SEO Checklist

SEO checklist

The SEO Checklist is a very useful feature to help with your SEO efforts. The SEO Checklist will guide you through the process of optimizing your site and highlights the recommended best practices for maintaining a search friendly site. The checklist is designed to help you maintain a good SEO ranking. Each recommendation links to the settings admin page to configure the features on your site. You should start with setting up a  Google analytics account and then move down the list.

Benefits of this SEO Checklist are to:

  1. Help you keep track of what SEO tasks need to be done.
  2. Check for broken links and provide basic information for editing them.
  3. Provide a date stamp to indicate when your site's content was last updated.

Note: You must enable the Search Engine Optimization bundle to use this feature.

1

Locate the SEO Checklist

  1. Go to the Express toolbar and select Dashboard.
  2. Click the SEO tab.

Dashboard


2

Google Analytics

This checklist item indicates whether you have a custom google analytics account assigned to your website.

  • Green Check: you have a custom google analytics account assigned to your website.
  • Red X: you do not have a custom google analytics account assigned to your website.
  1. Click Edit Google Analytics settings and assign a google analytics account to your website.

Google Analytics

Related: Google Analytics tutorial.

3

 Site Verification

Verification is the process of proving that you own the site that you claim to own. We need to confirm ownership because once you are verified for a site you have access to its private Google Search data and this can affect how Google Search crawls it. The first step to site verification is to register for Google, Yahoo and Bing accounts and sign up for their webmaster tools. You will need the verification files, tracking codes and other identifiers provided by these services.

  • Save the verification files to your hard disk.
  • Write down all account numbers.
  • Have them handy so you may fill out the site verification admin page.

You only need to add one site verification account. But you may enter several. Web Express offers site verification for Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and an option for creating a custom site verification.

  1. Click Add verification.

    2. Add Verification

  2. Select the verification Search engine you would like to add.
  3. Click Next.
  4. Add the Verification META tag.
  5. Click Save.

Verification META tag

4

Link Checker

The Link checker checks for broken links. 

  1. If errors are found, click Link Checker to go to an administration page to edit the broken links.

Broken links

Related: LInk Checker tutorial.

5

Sitemap

This tool will create a sitemap of your site. Sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster.

This initial sitemap building process is not instantaneous and may take several days depending on how large your site is. Once you have initially clicked the 'Update Sitemap' button, Web Express will automatically keep the sitemap updated for you.

Update sitemap

Related: Sitemap tutorial

6

Site Description

This checklist item checks to see if you have added a site description to your website. Your site's description should be two to three sentences long and provide a fairly detailed description of what your site is about. 

A florist in Denver might write something like:

Flowers and Such is a professional florist in Denver, CO with 25 years experience making birthdays a little brighter and anniversaries a little rosier. We have roses, lilies, orchids, tulips and every other flower under the sun.

Site description

Related: Site Description tutorial.

7

Responsive/Mobile Friendly

If you haven't made your website mobile-friendly, you should. Responsive/Mobile friendly sites rank higher in searches. See our  Responsive Design tutorial to learn how to enable this feature on your site. Mobile pages that provide a poor search experience can be demoted in rankings so follow through and check your site on mobile devices to ensure your site displays well on these devices.

Responsive/mobile friendly

Related: Responsive Design tutorial.

8

Content Updated

This checklist item provides a date stamp to indicate when your site's content was last updated. If no node or block has been updated in 60 days it will show a red X.

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