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SEO Checklist for 2020

Search engines are becoming better and better at understanding search intent, which means in 2020 they are providing more unique and granular search results that better address the user’s specific ask. In the most recent HubSpot Research survey, 64% of marketers actively invest in SEO. While I’d like to see that number increase significantly, that SEO is becoming more of a priority across all industries.

Global Companies Actively Investing in SEO

Want to get your website to the top of Google’s search results? You can do it—if you understand what it takes to rank on Google in 2020.

Table Of Contents

Url

Well in SEO checklist URL (uniform resource locator) are important for both search engine optimization and user web experience. Search engines factor many variables into their decision making process and URLs are high on the list. 

After choosing a domain name, URLs optimizing for your pages is the next SEO step. Seo for your web page URLs is important because keywords in the URL are a ranking factor and short and descriptive URLs can help with link building and user interaction. 

As with the page titles, URLs help describe a web page to search engines and potential visitors, meaning they should be accurate, enticing, and well-structured.url of a web page above the page in an address bar. 

A typical URL could have the form of http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a hypertext transfer protocol (Http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html).

According to Backlinko reports that URLs are the following ranking page-level factor.

  • URL length is listed as #54 in Google’s top 200 ranking factors
  • URL path is listed as #55
  • Keyword in the URL is #59
  • The URL string is #60

So when you put it all together, URL optimization is reasonably an enormous deal. Competition to rank as high as possible in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is higher than ever before as digital marketing teams are heavily investing in SEO. Taking your site optimization to the next level can help you stand out from the crowd and rank higher than the competition.

Keywords

Keyword optimization is an important part of any successful content promoting strategy.  When you search in google web pages and you will find the right content faster searching on the internet that’s a keyword.  Use the proper keywords once you write for the web and you may attract a lot of searchers and that will be more targeted keywords. Keyword analysis helps your audience to look and notice you through the common words and terms they speak or use. Your keywords should stand out. This builds up your contacts and covers the manner for potential customers.

Keyword research provides you with specific search data that can help you answer questions like:

  • What are people searching for? 
  • How many people are searching for it? (Keyword Search Volume)
  • In what format do they want that information?

The types of keywords included in the category are:

  • Market segment keywords
  • Customer-defining keywords
  • Product keywords
  • Branded keywords
  • Competitor keywords
  • Geo-targeted keywords

Another way to evaluate and choose keywords is by their length.

There are three types of keywords described by their length:

  • Short-tail keywords (also known as the head, broad, or generic keywords)
  • Mid-tail keywords
  • Long-tail keywords

Here are some resources to help you understand the keywords Research & Optimization

Meta Tags

“Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. (They) can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. (They) are added to thesection of your HTML page.”

Google

Meta tags are invisible tags that provide data about your page to search engines and website visitors. The Meta tags appear only in the page’s code and anyone can check them via source code (Ctrl+U).

It’s important to notice that in 2020, your meta tags still matter, however not all of them will support you. It’s our expertise, and that I assume anyone in SEO would agree, that if you would like to rank high in search, your meta tags need to accompany high-quality content that focuses on user satisfaction.

Examples of meta tags include the <title> and <description> elements.

Meta Title

In SEO the meta title tag is the single most important element that would have the most significant impact on your on-page SEO.

  • The Meta title in SEO should be 50-60 characters.
  • The Title element supports all browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.
  • Start your title tag with your main targeted keyword
  • Don’t stuff your keywords
  • Every page should have a unique title tag
  • Embed long-tail keywords in title tags

Meta Description

The meta description will target visitors to click on your website links. Search engines typically show the Meta description in search results below your Title tag. Google does not use the Meta description as a ranking signal; still, it has a massive effect on your page CTR because it shows up in search results.

How to write a good Meta Description tag:

  • The meta description should be Up to 160 characters.
  • Do not add duplicate Meta Descriptions
  • Add clear Call-to-action (CTA) in your descriptions like Apply today, Check-out, Contact us today, etc.

Here are some resources to help you understand the ultimate all meta tags.

Mobile Friendly

Google officially announced that they would be using mobile-first indexing. This means that they are going to be indexing websites based on their mobile version- not their desktop version (as was done in the past). This update has come at a time when mobile searches are becoming the majority and desktop searches are becoming the minority.

Today all the user has shifted from a computer/desktop-focused landscape to a place where the mobile platform dominates a majority of the online industry. It could be said that true success in Google is synonymous with having a successful mobile presence. When it comes to designing a mobile website, there are three choices: responsive, adaptive and traditional “m.” mobile sites.

In the age of the mobile-first index, your mobile website is the lifeblood of your existence in the SERPs. To stay alive, follow Google’s guidelines and make sure your content matches identically on your desktop and mobile.

Whenever you can make it easier for a search engine to improve its results, do it!

According to HubSpot Research, page speed, and mobile optimization are the most utilized tactics for SEO.

Company Statics For SEO

Page Speed

When you check your website performance such as PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix and Pingdom will advise you of the exact response time of your server. Google recommends testing the response time of your own website against similar websites. High-speed websites will help you offer the best user experience to your visitors. In addition, high SEO rankings will also correspond with higher-speed websites.

There are various things you can do to accelerate your site.

  • Limit HTTP Requests
  • Decrease server reaction time
  • Empower compression
  • Empower program reserving
  • Minify resources
  • Optimize pictures
  • Optimize CSS Delivery
  • Organize long-form content
  • Diminish the number of plugins used on your site
  • Decrease or eliminate any redirects

Page speed  is an important factor in 2020 please check here

Structure Data

One of the latest evolutions in SEO is called Structure Data. Structured data has been around the SEO world for a while now. It’s been an especially hot topic since Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex created Schema.org.

As Google will highly appreciate a well-structured data or schema website, if the Google algorithm assesses that an unstructured or poorly written HTML website is important and useful to a lot of people, the poorly structured HTML website will still rank higher.

Essentially, according to Google, the search engine user’s preference, convenience, and content relevance are more important than whether the whole website is organized in Schema.

According to Google:

“Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, time and temperature, calories, protein and so on.

Why Should I Use It?

Google has been upfront with the fact that the presence of structured data on a page isn’t used as a factor when ranking search results:

Google’s search rankings are built on 3 factors:

  • Quality
  • Authority
  • Relevance

Google Says:

“When you use structured data to mark up content, you help Google better understand its context for display in Search, and you achieve a better distribution of your content to users from Search. You do this by marking up content properties and enabling actions where relevant. This makes it eligible for inclusion in rich results.”

Here are some resources to help you understand the Structure Data.

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