Your Basic Search Engine Optimization Checklist
Apr 28, 2025
Search Engine Optimization can be so overwhelming for business operators! There are so many opinions on how to get a competitive advantage over the competition, but sometimes these opinions can even conflict with each other. Another challenge is that the rules seem to be constantly changing! The goal for this article is simple: to give you a simple checklist of getting the basics right, building a strong foundation. Having good on-page SEO doesn’t guarantee that your website will rank in the top 3 results on Google, but you also won’t get there without it. On-page SEO just means that you have certain things properly optimized on each individual page of your website. Here’s a comprehensive list of the major items you need to have in place:
- A page title that includes the targeted keyword or keyphrase for that page. If you need help, your developer can change this for you. But you will need to do some research to make sure you try to rank for the right keyword. For example, an attorney located in Atlanta, GA has a page specifically for personal injury on his website. His page title could be “Best Personal Injury Attorney in Atlanta, GA”.
- Write a meta description with the related keyword in it. Your website developer can also help you with this! The meta description is what shows up in Google rankings underneath the title.
- Page headers that include the keyword. This is the actual content on the page. The page title for this article is “Your basic search engine optimization checklist”. One important point here is that it needs to be an <H1> tag in the HTML that makes up the page. Just because something looks larger and has a different color does not mean it is a header by Google’s standards.
- Use clear page structure. This just means breaking your content up into bite size pieces. Use things like subheadings, bullet points, and multiple paragraphs. The goal here is to make the article readable for the end user.
There is a lot more than just these few bullet points to good SEO, but this covers the basics for on-page best practices. If you’re interested in moving forward with an SEO audit, let’s get the conversation started by having a free consultation call. We would love to speak with you about your SEO initiatives!