SEO Checklist: Top Actionable Tips To Success in 2017

Last year, RankBrain, Semantic search, AMP as well as Mobile SEO are few of the most effective strategies for businesses. In fact, Panda and Penguin algorithm updates become more smarter instead, the key factor to success. 

To assist you in competing with the world, and polish your SEO learnings, 10seos has brought the list of top SEO strategies, that you must emphasize upon right NOW!

Table of Content 

Phase- I. Let People Discover you

Phase- II. Mastering the basics of Panda Updates

Phase- III. Learn about Penguin skills

Phase- IV. Offer Great User Experience

Phase- V. Ensure Mobile friendliness

Phase- VI. Implement AMP effectively

Phase- VII. Follow right practices to earn social signals

Phase- VIII. Make revision of your Local SEO strategy

Phase- I. Let People Discover you

It follows the simple rule- Search Engine will never provide higher ranking unless they could locate you! Therefore, this has to be your top most priority to make sure that search engines find it great ease to locate your website and the content present on it. The most important thing is, they can find your content on the website easily, and quickly as well.

Check out how you can make your content available to the search engines in easy ways:

1.Make sure to keep the logical site structure

Implement the best practices, such as:

• Make sure search engines, could reach the essential pages of your website, through homepage itself

• Web pages must be structured in tree-like structure, logically

• URLs of your web page should reflect the structure of your website.

• Make sure to link important pages internally

• Provide easy navigation through breadcrumbs

• Insert a search box on your site to ensure your visitors get everything they are looking for

 Remove all the bad practises from your site, such as:

• Remove all those pages, which are not accessible through navigation or ordinary links.

• Do not include endless number of drop-down menu, which shows unlimited web pages on a single navigational block

• Do not link every page to your homepage

Check out the best illustration of the logical site structure:

Illustration to show a clean structure of URL:

• www.example.com/product-category-i/item-1

• www.example.com/product-category-ii/item-2

 2.Use XML sitemap And RSS feed as well

XML sitemaps facilitate the web spiders to search for your website and content present on our site and index. To know the situation better, think of a situation, that how difficult it would become, if a new tourist wants to go and discover a new place, without the help of a map

RSS or Atom feed, are the easiest way to allow - notify the search engine, that your website includes the fresh and original content. In fact, RSS feed is usually viewed even by the journalist and many people, who want to get any updated information about specific thing from any particular source.

Google optimization can also be achieved easily using the RSS or Atom feed and XML sitemap to crawl the website easily and effectively. XML sitemaps facilitate Google to provide each information, present on the website in a one run. RSS or Atom feed allows Google to fetch the most updated information, present on the site so that the content of the site could be kept fresh. 

Check out the best practices to make your site optimize effectively:
 

• Make sure to include the canonical version of URLs on your sitemaps and feed. 

• Update the modification time of a site, while updating the sitemap, if substantial changes have implemented on it. 

• If your existing sitemap already reached the limit, make sure to add one more sitemap, if you have multiple sitemaps.

• Allow your visitors to find the latest updated content easily on your site, through RSS atoms. 

 Remove all the bad practises from your site, such as:

• Remove the non-canonical URL from your sitemaps which are the duplicate ones.
• Eliminate the robots of the search engine, present on the sitemaps or feed, since they disrupt the web spiders to index any site effectively.

 3. Protect the Schema markup 

Schema markup basically helps to tag the entities, such as people, place, events and so on, in the content present on your web page. Although, this does not allow search engines to rank higher in search results, but helps them to interpret your content in an easy and efficient way. 

 Check out the best practices to use schema markup for the content present on your site:

• Make sure that you review the schemes which are already available on your site, and choose the schema which you can apply it to your content.

• You might find it challenging to edit the code. Therefore, Structured Data Markup Helper of Google could help you in a better way.

• The structured data testing tool of Google could help you to test the markup. 

 4. Provide rich answer

Usually, a rich answer to the people is the snippet, which already includes the answer to a specific query in a brief manner. It has been shown above the organic search result, and thus, involves more chances of exposure. 

Google provides a fair opportunity to each website to provide its answer on the rich answer section. Check out the best tips to avail the opportunity, and make your website appear on the rich answer section:

• Search for a simple question that your website includes the answer.

• Offer the precise and concise answer to the question

• Make sure to include extra supporting information, by incorporating gifts images, videos, charts and so on.

Phase- II. Mastering the basics of Panda Updates

Panda algorithm of Google is basically a procedure to provide a ranking to a website which aims to strain out those websites which include the thin or low-quality content.

In 2016, Gary Illyes make an announcement that Panda will be considered as a core algorithm to rank the website on search engine result pages. But the worst thing is that you can't determine that the ranking of your website is fluctuating due to the Panda update or any other factor!

 1. Improve the quality of your content

The content quality is still one of the major factors which determine the ranking of a website. Therefore it is necessary to implement only the good practices and avoid all such bad practices that might harm the ranking.

Check out the best tips to implement good practices to obtain high-quality content on your website:

• Make sure to build a useful and expert level content, which users find engaging and interesting as well.

• Ensure that your website offers a decent image to the users.

• Do to look for the length of the content, since there is no standard limit. Include all the necessary words which cover the topic and provide the most relevant answers to the user.

• Ensure that your content is free from any spam, and have to be user generated so that they find it useful. 

• Block all the least important pages from indexing

Make sure that you avoid all the bad practices, which could shatter the ranking, because of the low-quality content, such as:

• Do not include the duplicate content, or are write it on your site.

• Never ever write a similar content. Always provide a unique and original content to users.

 2. Make the canonicalization right

Canonicalization is one of the best ways to let the search engines know that how and which web page must be treated as the most standard one when various URLs provides the same content to the users.

The main aim of providing such service is to avoid the duplication of the content present on your website. However, it does not affect the ranking factor but makes your site looks more like messed up. 

Check out the best practices to carry out while canonicalize your content:

• Make sure to include the rel= “canonical” attribute on your site to mark the canonical page.

• Insert the  rel= “canonical” attribute in <head> section or HTTP header.\

• If it does not return to 404 status code,  that means your canonical page is live.

• It is not restricted from indexing through a robots.txt file. 

 Phase- III. Learn about Penguin skills

The Penguin update of Google was launched by keeping in mind to penalize those websites which are using the unnatural ways of getting the backlinks on their site.Soon, Penguin algorithm becomes the key element to rank a website and demonstrates those sites which include the bad link on their site. Make sure to keep the backlink profile of your website looks natural.

 Check out the best practices to implement on your website, to gain higher ranking:

• Include the editorial backlinks on your website, which is earned by quoting or sharing the content. 

• Anchor texts backlinks are the best to ensure higher ranking

• Remove all the low quality or spam backlinks from your website.

 Eliminate all the bad practices, that could harm the ranking of your website, such as:

• Do not participate in the link networks

• Never allow links from irrelevant pages.

 Phase- IV. Offer Great User Experience

From past few years, few of the UX- based metrics have provided a great way to boost up the ranking and fits well for Google algorithms, such as the speed of a web page, mobile friendliness, and HTTPs etc. Therefore, improving the user experience is the best way to boost the ranking of your website on search engines.

 1. Increase the speed of your site

There are few of the important factors which could help your website to load rapidly. According to the studies, the most common mistakes which people make is to ignore the page load time of a website. The page load time is increased due to various factors, such as: using large images, high videos, high volume multimedia, and huge designed elements which make the site loads slowly. 

Though, you can also use online tools, to test the speed of a website, such as, PageSpeed Insight, which also provides suggestion to improve the structure and ways to boost the speed of a site. 

 2. Higher user engagement and click through rates

The major search engines have accepted the fact that they consider clicking through rates as well as the behavior of the users to rank the website on top search results. Therefore, it is essential for every website to take these two factors on top most priorities to achieve a higher position.

 3. Make your site includes HTTPs protocols 

In the year 2014, the Google makes a major announcement, that it will treat HTTPs as one of the most effective ways to achieve a higher ranking. 

Presently, there is no such evidence that the websites which include the HTTPs protocol will outrank the ones which are not so secure. The reason being is:

• Many web pages does not include the sensitive information to transfer 

• Http and Https could also shatter the ranking of your website, if not performed correctly.

 4. Get ready for HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is the latest protocol for network and soon is going to replace the outdated HTTP/1.1. HTTP/2 . according to the best SEO strategies, any website could achieve higher ranking on a search engine because of the high speed of the website.

Phase- V. Ensure Mobile friendliness

The mobile searches are increasing tremendously, from past few years. In fact, the number continues to rise widely. The most awaited thing has now begun. Google allows those websites which offer mobile responsiveness to be indexed first. It implies that the algorithm of Google will use the mobile search version to rank the web pages, based on the context of their page. 

However, it does not mean that it will not at all rank those sites which do not show the mobile version. Though, if you don't provide users with the mobile unfriendliness, the ranking of your site will be hurt. 

Check out best practices to ensure mobile-friendliness of the site:

• Make sure to include the responsiveness of your design.

• The content on your page could be viewed even without zooming the web page.

• Provide easy to tap navigation as well as links to web pages.

Never include the bad practices, ever, such as:

• Don't use non-mobile friendly techniques on your site, such as Flash.

Phase- VI. Implement AMP effectively

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new feature launched by Google to create the better web, which also supports mobile friendliness, by launching the new standard and set of policies to create the better web content for mobile devices. 

Basically, these kinds of standards are built to offer simple as well as a light version of HTML. web pages which are created by including the AMP are loaded super fast on every mobile device. 

According to the survey, studies revealed the fact that, 

• AMPs are four times faster and consume 10 times fewer data as compared with that of non-AMP pages.

• If talking about an average figure, AMP pages take even less than a second to load the entire web page.

• More than 90% of the AMP publisher experience high click-through rates.

• More than 80% AMP publisher provides high ad view rates.

The AMP pages provide the best ways to start the newbies, especially those who wants to try out the latest technologies.

AMP provides a validated format. But make sure that it passes the validation because if your web page does not meet the requirement properly, Google is less likely to serve such kind of pages. 

Phase- VII. Follow right practices to earn social signals

Search engines are likely to rank those sites which have the strong social media presence. Your social media presence could help you to bring more traffic on your website, through an organic search result. Though, Google has not revealed it clearly but provides a hint that social post is more likely to provide more traffic and thus, higher ranking.

Check out the best practices to use social media to increase your online visibility:

• Make sure to attract social links and more shares, by providing users with the viral content.

• Make your content shareable easily. Do remember to include the buttons on each page, which allows sharing the content on each social media platform. 

Make sure that you avoid the bad practices, which could shatter the ranking of your website on a search engine, such as:

• If you are spending money on purchasing the likes or shares, then do remember, that you are not investing the money, but wasting it. Social networks, as well as search engines, could detect accounts easily, which was created to trade the social signals. 

Phase- VIII. Make revision of your Local SEO strategy

Remembering the year 2015, Google has reduced results, earlier it was 7, now it's being 3 only.  Also, rakIt has removed the address and phone number as well. In fact, the search engines also made it challenging for the SEOs to achieve the local pack. 

The worst happens, when Google has begun to show up the ads in 2016, as the top results in the local search list. 

In 2017, the competition has become even more tough rank your website on local result. 

 Check out the best practices to use Local SEO to increase your online visibility:

• Ensure that the website also includes the business name, address as well as phone number and should be consistent all over the web. 

• Make sure to optimised the Google my business listing

• Make practices to attain positive reviews and citations across the web. 

 Make sure that you avoid the bad practices, which could shatter the ranking of your website on the search engine, such as:

• Never use the fake address to show your business.

• Don't make the reports for violation of Google my business location.