Introduction
Whether you are an experienced SEO whizz or are brand new to Search Engine Optimization, we’ve got you covered. The Metro Publisher CMS has been specifically designed for digital magazines and we have built in all kinds of features designed to enhance SEO and promote reader engagement. But there is also a lot you can do externally to ensure that your website ranks highly on search engines and increase organic traffic. To make the process as easy as possible, we have put together our ultimate guide to enhancing SEO for your website, which covers everything from the basics all the way to advanced actions.
The inspiration for our list came from this Semrush blog, The Only SEO Checklist You Will Need in 2021: 41 Best Practices. It’s an excellent resource, and one we urge you to read. In this blog, we provide a complement to the Semrush blog, highlighting the most important practices from the list, and explaining, where necessary, how to implement these technical tips within the Metro Publisher CMS.
The Semrush blog is divided into five sections, of which two are exclusively applicable to content. For convenience, we have listed each point in the order it appears in the Semrush blog, with our comments and handy tips.
seo-checklist-01
SEO Basics
These are the basic steps you need to take to ensure optimal SEO and make sure you stay ahead of your competitors in search engine rankings.
1. Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Tracking your website’s performance
Your first step should be setting up the right tools to track your website’s performance.
Google remains the world’s most popular search engine, maintaining a 90% market share, so setting up Google Search Console is essential. This free tool will show you where and how often your website appears in Google searches, how it ranks for mobile usability and whether it has a healthy link profile, among many other valuable insights.
Bing is another well-known search engine; it may not have Google’s global reach, but performs well in markets such as the USA and UK. It also provides free Webmaster Tools for monitoring your website’s performance, which you can find here.
Signing up to Google Search Console is quick and easy. When you get to the last part of setting up, which is verifying your site, we explain how you do it here.
2. Set up Google Analytics
Getting user-oriented data for your website
Now that you can gather key data on how your website performs in terms of searches, you need to find out how users are interacting with your site.
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google which provides user-oriented information for your website. This includes how many visits your website receives, how readers get to your site, how long they spend on it and what they do on the site. Google does this by adding a code (i.e., your Google Analytics ID) to every page of your website to track visitor interaction.
Metro Publisher’s CMS allows you to add Google Analytics to your website easily: just log in to your site as an admin and paste in the Google Analytics ID. We explain how to do that here.
You can find more about how Google Analytics works here.
3. Install and Configure An SEO Plugin
SEO Plugins
At Metro Publisher does not include SEO plugins. There are many ways to optimize your search engine rankings. We cover some of these ways here.
Additionally, if you are looking for help writing and optimizing your content for SEO, you might consider third party services such as Semrush, ClearScope, Moz, Surfer, and more.
4. Generate and Submit a Sitemap
Sitemaps give search engines important information for indexing
A sitemap is a map of your site’s content which tells search engines which files you think are important along with other useful information such as when pages have been updated, how often new pages are added, etc. When you register your sitemap with search engines, you are telling them to index your website and therefore include it in searches.
If you are launching a new site, or relaunching an existing site, you will have to submit the new sitemap(s). In Metro Publisher, the sitemaps are automatically generated. We explain how you can locate your sitemap on Metro Publisher here.
- To register your sitemap with Google, use the Sitemaps Report feature in your Google Search Console (see point 1, above).
- To register your sitemap with Bing, use the Sitemaps tool in your Webmaster Tools (see point 1, above).
5. Robots.txt files
Robots.txt files tells search engines which pages they can request
By registering your sitemap with search engines, you have told them to index your website and include it in searches. The next step is to generate a robots.txt file: these simple text files tell search engine crawlers which pages on your website they can or can’t request. It gives you more control by allowing you to prevent specific sections of your website from being crawled. Most importantly, robots.txt files show search engine crawlers exactly where your sitemap is located.
Metro Publisher’s CMS automatically creates a robots.txt file that points search engine crawlers to your website’s sitemaps. As a result, most of our clients won’t need to think about this step, unless you specifically want to create a custom robots.txt file. You can find out more about how to do that here.
6. Check search console for manual actions
Make sure your site isn’t penalized for manual actions
Google penalizes actions such as spam, thin content, hidden text, keyword stuffing, etc., which contravene their webmaster guidelines. It is very unlikely that you will encounter these problems on your Metro Publisher website, but you can check for them using the manual actions tool (find it under ‘securities and manual actions’) on the Google Search Console.
7. Make sure that Google can actually index your website
Check that Google and other search engines are indexing your website correctly
You should always check that search engines are able to crawl your website correctly.
However, if you have registered your Metro Publisher sitemap (see point 4 above), then you won’t need to do this step. This is because every Metro Publisher CMS creates a dynamic sitemap that automatically syncs any changes you have made to the content and/or structure, which ensures that search engine crawlers know exactly what to index.
Keyword Research Checklist
The Semrush blog offers seven excellent tips (see points 8–14 of their blog) for improving your keyword research. We highly recommend you put these tips into practice when preparing your website content.
