Webpage Checklist

Overview

After you have all of the important initial site setup (hyperlink to site setup blog) factors taken care of, you can set your focus on making the webpage. Once your page is live, it is important to zoom out and look at your website from a more broad perspective. Checking for branding, clear images and headers, verifying your links and redirects, and ensuring your site has a logical flow and structure will help you maintain regular traffic and great SEO stats.

Check for Mobile Responsiveness

When your website is live you should always make sure that your website works on mobile devices. More than half of all visits to your site on average will come from mobile, so your website should be optimized accordingly. Google and WordPress both offer tools to help diagnose problems and make sure your mobile responsiveness is up to industry standards. To do this, simply navigate to https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly and put in your website’s URL. They will tell you where your site may be struggling on mobile and provide tips on how you can more effectively tailor it for mobile users.

Perform a CrossBrowser Review

When you make your site live, search for it and go through the site using multiple browsers. Try your website using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Users will be coming from all angles and you want all of them to have a similar experience.

Check for Consistent Branding

Try to look at your live website from an unbiased view and determine if it really exemplifies your brand and the image you are trying to present to viewers. The font, style, colors, and presence of your logo should be consistent throughout the site. If you have a branding package then make sure most of its contents appear on the site and that users will really understand your brand and leave your site with a lasting impression of who you are and what your services will mean to them.

Make Sure You Have a Featured Image and Proper Alt Text

Your featured image is important for SEO and should have proper dimensions and related alt text. These factors actually play a big role in determining your rank in search engine results. The featured image and alt text you prepare should be very relevant to your services and should exemplify the main points of your customers, services, or products. You can also check how well this is setup using the SmartCrawl tool.

Ensure Page Layout Uniformity

Having a logical page structure contributes to your search engine results. Having properly structured headers, subheaders, paragraph lengths, and even sentence length and transitions throughout your site will help search engines recognize the quality of your webpages. WordPress helps give guidelines on these factors and you can easily check to make sure that your page is compliant with up-to-date Yoast SEO guidelines based on your site’s uniformity and content.

Make Sure All of Your Links are Working Properly (Social media, redirects, etc)

After you are live, go in as a user and make sure all of the links and redirects are working properly. Click through all of the tabs and links and make sure they take you to the correct destinations. With blogs, store links, and a funnel to product and service pages, sometimes links can be mixed up in the initial design process. Always make sure to double check your site as a user and test these out from an outside perspective.

Update SmartCrawl

At Bolt Goodly, we use Smart Crawl which helps with page level SEO checks. Using SmartCrawl, the ultimate goal is to get the green light for all pages and posts on the website. This lets you know that everything is up to standards. To do this, follow these steps:

Open page to optimize
Scroll to smartcrawl section
Under google preview, review all of the info to check if it is relevant to the page content.

Now it is time to edit the copy to make sure you get the green check. Edit the meta description, SEO title, description, and keywords until they are approved. Now, for the focus keywords.

Enter Keyword that you want this page to RANK for. Be sure to not include stop words. For more information on how to do this, see https://premium.wpmudev.org/docs/wpmu-dev-plugins/smartcrawl/#chapter-6

Once you have entered the focus keywords, hit “REFRESH”. You should now see “SEO RECOMMENDATIONS.” Go through each of these and address the problems where it is appropriate. (SEO Analysis First, then hit refresh)? You should aim for a Flysh Kincaid readability score of 60-70% for the best results. Next up, customize the description and featured image for your social media pages and add your logo and alt text to the image. Finally, as you see on the following page, set the indexing, canonical, 301 redirect, and automatic linking to the settings you choose. Be sure to set the “sitemap priority” to automatic prioritization.

Check the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards

The W3C has a very extensive checklist of things to abide by when setting up your website. Their aim is to make sure your website can conform to the needs of the disadvantaged, leaving nobody excluded from experiencing your digital offering. Examples of the accessibility challenges that a web user might face include: visually impaired, hearing impaired, color blindness, fine motor skill challenges, and reading difficulties.According to the W3C, “The Web is designed to work for all people equally.” By sticking to many of our tips and following our checklists, you are already adhering to many of their guidelines. For a more detailed list of their recommendations, you can visit their website at www.W3.org