On-Page SEO Checklist | Top 40 Points for WordPress Blog

On-Page SEO is one of the most important parts of your website to make it search engine friendly and get huge traffic from search engines. So you must understand how you will optimize your website to make your site search engines friendly and get massive traffic from search engines. We know that, WordPress is one of the most important CMS because of its several features. SEO friendly is one of the most popular and attractive feature of WordPress CMS. So people love to use WordPress CMS to build their personal or professional website or blog.

So in this post, I’m going to share some important On-Page SEO Checklist. Here are the top 40 points, that’s you must consider for a WordPress blog. Using this On-Page SEO Checklist, you can optimize your WordPress site/blog for search engines and brings more traffic to your blog easily and quickly. So let’s check the list now and take proper step for your WP blog now.

On-Page SEO Checklist

1. Have You Install an SEO Friendly WordPress Theme?

To build a website or professional blog with WordPress, at first you must choose an SEO friendly WordPress Theme. When you are planning to build a blog with WordPress, you may search for a free WordPress theme because most of the newbie bloggers haven’t enough to buy a premium WordPress Theme. But the problem is that, free themes are not optimized for SEO and can harm your site ranking. So you must go for a premium theme.

Here is a solution for you. You can buy any Premium WordPress Theme for Professional blog or any website with 50% Discount from MyThemeShop.

2. Have You Set Your Blog URL?

When you install WordPress first time on your blog, you must set a default URL for your blog with WWW or without WWW. Although there is no major difference in with and without WWW, but you must set the URL and use this everywhere, such as during verifying Google or Bing Webmaster tool. Remember that, you can’t change the default URL frequently, because it may hurt your SEO ranking.

3. Have You Set Search Engine Friendly Permalink?

URL optimization is one of the most important parts of on-page SEO. You should make your blog/site URL search engine friendly to get a good SEO score and drive traffic from search engines. In WordPress CMS, you can set the default permalink for your site/blog. You should make your blog default permalink .

4. Have You Checked That your Blog Indexed or De-Indexed?

When you install WordPress first time, your blog will get indexed in Search Engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo automatically. You should make your blog de-indexed until your blog will ready with proper settings and some awesome contents. You can easily hide your blog from search engines, just go to your blog admin panel, then go to the Setting> Reading and check the box Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

5. Have Install, Active and configure essential WordPress Plugins?

After installing WordPress first time, you should install some essential WordPress plugins to make run and manage your blog as well as to make it search engines and user friendly. Here are some essential WordPress plugins

• Akismet (To protect your blog from spam comments)
• WP Super Cache (To improve blog performance by improving loading time)
• Jetpack (This is an official WordPress plugin comes with several features for both admin to end users)
• WordPress SEO by Yoast (To make your blog search engine friendly and increase search traffic)
• WP-Optimize (To improve blog loading time by optimizing database)
• TablePress (To insert table in pages and posts)
• Pretty Link Lite (Essential Plugin for Affiliate Marketing Blog)
• Limit Login Attempts (To protect your blog from hacking attempts or malware)
• Broken Link Checker (To remove broken links from your blog)
• SumoMe (To add social sharing button, image sharing button, collect email subscribers and much more)

6. Have you verified your blog on Google and Bing Webmaster Tool?

When all essential settings are done and if you’ve started your blog with a new domain, then you must verify the ownership of your domain in Google Webmaster Tool and Bing Webmaster Tool. Just log in the Google Webmaster tool using a Gmail ID and verify your domain. Do same in Bing Webmaster Tool also.

7. Do you Setup Google Analytics for Your Blog?

Google Analytics in one of the most popular and effective ways to see and analyze details traffic reports of any blog. So when you start blogging with a new domain, you must set up Google Analytics. Just go to the Google Analytics, create an account with Gmail ID, get the tracking code and insert in your blog.

8. Do you create and Submit XML sitemap in Google and Bing Webmaster Tool?

An XML sitemap is one of the important elements for a blog/site. You must create an XML site for your blog and submit in Google and Bing Webmaster Tool. This will help to get your blog new post/page indexed easily and quickly. To create an XML site in a WordPress blog, just install the Google XML Sitemap Plugin or you will find an XML sitemap option in WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin. Just click on “Check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality” in WordPress SEO by Yoast.

9. Do you create a Robots.txt File?

Just like an XML Sitemap file, a Robots.txt file is also important for a blog/site. This file will let search engines which files and folders will they crawl and indexed and which will not. Here you can allow search engine bots to index your site specific files and folders. Just create a notepad file with the name ‘Robots.txt’ and the following cods for WordPress blog only. Here is the example of an Ideal Robotx.txt file code.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Disallow: /wp-includes/

Disallow: /recommended/

Disallow: /comments/feed/

Disallow: /trackback/

Disallow: /index.php

Disallow: /xmlrpc.php

Disallow: /get/

Disallow: /go/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile

Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

10. Do you create About, Contact and Privacy Policy Page?
    

About, Contact and Privacy Policy/Terms of Condition/Disclaimer pages are most important for a blog/site. You must create an about page with detail information on your blog. Then create a contact page so that your visitors can easily contact with you for any kind information or query. Finally, create a privacy polity/disclaimer or terms of condition page for your blog.

11. Do you update your profile information?
12. Do you delete unused themes and plugins?
13. Do you select some Keywords for upcoming post? If not, then select some keywords using the Google Keyword Planner Tool.
14. Do you include your targeted keyword/keywords in the Homepage title?
15. Do you check the title length of your blog?
16. Is your blog contents are fresh, relevant and attractive?
17. Do you use relevant, unique and attractive Meta description tag?
18. Do you include your targeted keyword/keywords in permalink?
19. Do you use the H1 Tag in your Blog content?
20. Do you use some H2, H3 and H4 tag in your blog content?
21. Have you used interlink in your blog content?
22. Have you used outbound link your content?
23. Is your content long enough? Try to post every new content with minimum 1,500 Words.
24. Have you used LSI keywords in your blog content?
25. Have you include the primary keyword in first 100 words of your blog content naturally?
26. Have you included targeted keyword/keywords in sub-title/sub-heading?
27. Have you checked the grammatical and spelling error of the content?
28. Have you used some relevant images in your blog content? Use at least one image inside per content.
29. Have you created and submit an XML sitemap file for images?
30. Have you optimized images for search engines and users?
31. Have you checked your blog loading time?
32. Have you used permanent redirect (301) for a preferred domain, such as with or without WWW?
33. Have you implemented rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags for better user navigation?
34. Have you used a canonical tag?
35. Have you optimized homepage content?
36. Have you checked your blog is mobile friendly or not?
37. Have you used schema markup properly?
38. Have you used Google Knowledge Graph?
39. Have you created Social Profile for your blog on Popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites?
40. Have you verified your blog in Google+ page?

So, here are some points for On-Page SEO Checklist. Hope, you will find this list helpful to make your WordPress blog/site search engine friendly and get more traffic from search engines.

Also, please let me know by commenting below, if I’ve missed to include any points in this On-Page SEO Checklist.