1. Post Content

Is the information being adding to the site relevent? Is it a site about gardening but you’re writing about car tires and mufflers?

Are the keywords being used? Is there a focus on the target geographic area?

Have you applied some bold attributes to some of the keywords inside of your paragraphs?

Are your anchor links being sent to a proper, working, relevent page? (When using full urls links should always have “http://” in front of the address in order to work)

Overall Word Count

The amount of words you have on a Web page will vary by topic, keyword and intent. But, in general, less than 250 words is rarely recommended – especially if you’re trying to optimize for keywords. Informational Web pages will almost always warrant at least 450 words.

Quality content is key!

Answer questions, provide solutions, give tips or advice, add product reviews (it doesn’t have to be a new solution… it can be spun or added to)

If your content is compelling people will link to it, and if people don’t link to the post there are certain sites that will.

For example, I added a post to the PRM site explaining how to sync a godaddy email with a personal gmail account.

The article was added 10/1/2013 and has received 18 backlinks because it holds value. Most of the links are added to sites like Askives.com but it’s still a Pagerank 4 site.

2.  Does your Post have Header Tags?

In the body of your content, make sure your first Heading tag always begins as an <h1>. Subsequent heading tags should be <h2>, <h3>, <h4> etc., and be used as the page’s table of contents. For example, <h2> is a subhead of <h1>.

The headers tags should always include keywords –

H1 Tag – Main Keywords

The “Header 1 tag” is the most important and will be the title of the page/post. Typically when you’re using a WordPress site you won’t need to add this, the site will use the title of the page as the Header 1 tag.

H2 Tag – Keyword + Geographic Keyword

The “Header 2 tag” is also very important, this is where you would add a main keyword along with your target geographic area. Example – “Service X Scranton”

H3, H4, etc. Tags – Keword

The other header tags are not as important as the H1 & H2 but if a post is long enough the h3 tag should be used, if the post isn’t long enough don’t try to squeeze it on to the post.

3.  Are you using a unique title for this post?

 

Google looks for a page title for every page it indexes.  The title is really important for Google but a lot of times we don’t create titles, have ones that are not optimized or we have duplicate titles.

Each title needs to be unique and describe what the page is about. Title tags should be approx. nine words, plus or minus three. You want to make sure the most important information, including top keywords, show up before the cutoff in the SERP in Google at approximately 70 characters including spaces.

*If a title is longer then 70 charactors it’s fine, just make sure your main keywords aren’t being cutoff.

4.  Are You Using a Unique Descriptions For This Post?

 

In the image above we have highlighted the page titles.  Directly under the titles is the description.  When someone searches and finds you on Google they are likely to read the description before clicking.

Action: The description tag should also be mindful to include the most important info and  keywords before the SERP cutoff at approximately 160 characters in Google. Same as the title tag just make sure your main keywords aren’t being cutoff.

5.  Are you using keyword rich permalinks / page names?

 

When you look at the page names for each of your posts it should contain relevant keywords.  This also helps Google rank your page correctly.

The blog post title and page title are different

 More information regarding page names and how they can help a sites SEO

*Dashes vs. Underscores in URLs

Underscores are alpha characters and aren’t used to separate words.

Dashes are word separators, but should not appear too many times or it could look spammy.

For more on this topic, check out this post by Google’s Matt Cutts.

6. Did you add a Featured Image to the post?

All of the sites are setup so when a new post is added a featured image is needed to maintain the balance of the page. Basically, if you don’t add a featured image the site will start to look sloppy.

But beyond the aesthetics of the site images can generate a TON of traffic from image-based search engines and when you are adding quality images you can pick up backlinks. Sites will use your image and give you credit for the image.

>>See here>> – Classic example of using a quality image to pick up a backlink from a high page ranked site.

7.  Did you tag your images correctly?

When you upload your images you need to create:

a). *Alt Tag – This is what Google uses for indexing (*Most important)

i). Name – Name your image with a good relevant description

ii). Title – Give you image a title which appears when someone hovers over your image with a mouse.

The American with Disabilities Act says you should always describe the image on the page for the vision impaired. Ensure your images have proper descriptions associated with them, and if appropriate, keywords for the page. Alt attributes are also required to validate your HTML code. ALT tags do have an impact on your sites SEO.

Action – Read this post on how to optimize images.

8. Add Your New Post to the Site Map

 

The sitemap will tell the search engines what they want crawled as well as the priority or “hierarchy” of the site content. It also tell bots when the page was last updated.

Usually it will update automatic but it’s always good to do it manually every once in a while to make sure it is being updated.
Click on “Rebuild the Sitemap” manaully link.