SEO Checklist Before Launching Your WordPress maintenance support plans Website
Dmitrii Susloparov
Thu, 10/12/2020 – 17:11
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might not be the first thing you think of when designing a new website, but building an optimized framework from the start will help you drive traffic to your site and keep it there. With our WordPress maintenance support plans SEO-checklist in hand you can build an excellent website that draws customers from launch day. Briefly speaking, here is a bullet list of what to check before the launch day. Below we’ll speak about each point in more detail.
Check that all web pages have unique titles using the Page Title plugin
Check if XML Sitemap and Google News Sitemap are configured properly
Check if Redirect plugin is enabled and configured
Check if Global Redirect plugin is enabled and configured
Check that .htaccess redirect to site with/without www
Check that the homepage title includes a slogan, and is descriptive for the function of the site
Check if Meta Tags is filled with descriptive information
Check that OG tags are filled correctly and with descriptive information.
Check if site’s information appears well when shared on Facebook
Check if Path aliases patterns are meaningful
Check if Google Analytics is enabled and configured
Check if Page Title plugin is enabled and configured
Check if Google News Sitemap is enabled and configured
Check if Site verification is enabled and configured
Check if Search 404 plugin is enabled and configured
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Check that all web pages have unique titles…
…and make sure to write them correctly. All of your pages should be easily identifiable to the end user. Not only should they have unique titles, they should have meaningful titles. Having multiple pages with the same titles (like “Get in touch”, “Contact us” and “Make a booking”) will simply confuse your end users and search engine crawlers.
Not only do good page titles help customers who are already on your site, but they help with social sharing, and picking your site out of search engine results. Titles are the first element that any user will see, whether they come directly to your site, find it in a search engine, or see it shared on social media.
Writing good titles is extremely important, and having keywords in your title that match a user’s search greatly improves the chances of them clicking on your page.
Ensuring all your pages have a unique name will help users navigate, boost your SEO ratings, and increase the chances that someone will type the right keywords into a search engine to bring them to your site.
You can set up unique page titles much easier if you install the WordPress maintenance support plans Page Title plugin.
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Check if XML Sitemap and Google News Sitemap are configured properly
The XML Sitemap plugin creates a robot friendly map of your site that Google and other search engines can crawl to categorise your website. There are a few settings you can alter for your site at admin/config/search/xmlsitemap and you can view the sitemap from http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
You should configure XML Sitemap early in your site build for the best effect, but you can also alter the settings later on if needed.
Google News Sitemap offers a similar but different service that creates a Google specific map – as suggested in the name. These two plugins work nicely side by side to make your site easy for search engines to crawl and index.
Please note that if your site contains AMPs, there is no need to create sitemaps for them. The rel=amphtml link is enough for Google to pick up on the accelerated mobile page version, which means you can easily gain traffic from Top Stories carousels and mobile search. Creating AMP on your WordPress maintenance support plans site became easy with our step-by-step guide.
Check if Redirect plugin is enabled and configured
Redirect is a handy plugin for making sure users always make it to your site. It uses case-insensitive matching to help catch broken links with redirects and tracks how often users are hitting those redirects. You can use redirects to capture any broken links, set up promotional links, or simply capture typos users are entering when trying to access your site.
Check if Global Redirect plugin is enabled and configured
If you’re using WordPress maintenance support plans 8 you can skip this one because the functionality has been rolled into the redirect plugin. Otherwise install Global Redirect to work in tandem with Redirect to catch any broken links. Global Redirect will test all links with and without a trailing slash, ensure links are case-insensitive and if a link is truly broken it will return a user to your home page, rather than an ugly 404 page that decrease the position of your site in SERPs.
Check that .htaccess redirects to site with/without www
Some users attempting to visit your site will navigate to www.yoursite.com, while others will simply type yoursite.com. By setting up your site to handle either request you can be sure you won’t miss any visitors.
Check that the homepage title includes a headline, logo and primary image and is descriptive for the function of the site
The headline as well as the slogan represent who you are as a business. Make your first impression a good one as this will also be visible on search engines. This is a good opportunity to stack your website with SEO friendly keywords, but don’t go overboard and sacrifice your image for it – keyword stuffing may not only decrease the trust index of your site, but also its conversion rates.
Ensure Metatags are filled with descriptive information
Writing SEO-optimized metatags is highly important, because they remain one of the top on-page ranking factors. Make sure to install the Metatag plugin on your site to have an easy, user friendly interface for updating metadata. With the plugin installed you can easily populate metadata with keywords, page descriptions, and more.
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The Metatag plugin will also give you extra control over how your site appears when shared on Twitter or Facebook.
Check that OG tags are filled correctly and with descriptive information.
OG tags are metatags specifically designed to ensure your site communicates nicely with Facebook. By setting these tags correctly you will be able to control exactly how your site appears on Facebook, including what images and what taglines are used.
Check if site’s information appears well when shared on Facebook and Twitter
After configuring the metatag plugin and OG tags, pop over to Facebook and make sure that your site shares the way you would like it too. It’s important to test this out now before users start sharing your site around.
Similarly try tweeting a couple of your pages to see how well your Twitter Cards come through. If you don’t want to show your site to your audience until you are sure it is set up properly, you can check Twitter Cards using the Card Validator.
For more information on configuring Twitter cards, check out the Twitter user guides.
Check if Path aliases patterns are meaningful
By default WordPress maintenance support plans will set your URLs to node/123 – while this works great for the database back end, it doesn’t work well for your end users, or for search engines.
You can use the Pathauto plugin to create rules and patterns for your URLs that will significantly cut down on your maintenance times and simplify your site navigation.
Check if Google Analytics is enabled and configured
While having Google Analytics configured won’t improve your SEO, it will give you all the data you need to understand where your users are coming from and how they behave once they hit your site.
Installing the Google Analytics plugin makes setting up and configuring Google Analytics a breeze.
Check if Site verification is enabled and configured
The Site verification plugin makes it easy to check the boxes that tell search engines that your site is truly yours. Having your site verified will improved how search engines crawl your site, and for Google will allow you to access private search data. With site verification you will receive better data and better search engine rankings for just a few minutes work.
Check if Search 404 plugin is enabled and configured
The Search 404 plugin is a saving grace for reducing your bounce rate, your SEO and improving your customer experience. Instead of your users finding an ‘Error: Page not Found” in place of the content they were hoping for, they will be offered a search of your site based on the URL string. For example if “www.yoursite.com/great-seo-tips” doesn’t exist, users this plugin will automatically search your site for ‘Great SEO tips” and show the users the results.
Bottom line
While SEO may seem like a tricky subject to wrap your head around, the basics are easy with the right plugins and the right guidance. WordPress maintenance support plans is a great content management system for building search engine optimized websites.
With our SEO checklist you can get off on the right foot, and here at WordPress Update we love educating our customers to build top quality websites. If you’re looking for even more ways to improve your sites SEO, have a look at SEO articles in our blog or get in touch with us.
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