Writing a fantastic post for your blog is only half of the battle. If you want people to find your content through search engines like Google, you also need to make sure that it is optimized for SEO (search engine optimisation). The good news is that you do not need to be an expert to make a real difference here. If you follow a simple checklist every single time you publish, you will be able to improve your chances of ranking higher, attract more visitors to your website, and create content that continues to generate traffic for a long time after it has been published.
SEO can seem overwhelming when you’re just getting started with it though. There are countless tools, conflicting advice online, and acronyms that you need to get your head around. But, the fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed. You need to focus on creating helpful content, making it easy for search engines to understand, and providing an overall great experience for readers.
This beginner-friendly SEO checklist walks you through the essential steps to optmise every blog post before and after publishing. So, if you would like to find out more about this, let’s dive right in.
Keyword Research Checklist
Every successful blog post is going to start with you understanding what your audience is looking for. Keyword research helps you to identify topics that people are actively looking up, and allows you to create content that answers the questions that are looking to have answered.
So, before you write your article, you need to ask yourself a few questions:
- What would someone type into Google to find this information?
- How competitive is that keyword?
- What problem does this post solve?
- Is there a specific phrase that has less competition?
For example, targeting broad words like SEO is going to be a nightmare as so many others are doing it. Instead, you want to consider more specific phrases such as blog SEO checklist for beginners (can you see what we did there?), or how to optimise a blog post. These longer search terms are known as long-tail keywords often have less competition, and they end up attracting readers who know what they want to read.
A quick checklist to help you with your keyword research:
- Choose ONE primary keyword
- Find two to five secondary keywords that are related
- Look for common questions that people ask
- Check search intent – this means you need to know if people are looking for information, services, or products
- Review the current top ranking pages for inspiration – do not copy or duplicate
Keep in mind when writing your content that your keywords should be helping you write, not controlling the entire piece. Make sure you’re not stuffing your keyword into every sentence, as Google will pick this up and penalise you for it. All keywords should be incorporated naturally within the content.
URL & Permalink Optimisation
Your URL is one of the first things that search engines and users see. A clean, descriptive permalink makes your content easier to understand, and more likely to be clicked.
You want to make sure that you are keeping URLs short, easy to read, descriptive, and focused on your primary keyword. You should be avoiding unnecessary words, dates, or random numbers unless they are absolutely essential.
Your quick checklist for URL and permalink optimisation:
- Include your target keyword
- Remove filler words where you can
- Do not use underscores
- Keep it around 60 characters
- Don’t change URLs after publishing
Header Structure Best Practices
Headers are not just for formatting. They are helpful both for readers, and to allow search engines to understand your content.
Each page should have a H1 which will be the page title, multiple H2s for major sections, and H3s where organistion is needed further.
Try to think of your headers as though they are chapters in a book, this should help you organise them.
The goal here is to break your text into logical sections that answer specific questions, rather than having one huge block of text that continuously explains different elements. The structure then improves readability while helping search engines to understand your page, helping to determine where it is going to rank.
Your quick checklist for headers:
- Only one H1
- H2s for major topics
- H3s only when needed
- Include keywords naturally where you can
- Make headings descriptive
Image SEO Checklist
Images improve engagement, but they also allow you an opportunity to improve SEO. Before you upload any image you should have taken all of the necessary steps.
Compress It
Large image files slow your website down, which then negatively impacts your rankings. It brings down user experience, causing issues. As such, you should use an image compression tool before you upload it.
Rename The File
When you save an image, it will likely be saved as something like IMG_5739.jpg. You want to rename this to something like blog-writing-description.jpg, or something similar. The descriptive filename helps search engines to understand what the image is.
Add Alt Text
If you’re not aware of what alt text is, it describes the image for visually impaired users and search engines. For example ‘person writing a blog on a laptop’ is a good one. Just make sure you’re not keyword stuffing in your alt text, keep it natural and descriptive.
Choose The Right Format
Generally, you want to stick to these guidelines when it comes to formatting:
- JPEG for photographs
- PNG for graphics that need transparency
- WebP for faster loading where possible
Keep in mind that optimising images improves page performance, which is why this is all so important.
Your quick checklist for image SEO:
- Compress images before you upload them
- Use descriptive file names
- Write helpful alt text
- Resize the image appropriately
- Avoid uploading unnecessarily large files
- Include captions where relevant and needed
Internal Linking Checklist
Internal links connect your blog posts together, which helps your visitors to discover more content while allowing search engines to crawl through your website more efficiently. Every new article should link to relevant existing pages on your website. For example, if you are writing about SEO in a new post, you should be linking to articles that cover areas such as website speed, Google analytics, blogging tips, content marketing, and more.
In the same vein, you should be updating older articles to help drive visitors towards your news content.
Best Practices For Internal Linking
You should make sure you are using descriptive anchor texts and linking naturally within sentences to get the best results. As well as this, you should try to avoid overloading a page with links, as this can end up going against you.
Remember to prioritise useful resources over random placements.
You should also carefully consider how you’re linking. Instead of writing things like ‘click here’, you should be writing something like ‘read out in depth keyword research guide’ as this encourages more engagement. It also helps to provide context for readers, and for search engines.
A strong internal linking strategy is essential to distribute authority throughout your website, helping it gain points with the algorithm.
Your quick checklist for internal linking:
- Add links to relevant blog posts
- Update older posts with links to new articles
- Check regularly for broken internal links
- Link to important service pages where appropriate
- Use descriptive anchor texts
Technical SEO Basics
When you hear the term technical SEO, you might already be panicking. It sounds tricky, it sounds intimidating, and it can overall put people off because they think that they’re not going to be able to get it right. But, beginners only need to understand a few core concepts, so there is no reason for you to start panicking about this, okay? Let’s take it one step at a time.
Mobile Friendliness
Most searches now happen on some sort of mobile device. Your blog should ensure that it displays correctly on phones and tables, without needing to zoom or scroll sideways. This is a problem that a lot of blog owners have, so you need to take the time to ensure that this is not the case with your blog. If you don’t, you will struggle to rank due to a high bounce rate.
Page Speed
Fast loading websites provide a better user experience, and websites with better user experience end up ranking better. You can reduce load times in a range of different ways, including but not limited to:
- Compressing images
- Using quality website hosting
- Enabling browser caching where possible
- Minimising unnecessary plugins
Meta Title
Create an engaging title under around 60 characters that includes your primary keyword. This helps to define what the blog is going to be about without making it too complicated, and adding too many words so as not to put people off before they have even started reading. Make it clear, make it punchy.
Meta Description
It’s true to say that meta descriptions do not actually improve rankings directly, but they do influence click through rates, which do. You want to aim for around 150-160 characters to summarise the article, helping people to understand what it’s about before they take the time to read it.
HTTPS
Your website should use HTTPS rather than HTTP. This keeps data secure, and is considered a ranking signal, so will be a positive for your content.
Schema Markup
This one is actually optional for beginners, as some find it quite tricky to do. Structured data can help search engines better understand your content, and increase your chances of appearing in rich results. This is code added to the website backend that helps search engines and AI systems understand the meaning and context of your content.
Each of these foundations helps search engines to crawl and understand your website more effectively, helping you rank better in the long run.
Your quick checklist for technical SEO:
- Mobile friendly design
- Fast loading pages
- Optimised meta title
- Meta description
- HTTPS enabled
- No broken pages
- Search engines able to index the page
Before You Hit Publish
Before you press that publish button, you want to ensure that you are spending at least five minutes reviewing the article that you have created. You want to ask yourself whether the article fully answers the readers question, whether the content is original, if you’ve included examples, if you’ve made it easy to skim through, and whether someone could understand what you have written without any prior knowledge on the topic.
Each of these is crucial to creating good content, so you need to slow down and make sure that they are all answered before you publish your content.
Once you’ve done this, you should be proofreading your content carefully, making sure that you are checking thoroughly for spelling and any grammar mistakes that you may have made.
Your pre-publishing checklist:
- Primary keyword appears naturally within the content
- Headings are logical and in a good order
- Images have alt text
- Internal links are included for best results
- External links only point to trustworthy sources
- Meta title is written well
- URL is clean and makes sense
- Categories and tags are selected
- At least one featured image is added and optimised
After you have checked all of this, you then want to make sure that you preview your article on your desktop, and then mobile to ensure that everything is being displayed correctly. If it isn’t, take the time to fix anything that isn’t quite right. If it is, you’re all good to go.
Remember, publishing issues are much easier to fix before your readers start seeing the page.
Maintaining Rankings After Publishing
SEO doesn’t just stop because you have published your article and it’s now live on your website. In fact, many people publish a blog post and then don’t ever go back and revisit it, but this is not something that you should be doing. In fact, ongoing optimisation actually offers the biggest gains more often than not. So, how can you do this?
Monitor Performance
Make use of tools such as Google Search Console and analytics software to track different elements. For example, you should be tracking the following things:
- Average position
- Click through rate
- Organic traffic
- Impressions
- Clicks
Each of these insights show you whether your content is performing the way that you expected it to, or whether you need to make some changes to improve.
Refresh Outdated Information
Search engines do not look kindly on articles that contain old, out of date information. Instead, they favour fresh, accurate content. As such, you should review your important articles every six to twelve months, and work to update them to make them more appealing to the search engines, and to users.
You should be updating the following:
- Broken links
- Examples
- Screenshots
- Statistics
- Industry developments that have happened since posting
- Product recommendations
These small updates might not seem like much, but they can dramatically improve your rankings.
Build Backlinks Naturally
We cannot highlight enough how important this one is. When other websites link to the content that you are posting, it signals authority, which you need. As such, you should focus on creating genuinely useful resources that people want to reference, instead of chasing low-quality links. It can take some time to fully understand how to do this, but practice helps, and there are companies that can assist if you need their help.
Don’t Stop Linking Internally
Every time you publish a new article, you should consider whether you are able to link this to an older post in some way. This creates strong links throughout your website, and helps your older content to continue to be seen, helping your ranking.
Think About Republishing
If you have substantially changed and improved an article, then you can update the publication date. This signals to readers that the content has been genuinely refreshed, and now offers more than the previous article did, which is something that readers will enjoy seeing.
Look At Competitors
A common problem that bloggers have is that search results are constantly changing, which means that you need to be on the ball. You need to review the top-ranking pages for your target keywords to ensure that you’re on the right track. You don’t need to obsess over this, but every now and then have a quick look.
Ask yourself the following questions about their content to help guide yours:
- Have they improved the visuals?
- Is their article longer than it was?
- Have they added any new, valuable information?
Keep in mind that SEO is not about getting it all right the first time, it’s about continuously improving over time for the best results.
Wrapping Up
Learning how to use SEO to your advantage doesn’t need any sort of technical or advanced knowledge in the area. You don’t need expensive software, you just need to follow a simple checklist like the one that we have given you above. If you do this every time you create a post, you will develop strong habits that help you to improve every article that you publish moving forward.
