Top 10 Basic SEO Checklists For Beginners 2024

Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic of today in digital marketing. What Are The Top 10 Basic SEO checklists For Beginners that Work in 2024 and beyond? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique that you can apply to content that you create to get it to rank on searchable platforms. In case you don’t know occupying the number one spot on Google for a keyword that’s relevant to your industry.

Not only does it earn you bragging rights, but can actually help generate hundreds of leads for your business. But I know SEO can be a little intimidating, Especially if you’re new. So in today’s post, I’m going to share the top 10 Basic Seo Checklists For Beginners in 2024.

If you’ve been a follower of mine for a while, you may know that I actually started my blog Sam Tech in 2020, almost 3 years ago, and it’s safe to say there have been several errors of let’s just say evolution for my blog. 

As soon as I started interning, and then later working at magazines. And even though I have been publishing around a post a week for almost eight years, my blog was so small. I was very happy to have the readers that I did.  But I felt like I should have seen more growth.

Over the summer of 2020. When I found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands, I finally started doing a deep dive into SEO and wow, was it a  game changer and knew I was a good writer. But I wasn’t necessarily writing for search and SEO  became a big missing piece of my blog that I was able to solve and grow my traffic substantially. Two years later, after starting my Basic SEO journey.

I have more than tripled the page views on my blog,  and I now really focus on quality over quantity of content. Not only that, but I even qualified for an ad network. The Shemedia Collective, where I can actually start earning money from ads on my blog.

Here I want to ask you to see my post about Best WordPress SEO Tips and Practices for Beginners 2024 which may also help you for better rankings. Before you actually start learning and implementing SEO. I feel like you really need to understand it just from a conceptual standpoint so that you know what you’re getting into.

That’s why I’m creating this post because I really want to answer the question of why SEO matters, What Seo Checklists For Beginners, and related questions like what are the basic steps of SEO, Which are the main Seo Checklists For Beginners, SEO basic information and Basic Seo Checklists.

Before you even start looking up keyword research. First, you need to know About What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how it works.

What is SEO and how does it work for beginners?

What is SEO? SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” If you have the same answer, then you are at the right place and you must read the post because, in this post section, I am going to tell you what is search engine optimization.

SEO and search engine optimization both are the same. In Google search results you may see when you search something Google search engines give you the best results as per your search query from different websites.

The website that comes in Google search results for your query is SEO because they put your targeted search query in their web pages and that can rank so putting the right keywords and optimizing the content for user search intent is called SEO or search engine optimization.

Whereas the website optimizes its content to rank on Google and Google provides you best results for specific queries That is the process of how SEO works in Google search results. Search Engine Optimization is made up of two words. First is ‘Search Engine’ & second is ‘Optimization’. First, let’s talk about search engines.

What Is a Search Engine?

So what is a search engine? A search engine is a software system that has been created to search for information or, to find information from the World Wide Web, i.e., the Internet. Because you know that thousands of websites or millions of TB of data are stored here. A system has been created to find that data, which we call Search Engine.

What Is Optimization?

Now let’s talk about optimization. So what is optimization? Optimization means using something perfectly like a blog post on the internet with best-researched and in-depth content. So what it means to say here is that we do the best optimization of the search engine in search engine optimization to rank our article and web pages, i.e., Use the search engine to your advantage in a better way to better ranking by optimization. Now think about how you can use the search engine.

If I have a website or a business, then I can make sure that any person types anything related to my business, product, or service in any search engine, so he or she should see my website at the top. So this is the best use of search engine optimization that we do in searching Google and other search engine.

Do We Optimize Search Engines?

The next question is, do we optimize search engines? yes, We Optimize Search Engines for better ranking of our web pages, products, or services. The search engine is a software system that has been made after a lot of effort and is a very secure and broad network. I take Google’s example. Can you tamper with Google’s backend? Can you take your website to the top by changing its algorithm or coding?

No. If I talk in simple language, then you cannot optimize the search engine in search engines. You optimize your website in a better way so that you can get the best out of the search engines.

For example, I have a designer showroom. I make designer dresses this is my business. And I want whenever someone searches for designer dresses in Delhi or any other place, then my website should be visible at the top. This is an amazing thing. So that’s what we have to do is optimize our website in such a better way that it appears in the top ranks of search engines, which will boost my business, increase my conversion rate and ultimately make my business grow.

The Top 10 Basic SEO Checklists For Beginners

Let’s get into the top 10 Basic Seo Checklists For Beginners in 2024. There are a lot of rank factors and Checklists that matter in SEO for ranking your websites. Creating helpful, original, and highly quality content as well as optimizing it for targeted keywords to rank it in Google search engines is the basic and fundamental SEO checklist that you must mark if you are a beginner. in this post, I’m going to share with you some other SEO basic checklists for newbies for 2024 to build a successful blog website.

1. SEO is an extremely powerful tool

So first of all, SEO is an extremely powerful tool for beginners to rank easily. As I alluded to. In the introduction of this post, SEO and ranking in the first spot on Google can do amazing things for your business, Not just because you are ranking number one.

But think about what that means when someone goes to search for something on Google. I don’t know about you guys. But Google’s algorithm is extremely impressive. So I rarely have to go past the first three search results to find what I initially searched for.

As a result of this, there is fierce competition to get those first few spots and click-throughs to your website. If you have a blog, the more readership you have. And the more page views you have, the more potential revenue you can earn later on from ads.

SEO is essential. But sometimes it can fall on the back burner, Especially when you have shiny things in front of you as TikTok and Instagram reel now, Where you can post a video and have a viral moment that feels good and exciting. But of course, if you’re hosting on an algorithm control platform, you need to feed the algorithm continuously. With a searchable platform, your content’s lifespan is much longer, and articles that you wrote like 2, 3, 4, or even 5+ years ago. Can still rank high in Google.

Think about what it would mean to you to put your lead generation and your ad revenue from your website traffic on autopilot, and have it continually bring you in money from ads, and leads for your business or new customers for your products or services. 

You will get time back and see a more significant return on the investment of this type of content you’re creating. And it’ll give you more creative freedom and more time to focus on what you are passionate about. And not just how to get people to find you in the first place.

2. Detect your mistakes in SEO

The quick way to start your technical and basic SEO checklists is to spot your mistakes. Thus, you have a roadmap to correct your mistakes. Technical errors result in crawlers not indexing your pages properly.

In the worst-case scenario, the browser won’t index your page. Fixing these errors is a necessary first step in any technical SEO checklist. I suggest you see my other post on Common SEO mistakes that beginners made and you must avoid them.

3. SEO Is A Long Game

In almost all cases, SEO is a long game, meaning that it will take more time to see results than it will take for you to start building an audience on a platform like TikTok. So Seo takes a lot of time to show results in Google and other search engines because Seo does not work quickly. if Google does not discover and index your website pages also take time to rank and that is the main reason.

Again it may be straightforward to Write a video that happens to go viral on TikTok. But the question about that viral video you should be asking as a creator is, What did that get me?

It could have given you a bump in followers, which was good. Was it a long video where they got to know you, though? Or was it a trend or a short video they watched once and then never returned for more? When I go back and look at my blog analytics, from the time I started my SEO journey. It did take me about six months to start seeing accurate results over time from SEO.

So you have to be willing to be patient, put in the work, and keep up with it. Because if you don’t do that, you write one or two posts and then ditch it.  

It will fail its job because the more content you create consistently about whatever it is you create. The more information you give Google’s algorithm so that it can get to know you categorize your site accordingly and show it to the people to whom it would be most relevant.

That leads us nicely to the third thing I want you to know about SEO: a comprehensive overview of how Google’s algorithm works.

4. Must Have a Good Website Architecture

Google also matters how information is structured on a website. A website with good architecture does not use the browsing time unnecessarily. Google and other Search engines rank these websites faster on results pages. That’s why having a good website architecture is very important and is the main ranking factor in SEO.

How To make your website have good architecture?

To make your website have good architecture, First, make sure your website has an XML sitemap. Then, organize your website URLs in a logical flow. Then organize your website URLs from domain to category to subcategory. This way, the new URLs that will come will fit this architecture.

In the end, optimize your website URL structures for search engines. To do this, move the main keywords closer to the root domain. Also, do not keep the URL length longer than 60 characters.

5. You must Know How Google’s Algorithm Works.

How Google’s Algorithm Works to rank a web page or product and service. Google’s algorithm is the process that Google uses to rank websites, products, and service pages based on various factors and elements. The algorithm works by understanding the purpose and intent of the user’s query, finding the most relevant web pages having the main keywords or related terms, finding the quality and credibility of the content on those web pages, assessing the usability and user-friendliness of the web pages, and considering the context and settings of the user, such as location, device, and personalization.

According to the post, Google’s algorithm is designed to help you find the most relevant information for your search query. It does this by searching for web pages that contain the keywords you used in your search and then ranking those pages based on several factors, including how often the keywords appear on the page.

The higher a page is ranked, the closer it will appear to the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). This means that the most relevant links related to your search query should be listed first.

So there is a three-letter acronym that will give you a better idea of how Google’s algorithm works. And that algorithm is EAT, which makes me hungry. So what do you get? Three letters in EAT stand for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

And like There’s a lot more to this algorithm. But just knowing this in a general sense already tells you a lot about the type of content that Google values from the sites it recommends to its readers.

This is where I and many of my fellow creators in blogging niches or people who talk about more than one topic have struggled to get people to read our website. This is because sometimes we’re talking about lots of different things.

I have posted on my blog about tips for SEO I’ve taken on Blog. I have the GPT 4 review and introduction, and when you’re publishing all that content. When you’re still a tiny new site on the whole internet, it can be challenging for Google to figure out precisely what your site is about.

One big reason I needed to understand this early is that I come from the magazine world. And if you go to any blogging magazine and look at their website, you know, they have an SEO section of Blogging section, a Social section, so why not do everything?

And by the way, you can do everything if you want to. But suppose you want to grow with search. In that case, I suggest focusing on what Google’s algorithm wants. To give credit to sites and give more visibility to sites that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on specific topics.

These Blogging magazines and legacy brands have been around for 20 or more years and have notoriety because they have a significant readership. They have trustworthiness and Authority, because they have editors specializing in all these topics. But when you’re just one person. If you want to grow on Google, it will significantly benefit you to quote niche down. It depends on what your goal and your strategy are with your blog. If you want your blog to be a place where readers can come and learn more about what you think on tons of different topics.

That’s entirely up to you. If you want to scale and grow your traffic with SEO so that you can qualify for an ad network, autopilot is part of your business. This is where niching down will benefit you.

So I have even taken my site and niched it down as far as I can to still incorporate blogging and SEO content where I can. But focusing on the industry side of things, the content creation side of things, and making that what I am telling Google I am an expert in.

So to summarize, if you are interested in growing and scaling your blog and your traffic, you must pay attention to Google’s algorithm. That brings me to the fourth thing you should know about SEO as a beginner, which is that believe it or not. You are being graded.

6. Must Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content issues are also important for technical and basic SEO checklists. If you use Duplicate Content or copy-paste text from other websites. In this case, Google will soon penalize you for this act of using copyright or Duplicate Content on your site. You must avoid Artificial intelligence-generated content through chatbots like ChatGPT-4 and other AI writing tools.

There are several main reasons for this. Browsers need to know which version of a web page is the original or canonical page. Otherwise, they will not know which result to show in the search results. So, your web pages will not be in the rankings it deserves on the results pages. Also, your webpages may be in a lower order than the value for which it was filtered.

7. All Websites Are Graded

Yes, all websites are graded based on various factors and elements. For example, HubSpot has a tool called Website Grader that estimates and checks the authority and effectiveness of a website in attracting a relevant and organic audience of interested and relevant buyers as well as checks the most visited websites in the world based on various metrics such as average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate, performance, search engine optimization (SEO), and website design, and security.

You are being graded by Google or any other search engine that you might use. And that grade is referred to as domain authority. So every single website on the internet has a domain authority. If you want to check yours, there is a free keyword research tool called Moz M O Z. You can sign up for Moz create a free account and search for your website.

If you use the Google Chrome plugin will display the domain authority of any website on the search engine results page. So you can go and check and see what your domain authority is. Domain authority is graded on a scale of zero to 100. Okay, So it is like school, which can be intimidating. But having a low domain authority is okay. For example, if you just created a brand new website yesterday or last week, your domain authority is all certainly zero.

The domain authority of my blog, at least the last I checked, is a 28. And domain authority is on the higher end, close to 100. Our websites are like the New York Times or YouTube. A few factors determine your score and your domain authority. And I’m going to list them for you now.

1. Time

Okay, so as I alluded to, time is certainly one factor. How long has your site been around? Readability is another factor. So if you are, why would anyone do this? But it’s tough to read if you’re using an orange font on a purple background, and it has lots of curly Qs.

And not just hard for people to read but also challenging for Google to scan and understand what your site is about, which can hurt your Domain Authority.

2. Quality Content

Another big one is the quality of your content. This is why I will probably not publish a blog post again, that is, fewer than 500 words because I want to give as much information as possible to go in-depth and show people what they’re looking for when they stumble across a blog post of mine.

This is also why I’m not just going to write any old blog post about the first thing that pops into my head without keyword research and validating that it is something people are searching for.

3. Originality of content

Another factor is originality. And, of course, if you publish your original content consistently, that is the best-case scenario. You can, of course, reference other articles stories, or blogs out there. But it’s essential to ensure you are creating and sharing original content.  

4. Website Structure

Another factor is a clean site structure. So think about the menu options on your website and make sure that it’s straightforward and clear to direct people to where they need to be on your site.

5. Backlink or Link building

The last thing is backlinks. So that goes back to the authoritativeness part of the algorithm with Google, where you are starting to build Authority when other people also start referencing you, linking back to your website, or linking back to a post that you published.

So there are a few different methods for getting backlinks. I talked about backlinks a little bit more in a post. So that is more about growing traffic. But those are five things you are being graded on when Google or any other search engine is scanning your site to decide how to rank up.

8. Make Sure to use HTTPS

Servers used to run on Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This method was a fast way to send system data. However, it was not safe. So, it is better to use HTTPS, this method’s additional protocol. This protocol encrypts data and transports it securely on the web.

In doing so, it uses the secure socket layer. Google announced that it recognized HTTPS as a ranking factor in 2014. This method is a good way to protect users’ data.

The same thing was reported in another post on Search Engine Journal, In August 2014, Google published a blog post announcing that HTTPS had become a signal for its search ranking algorithms. This means that websites using HTTPS encryption were given a slight boost in search engine rankings. Google stated that the change was made to encourage website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

9. It’s Not Just For Blogs 

The second last thing you should know about SEO is it’s not just for blogs. You can take SEO knowledge and apply it to other searchable platforms like Pinterest and YouTube. Of course, you can even search for different topics on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

TikTok has a good search. Typically if you type in a keyword on TikTok, other relevant videos will populate. And in the past, Instagram search has been heavily categorized by hashtags. However, Instagram is making strides to improve the SEO on its platform, which is long overdue and necessary to keep up with platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

So I am curious. I have yet to talk about this anywhere else. But I’m interested in working some keywords into my Instagram captions to see if it helps me reach a larger audience. So if you guys end up trying that, please leave me a comment and let me know how it goes for you.

10. The Usage Of  the Browser Caching Feature

The Browser Caching Feature feature is a feature that increases the opening speed of your website. This way, browsers don’t have to load images and other resources on the site over and over again.

When users enter the website after their first visit, browsers pull these resources from the cache for a specified period. Thus, users view the site much faster. The same is true for bots. When bots enter a webpage, recalling static resources each time that will not easily change causes extra waiting time on their behalf.

For this, you must set an expiration date or a maximum lifetime in HTTP headers for static resources. These settings tell the browser to load those already downloaded on the local disk, not resources on the network.

You may also like:
Best WordPress SEO Tips and Practices for Beginners 2024
Check why your pages aren’t ranking high on Google

FAQs