The 20-point SEO checklist for startups

Pratik Dholakiya, a contributor to the SEO checklist for startups reports that the startup should never miss any of the SEO tricks based on the launching of a new site. The checklist below will help you keep on you on track.

Whether you’re honing your onsite SEO post launch or in the process of taking your startup site public, having a checklist is vital since it helps you ensure that you do not miss anything. The SEO Company Toronto have been able to collect about forty factors which we recommend to be incorporated in your checklist and the whole process to ensure that SEO takes the lead of the game. This is mainly a digital marketing company with the famous Toronto SEO experts who assist most of the website design companies in Toronto.

This checklist will have the various SEO factors related to your;

Technical content factors

Site architecture

Mobile factors

These factors are vital for the evaluation of your site.

Content

This entails the putting of processes in place to help make certain that the below issues are taken care of with the various new piece of content put in place for the creation of post-launch and the checking of such points on the site before its launch.

1. Missing titles

A crawler is used for the verification of the content to ensure all pages on your site have title tags.

2. Title length

If using the screaming frog, you should sort the titles by pixel length. This helps in the identification of the length at which your titles are cut off at the SEO search results. Though it is not always important to cut off the title length below the given value, it is important that the info required by the user for the identification of the given subject are shows up on the page before cutoff point. You should also note that regardless of the length of the title, they all should meet the long tail search queries.

3. Title keywords

You should always ensure that the primary keywords of the given content are featured in the title. Avoid repetition of keyword variations in the title tag, consider synonyms if not awkward then place the important keyword closet to the beginning, if not awkward. Keyword use should hardly outdo the significance of an attractive title.

4. Meta descriptions

You should crawl to site to make sure that you know all the missing Meta descriptions. It has always been a misconception that all your pages require a Meta description. This is because at some cases Google’s automated spinning is better, for example most of the pages with a long-tail target. Conversely, there should always be a deliberate choice between the present and the missing Meta data description. You should therefore pinpoint and eliminate any identical Meta descriptions. They are ever bad. Meta descriptions should always have less than one hundred and sixty characters to avoid the cut off. Naturally add key phrases to your Meta descriptions which should show up in bold in snippet. It is important to note that the one hundred and sixty characters generated is only a guideline and both Google and Bing use dynamic, pixel based upper limits on present.

5. H1 headers

You should always ensure that all your pages use H1 as the header tag. This tags should never be duplicate hence there should only be a H1 tag per page. This should have a similar treatment to your title tag with an exception that it does not have the maximum length. In most cases related to blogging, most users prefer having similar or nearly identical title tag and the header. However, cases related to a landing page require the header to be a greeting while the title tag should be a call to action.

6. H2 and other headers

You should always craw your site to ensure that no H2 header is missing. Subheading are not always essential though the pages which lack such have always been the walls of text which most users find hard to parse. Pages with more than three short subsections of text should use H2 tag. This header should always be on the primary subheadings. You can as well verify that H2, H3 and the rest which have been used for additional subheadings.

7. Keywords

Any content without a given official keyword is currently assigned for some applied keyword research.

8. All text

Images which are non-decorative should always ensure that they use alternative text for the identification of the content of the image. Your keywords should naturally identify the image itself and not the other part of the content. The alt-text has always been used as a genuine alternative to the given image, used by browsers as well as the visually impaired users who cannot extract the image. It therefore make sense to any human user. The alt-text is not used for the decorative images such as borders. It only serves as an interface or content.

Site architecture

It is advisable that you get a site architecture handled in the on the launch process. However, these are among the vital considerations which should be taken into account even for the existing sites.

9. Logo links

For every section on your site, as well as the blog should be verified to ensure that the logo appears on the top menu links on the homepage.

10. Navigation anchor text

This should use words for the target keyword phrases. However, they should be short enough for navigation. These text should not be repetitive as well.

11. External links

These are the links to other sites in your navigation which the search engines can interpret them as a spam signal.

12. Orphan pages

You should cross reference your crawl data to ensure that such pages are not available. These are the various URLs which cannot be reached from any links on your site. Such pages may also be interpreted as spam.

13. Subfolders

The subfolders follow a given logical hierarchy to match the navigation hierarchy in your site. They should never contrast in any subcategory or category.

14. Link depth

The most vital pages in your site should be reachable from your site and not more than two levels deep.

15. Hierarchy

Regardless of the size, your site should not have flat architecture. The main categories in your site should be reachable from your homepage with the subsequent categories reachable from the category pages then the subcategory and so on.

16. No JavaScript pagination

Each piece of your content should contain an individual URL. The user should navigate to another page in your site by changing the URL. This helps the user to directly link any useful page.

17. URL variables

Variables like ?sort=ascending should not be attached to the URL indexed in SEO since they lead to the creation of duplicate content.

18. Contextual linking

Google editorial links mostly embed in context count as compared to the links within navigation. External links within the main body of you site is vital especially for editorial and blog content.

Mobile

Almost each modern start should entail a bat with infrastructure and a mobile friendly interface. You should therefore check for the implementation the following;

19. Google-mobile friendly test

You should run this for the identification of issues specifically found by google based on the user experience on your site.

20. Responsive navigation

You be able to verify that the drop-down menu is functional on any mobile device with the right text width for visibility and attraction of the user.

Conclusion

As vital as personalized and innovation strategy are to effective launch, if you do not take care of the basics for the foundation process, it is easy to do away with what we have attested to work best as well as chase the SEO trends. As you follow up the SEO work and develop the startup launch, this checklist will be vital in the building of the process.