Basic SEO Checklist
Search engine optimization, or more popularly known as SEO, is a set of techniques that allows your website to become more easily found on the web using search engines. Yes, it can be complicated. However, it does not need to be that way.
In case you are unfamiliar with SEO but you want to experience its full benefits, you can just perform the basic techniques. And we assure you, those things will quickly make a difference. For your benefit, here is a checklist of those easy and basic SEO techniques.
Connect Your Site to Search Engines
The first and easiest step in SEO is connecting your site to search engines. By the way, you do not need to connect it to every search engines on the web. Connecting to Google and Bing (now partnered with Yahoo!) is enough.
To do just this step, go to Google Analytics and Google Search Console if you want to connect to Google first. Just login with your Gmail or Google account, and follow the steps that will be provided to you. On the other hand, if you are going for Bing, go to Bing Webmaster Tools.
What is the benefit of doing this step? Aside from making those top two search engines prioritize your site for indexing, you will be able to analyze reports regarding your site’s status in those search engines. It will not be elaborated for now, but this is your first crucial step in SEO and most of the time, all your SEO effort will revolve around these webmaster tools.
Using an SEO Oriented CMS
If this will be the first time that you will be creating a website, we recommend that you use a CMS or Content Management System. A good example of CMS is WordPress. With a CMS, you can easily create, update, and manage a website.
Fortunately, most CMS that you can find on the web are SEO oriented. It means that SEO related code is already embedded on the website that you will create with them. On the other hand, some CMS will allow you to add plugins that can help you with SEO. And the good part about that is that most of them can be used free of charge.
Managing Content Word Count
It is advisable that you keep your content’s word count to 100 up to 900 words per page. Having pages with 100 words below can be marked as thin content and might hurt your site’s SEO. On the other hand, if you go over 900 or 1,000 words per page, your page can be marked as long content. That is not bad per se. However, your pages will indexed and categorized on the long content category, which is not always presented in the search engine results page.