SEO To-Do List
Each year the list of SEO to-dos gets longer. To keep up with all the necessary bits and pieces of effective search engine optimization, we need to lengthen the list of requirements. Below is an infographic which outlines 75 elements with checkboxes for what is needed in 2018. It does include the core of what matters for SEO. If everyone paid attention to these elements, they’d do better than most in search simply because so few actually pay attention to everything on the list. Following are the items getting more attention this year.
Secure HTTPS
Secure pages everywhere is happening slowly as businesses upgrade, rebrand or redesign their sites. Using SSL certificates sitewide is much more important now that it has become a ranking signal for Google. The transition is a tough one because it can involve a significant amount of work to get it right. Many sites resolve on both http and https – but that should be avoided for many reasons – 301 redirect all non-secure pages to a secure version. Glad this made the SEO to-do list for more companies in 2018.
HTML Sitemaps
I’m glad to see HTML sitemaps in the list. It’s been important forever, but it’s been resisted by development teams (hard to code a dynamic hierarchical sitemap) and given low-priority by product teams (because their focus is on user experience and HTML sitemaps are not used by humans to navigate the site). Therefore, far too few sites include them and link to them sitewide and therefore don’t see the indexing benefits.
Breadcrumbs
Also happy to see the inclusion of breadcrumbs in this list of seo to-do’s because they have long been important to search engines but they keep being removed by designers who don’t like the way they take up space on the page and clutter the visual cleanliness they prefer. Breadcrumbs are critical to include on your SEO checklist and you can count on resistance from the clean design clan – put your foot down firmly and demand breadcrumbs with semantic markup.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
One item that’s also critical in this SEO to-do list is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and this will also get some pushback by dev teams that will need to supplement their coding knowledge to figure out how to include the necessary markup. This will become critical in 2018 as Mobile First Indexing contributes to the need for speed of all popular pages on your site. AMP started out with enthusiastic adoption by news sites, but was ignored by retail ecommerce businesses. It’s going to be more important than ever – for every business – now that more mobile search leads to prioritization of faster-loading pages as a much bigger ranking factor.
How Many Have You Left Off Your To-Do List?
Check out the list and get busy if you’ve left anything undone. All of it matters for good SEO. If you are thorough, you’ll see results in higher search engine referrals, better conversion rates and improved revenue.
Killer SEO Checklist [Infographic] by the team at Capsicum Mediaworks, LLP
