settings. Take the address in the ‘WordPress address’ section and enter it into a new address bar without the www. and make sure that it re-directs you to the www. site.

If it doesn’t redirect, you may have two versions of your website online. This is a problem because Google is allocating less points to your site which therefore creates less visibility. Contact your websites developer if this is happening to your website.

ACTIVATE YOAST PLUGIN

Install the Yoast plugin by clicking on ‘plugins’ on the dashboard. Activate Yoast if it is not already activated.

Yoast allows you to see exactly how your content will look when someone searches for it on Google, it has the ability to get you verified Google Authorship for your website, it will rank your SEO value page by page from Bad, Poor, Ok, and Good, it will also give you recommendations on how to improve from Poor to Good.

For more information visit the Yoast website.

SEO YOUR PAGES

Now that you have Yoast installed you can begin to SEO your pages. In the ‘pages’ tab on the WordPress dashboard, your website pages will be listed.

From here you can SEO each page. WordPress will offer you a helping hand by providing a checklist. This checklist offers instructions for the pages such as readability, if the keywords are mentioned in enough places, if the focus keyword has been used enough, and if the page title is too long or too short. WordPress also provides a traffic light like system showing you if your SEO is poor, good, excellent etc.

It offers you a snippet preview of how your page title and description will look when it pops up in Google results. Your description should be short and to the point as it should not exceed 155 characters. This is so that potential customers can see what your business is offering before clicking into your website. If your whole description doesn’t fit, people may not be interested in clicking in to see more.

Ensure that when you hover the curser over your website tab, that the title tag pops up.

IMPORTANT

Under settings and ‘reading’, ensure that the ‘search engine visibility’ box is not checked. If this box is checked, it can suppress your websites page ranking.

So, there you have it. Following this checklist will have you on the road to higher page rankings in no time.

**More Visitors -> More Leads -> More Sales**