SEO Basics: Breakdown and Summary Check-List

10/16/2018

Amy Prindle

The Center for Online Evangelism is a missionary project devoted to developing online mission stations.

Edits and additions by Jamie Jean Domm

You may be wondering, what can we actually do to optimize our web presence?

Since optimizing content for search engines primarily means optimizing content for people, many principles of SEO follow fundamental principles of advertising, marketing, psychology, and sociology. Remember, it’s all about people and their behaviors.

However, since search engines are the vehicle by which this content is delivered, there are several technical aspects involved as well, such as web development, data gathering and analysis, and research (get your spreadsheets ready!).

This why digital marketing agencies and large organizations typically have an entire team to carry out SEO strategies, often comprised of copywriters, content managers, web developers, and SEO specialists. These team members spend considerable amounts of their time just keeping up with this industry, as trends and best practices can change even daily!

While this can sound overwhelming, take comfort that much of this research has already been done for you, and each blog post in this series is based on the latest data available.

We’ll introduce you to the concepts and processes that are major players in a complete SEO strategy: a checklist overview, writing and optimizing content for online readers, User Experience Engineering (UX/UXE), off-site SEO basics, tracking and analyzing your audience’s activity, and any technical setup or modifications that will be needed throughout.

Let’s start with a checklist of major elements involved in SEO.

NOTE: Make sure to check the dates of our SEO blogs as you read through—this guide will be updated frequently as trends change or if there’s a major Google algorithm update.

The following SEO fundamentals checklist has three categories: roles, onsite work, and offsite work.

ROLES refers to the different positions, expertise, and points of view that contribute to successful SEO. Often this means specific job positions that work together as part of an SEO team, but it can also demonstrate the wide range of different facets involved in truly optimizing content for search engines (people).

ONSITE refers to adjustments and development done directly on the pages of your website.

OFFSITE refers to SEO efforts done on platforms other than your website, such as social media, directories, review sites, external websites, etc. This can create more listings in search results that relate to your website/topic/organization, and they can also catch different audiences and send that traffic back to your website. When done correctly and legitimately, offsite efforts can also boost credibility, relevance, and authority.

(Note: Most offsite SEO, especially with external websites, is also referred to a “backlinking,” and it must be managed with care.)

These items will be covered in depth in later posts.

1. COMMON ROLES IN A WELL-ROUNDED SEO TEAM

Copywriters and content writers are trained differently than academic writers or creative writers. Advertising theory plays a big part in creating content that connects with its target audience.

Rather than an artistic focus, these writers focus on clarity, connection, directness, and appropriate emotional appeal. They write to relate. They write to enhance understanding and lift up the reader, making them feel like the hero of the story—not to condescend and make their brand the star of the show. They inform and educate, emphasizing the benefits in store for the reader, not simply describing the features of a product or service.

When it comes to SEO, these writers know how search engines work and how to use keywords/phrases without sounding unnatural. Overall, it’s important to note that not just any writer—even a very good writer—will be successful with copywriting or content writing without proper training.
SEO specialists often act both as a consultant and a technical implementer. It’s their job to stay current in what Google’s doing, what the digital marketplace is doing, and how it’s affecting the way people use the internet—how they consume content and what drives them to conversions (making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, donating to a cause, sharing content, etc.). This helps them advise writers, marketers, and web developers, and also test or measure a strategy’s effectiveness.

SEO specialists conduct audits on an organization’s websites and/or their entire web presence, and they monitor and interpret analytics to see how users behave on a website or social media page. They do keyword research and use variety of software programs to audit websites, create content briefs, and keep up with the numerous ways a brand can expand and enrich its web presence (much of which will be covered further down in this checklist).
Web developers play an integral supporting role to SEO specialists and writers. They use their knowledge of HTML, CSS, XML, Java, etc., along with user experience and web design best practices to create a website that best supports the recommendations for the site’s content and SEO.
Social media specialists are experts at the big picture of social media. They don’t just write great posts, they coordinate campaigns, manage advertising, and work to coordinate a brand’s overarching goals for SEO and the perception of its web presence.

2. ONSITE SEO BASICS

Keyword Research
- Keyword Research refers to the process of discovering which words, phrases, or entire sentences or questions are commonly typed into Google’s search box regarding the topic you want to cover (e.g., “Easy Vegan Desserts,” or “Monetizing Your Blog”). Typically using software like AdWords’ Keyword Planner or Keyword Explorer, this process gives you a window into current search data to help you develop a strategy for content creation.
Measuring and Analyzing User Behavior
- Knowledge is power. It’s hard to determine how to optimize your site if you don’t know how people are using it! Find out how many people come to your website, what page they come in on, how long they stay, what pages they’re most likely visit, links they click, etc. You might find that the page you want people to see is getting skipped! Or, if you change something without looking at user activity, you might lose existing traffic—and recovering from that is tougher than gaining new traffic. In short, this data tells you what’s working and what isn’t, so you can focus your effort where it will make the most difference. Properly installing Google Analytics and Search Console will show you this data, and much more. While there is a learning curve, they are incredibly useful tools. Don’t start your SEO plan without them!
Tags, Headers, and Meta Descriptions
- These are the small pieces of content that dictate the way your site appears in the list of search results. Based on keyword research, you should make sure to use the most-searched keywords in each of your pages’ titles (that appear at the top of the browser window), headers (headline and subheads for the page’s content), and meta descriptions (the intro blurb that shows underneath the page title and link)—this helps draw users in by introducing the site’s content.
Fixing Page Errors
- If your website has broken links or other page-load errors, Google takes notice when it crawls your site (aka when google visits your website for tracking purposes. This is done by Google’s Spider crawler). This dings your credibility with Google—and frustrates site visitors! There are several ways to audit for these errors, and then you can fix link misspellings, apply redirects, or optimize other items that affect navigation.
Optimizing Page Load Speed
- You may have seen Google’s latest announcement that page load speed is a ranking factor, especially for searches on mobile devices. If your page takes longer than 1.5 seconds to load, your ranking—and the patience of your audience—may be at risk. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to address this, which will be discussed in a later post in this series.
Mobile-FIRST
- While you’ve heard about mobile-friendliness and mobile-responsiveness, mobile-FIRST is the most recent term sprinkled through web development articles and guides. Bottom line: your website MUST be easily viewable and usable on a mobile screen. If not, users will leave your site AND Google will rank mobile-friendly sites over yours. Also keep in mind that this means more than just having a mobile friendly template. It has to do with content organization, text size, link click/tap-ability, and navigation.
Optimizing Site Security
- It’s not a question of if your website will be hacked, but when—regardless of how much traffic it gets or what topics are covered. If you’re not using good security plugins and your site is hacked, all your hard work on optimization can be lost as well. Additionally, websites without an SSL certificate, which tells browsers that a website is secure, can cause a lower ranking, and cause skeptical site visitors to reject your site.
Optimizing Navigation
- You want to make sure your XML sitemap is submitted to Google, and this sitemap should facilitate easy, user-friendly navigation throughout your site so users can follow a logical path that leads them to an action. To help users visit archived content and to give them whatever supporting information they need, use internal linking strategies.
Targeted, Topical, Reader-Centric Content
- To achieve higher visibility for the key topics you want to work with, a good rule of thumb is to keep each webpage to one topic or subtopic, and structure these subtopics logically. This makes for better navigation and it’s easier for Google to determine what each page is about—and direct the right traffic to it.
Consistent Updates (Fresh Content)
- To determine if a site has fresh, relevant content, Google looks at how often a site is updated. If your site hasn’t been updated in 6 months—and other websites covering related topics have been updated—it will cause the other sites to appear higher in search results. Additionally, if a site visitor spots out-of-date information, credibility is hurt as well (which is even tougher to recover from).
Links to Other Sites Within Your Web Presence (And Some That Aren’t)
- To help show relevance, linking to other websites can boost credibility—if the links are to quality content about similar topics. Additionally, linking to sister websites, your social media sites, or review sites can direct traffic where you want it to go, and demonstrate that you have a robust web presence. But don’t overdo it! You don’t want to end up ultimately leading your traffic away from you.

3. OFFSITE SEO BASICS

Social Media
- This is the best place to start for off-site SEO. Whether you use Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, or a custom combination, remember to always link back to your website for credibility’s sake. Conversations happen on these platforms, but you’ll often want to lead users back to your website’s blog, contact page, product page, or landing page with a call to action.
Review Sites
- Make sure you set up or “claim” your entity on review sites like Yelp, and also on Google, Facebook, and other platforms that allow users to leave reviews. Bonus SEO points if you regularly respond to reviews (with caution!) and show an active interest in your audience!
Directory Sites
- Especially if you have a brick-and-mortar entity such as a church, school, office, or ministry, directory sites such as Google My Business, Google Maps, Yellowpages.com, Better Business Bureau, and several niche-specific directory sites help legitimize your entity and provide places to add additional information, such as hours of availability, driving directions, parking information, contact information, area-specific tips, and more. Proper attention to directory sites can do wonders for your SEO—but this process also needs to be done carefully. Not all directory sites are respected.
External Publishings
- When you’re featured as a guest blogger or you publish an article in an external online publication, you can name your organization in your bio. Anywhere your content is curated or quoted may show up in search results related to your organization.
Other Websites
- When a webpage that is not run by your organization links to you, or even mentions you by name, it can show up as a listing in search results. If the page this mention/link appears on is a respected site with quality content, this can be a considerable reputation boost. However, if low-quality websites/pages link to your site, this could actually ding your credibility (even worse—some organizations have created fake websites to link back to themselves. That’ll get a Google penalty as well as a big reputation hit). This is why it matters how you represent your organization to other entities. If you do discover questionable sites linking to yours, make sure to disavow these links.

While this checklist covers several of the fundamental facets of SEO, this is a process of perpetual motion. Your work is never “done.”

Google releases updates, websites need to consistently post fresh content, and trends in online behavior can change almost instantaneously.

However, a consistent, concentrated effort can reap big rewards. You can find these checklist concepts expanded in the coming posts.

Click here for the SEO series and resource guide.

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