SEO Tools - On-Page SEO Checklist

This on-page SEO checklist is one of the handy SEO tools you should use as a resource whenever you are creating any content for your website or articles. Bookmark it now so you can come back to it at any time.

Your website optimization is even more important since the Google Panda update to ensure you have quality content that will score well in the new page ranking algorithm. You may know that Google scrapped a huge number of websites and web pages that they deemed poor quality. If you have any pages or posts on your site that may have fallen under the axe, you should either take steps to improve that page’s quality or get rid of the offending page altogether as it can effect the overall performance of your website.

I have created this checklist for you so it will be easy for you to make sure you have all the elements in place to get your website ranking well in the search engines. Use this to optimize every page of your site. Even though this is second nature to me, I still keep this handy when I am writing posts and articles as a reminder in case I happen to forget something important. Even the little things can have an impact on how well a page does.

SEO Tools – On-Page SEO Checklist

Choosing your Title and URL

Keyword at the beginning of the title
Keyword in the URL or blog permalink
Title is no longer than 66 characters
Title contains more than 3 words

Creating Meta Tags

Your description begins with your keyword
The length of the description is no more than 160 characters and no less than 150 characters
You have between 5-8 content relevant meta keywords per page specific to that page’s topic. Avoid using the same keywords for every page.
The meta keywords contain your focus keyword

Key elements for optimizing the page content

Keyword at the beginning of your H1 tag (most blogs will create an H1 tag by default from the title)
Keyword at the beginning of an H2 tag (create a subtitle somewhere in the content for this)
Include an image with the keyword in the file name and the ALT tag and title
The content must be a minimum of 300 words. (400-500 is even better)
Your keyword density should be at least 2% but no more than 4-5%
The keyword should appear in the first sentence of your content.
You should include at least one outbound link to a credible source (anchor text)
Include at least one, but no more than three, anchor text internal links to related pages within your content
You should use related keywords within your content. You can get a list of related keywords using the free Google Keyword Tool
Use your keyword in the last sentence of your content
Grammar and spelling is important to a site’s readability score so do be sure your content is reader friendly