Do you want to enjoy more organic traffic to your website? This on-page SEO checklist for 2023 can assist you to rank well on search engines like Google and Bing.
This is the most comprehensive on-page SEO checklist available on the internet.
The best part?
Following this most updated checklist helped us increase our client's blog traffic to over 200K organic visitors per month.
It can be used for blogs, portfolio sites, ecommerce stores, local businesses, affiliate sites, or anything.
On-page SEO has the potential to drive a flood of unique organic visitors(and potential customers) to your website.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is always changing, and on-page SEO will always be an important part of your SEO performance.
In this article, we'll discuss the exact step-by-step on-page SEO checklist we use to fine tune our own and our clients' websites.
So let’s get started …
How to Use this On-Page SEO checklist
Most people do not understand SEO is an ongoing step-by-step process. They simply follow some random SEO tips and feel like SEO is complete once optimization is done.
That’s not the thing. To succeed in SEO, you need a long-term SEO plan.
For this reason, we've outlined the on-page SEO strategies in such a way that you'll know exactly what to do now and what to do consistently in order to take your SEO to the next level.
On-Page SEO Checklist For 2023
Creating and publishing your site is never enough; you need to optimize it for search engines like Google and Bing in order to rank and attract potential customers.
In this on-page SEO checklist, you'll learn everything you need to know about on-page SEO in 2023. This will increase your search traffic, grow your business, and make off-page SEO much easier for you.
So the most important on-page ranking factors includes:
1. H Tags + Meta Description
One of the most important on-page SEO factors is the title. Your title tags are one of the things web crawlers look at first in your site to figure out the intent of your page in regards to a search query.
Make your titles unique and attractive and wrap up with H tags. It should also be to-the-point, brief, and sum up the essence of your page. Plus, make sure to add your primary keyword in your Title to make it more comfortable for search engine crawlers.
Page meta descriptions should be between 155 and 160 characters long. This is the ideal length to ensure that the circles do not trim any of the description. Make sure you're not overusing keywords to make it more concise and appealing.
2. URL Optimization
The page URL is the internet address of a web page. It's one of the most important on-page SEO factors.
We suggest you to avoid using special characters in your URL and to keep it short (around 4-5 words). Your focus keyword must be included in your URL, making it much easier for crawlers to understand what your page is about. The shorter and precise the URL structure of your content, the more appealing it is to search engines.
Overall, both long and short, keyword-rich, basic URLs perform well in search engine results pages (SERPs), particularly when the content is useful and valuable for users.
3. Proper Keyword Optimization
This step requires you to perform a comprehensive keyword research and optimize each of your web pages. Make sure to sprinkle your target keywords throughout your content wherever it fits naturally.
The best practice is to include your main focus keywords in the title, page URL, meta descriptions, H tags, and the first 100 words of your content.
Putting your target keywords on those vital on-page factors will assist Google bots to quickly understand the core topic of your web page. Your keywords should be used 1-2 times per hundred words. The goal is to place keywords as naturally as possible.
Many SEO beginners make the mistake of "keyword stuffing" when improving their on-page SEO.
Keyword stuffing is when you use the same keywords repeatedly for the sole purpose of attracting crawlers attention rather than providing value.
When you stuff keywords in your content, your ranking in search engines can suffer and your readers/visitors will feel spammy when browsing your content.
You can use our free keyword generator tool to generate to get a most accurate list of long tail keywords that you should follow.
4. User Experience (UX)
Page speed is one of the most important UX factors. You should improve your page loading speed because it benefits both your site SEO and conversions.
You should make sure to have a pleasant experience while browsing your site. A variety of factors influence a pleasant user experience:
- Making your site easily navigable
- Making content easy to understand
- Responsive design
- Page loading speed
- Having no broken links
Optimizing your user experience to improve your SEO performance is a process that you should always be on top of. Google's algorithm is regularly evolving, and failing to optimize your site on a regular basis can harm your site’s ranking.
5. LSI Keyword Optimization
LSI keywords, or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords, are synonyms or phrases that are semantically related to your main focus keyword.
Incorporating LSI keywords into your content improves the contextuality of your content, likely to result in better ranking, traffic, and content relevance.
6. Image Optimization
Images aren't just used for good web design. Image ALT tags help search engines crawlers to understand the images on your page in a more accurate way. It helps your page's overall ranking in SERPs.
Because crawlers cannot visually identify every image, it is critical to assist them by adding alt text tags to your images. Alt text is the text that shows up on your page when an image fails to load properly. It is used to describe the image and its relevance to your content. Search engine crawlers use this text to accurately index your image.
Always use high-quality relevant images and make sure to compress the images before posting them to your website.
7. Video Optimization
You can add videos to your page in addition to images. Videos are without a wonder the most effective content marketing tool in your arsenal. Including videos in your content will engage your visitors and increase the dwell time on your page.
You should always use a video hosting platform like YouTube instead of uploading videos directly to your website. As a result, you will be able to keep your page loading speed high, while you will also be able to optimize your site by using video SEO.
The most effective video optimization strategies include Title optimization, description optimization, adding subtitles and also making sure your video is of high quality and relevant to your main content.
8. Internal Linking & External Linking
Internal links are hyperlinks in your content that lead to other pages or articles on your own website.
External Links are hyperlinks that point to any domain other than the one on which the link is located. In simple words, an external link to your site is when another website links to you. Similarly, if you link to another website, this is regarded as an external link for that particular website.
Adding internal links on your page will increase dwell time on your website. Interlinking internal pages is also an important step to improve the crawlability of your site.
External links, on the other hand, help crawlers in better understanding your content. When you link to websites with high domain authority (DA) that are related to your topic, you increase the credibility of your page.
When adding external links or outbound links, you should always attach high quality links to trusted authority sites in your niche. Use relevant anchor text and keep the dofollow and nofollow tags in mind. Additionally, make sure it opens in a new tab so that your website remains open while they visit your external links.
9. Broken Links Optimization
Always double-check that your internal and external links are working properly.
You don't need to check each and every link on your pages to see if there's a broken link, just use our free broken link checker tool to determine if there's a gap.
Broken links harm SEO indirectly by affecting bounce rate, dwell time, and how link juice is passed. Broken links can also have a direct impact on SEO rankings by signaling that your website is old and out of date.
10. Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization means that you have multiple blog posts or articles on your site that are targeted to rank for the same target keyword.
When this occurs, search engine crawlers become confused about which page is more important. As a result, neither of your web pages will be ranked. So always use one target keyword per page.
11. Use Schema Markup
Schema organizes the structure of your SEO snippet so that search engines can understand the value of your web page in a more effective way. Using structured data schema markup can also help your search result stand out from the crowd.
Schema markup is basically a code that describes the elements on your website in a language that is easy to understand for search engine crawlers. This allows search engines bots to provide users with more relevant results.
An example of Schema markup is the star ratings you see in search results when you search for hotels or restaurants near you. Adding such Schema markup will help increase your page’s CTR and end up improving your overall SE ranking.
There are more than 30 types of schema that you can implement based upon the relevance to your web pages.
12. Create Great Content
According to SEMrush, long-form quality content with more than 3000 words receives more organic traffic, more shares, and more backlinks. As a result, it boosts your page's authority and ranking in SERPs.
Your content must be of high quality, unique, and relevant. The information you propagate should be relevant to your target keyword.
Your content should be simple to understand. It doesn't have to be riddled with hifi buzzwords that only industry professionals will understand.
It's also a good idea to focus on evergreen content that will be useful and relevant for a long time. As a result, your content won't get outdated soon and will continue to generate results for quite a long period of time.
13. Voice Search Optimization
The process of optimizing your pages to appear in voice searches is known as voice search optimization. When you optimize for voice search, you are optimizing for the way people search verbally.
A core Voice SEO strategy includes optimizing content for conversational queries using NLP procedures, having a GMB profile, using PAA strategy and adhering to the basic SEO principles.
14. Page Loading Speed
Page load speed is super important for SEO. If your page takes too long to load, visitors may become grumpy and leave your site without any further interaction. In turn, this can destroy all of your SEO optimization efforts.
According to Google, Page Speed is one of the top 5 ranking factors. So make sure to optimize your site speed as much as you can.
You can use tools like GTmetrix or our Page Speed Checker to check your site’s loading speed and to determine the gaps that can be improved to optimize your site loading speed.
15. Mobile Responsiveness
Google started penalizing sites that aren't mobile friendly in 2015.
Mobile devices are the majority of devices used to browse websites, so you need to make sure that your mobile site can be read and navigated. If not, users will leave your website, which will lower your search engine rankings.
16. Crawlability & Indexiblity
The most basic aspect of on-page SEO is making your page crawlable. If your webpage is not indexable, it won’t rank on search engines. And it can't be indexed if it can't be crawled. If your website appears on the SERP, it has been indexed. However, blog posts or other pages can become subtly unindexed for some reasons. So you should always make sure your pages are crawlable and indexable for search engine bots.
Of course, you can prevent crawlers from crawling and indexing your webpages. You can easily do this by leveraging Robots.txt. You can also use tools like Google Search Console, Best SEO Tool or Screaming Frog to determine whether you have pages with a "no index" tag that should be indexed.
Final Thoughts
So now you know the step-by-step on-page SEO checklist.
Now your task is to write down all of the above on page checklist points and open our free SEO Audit tool, paste your site URL, and check your SEO performance along with some tips to improve your on-page SEO strategy.
Feel free to comment below what you think!
I’d love to talk to you.
