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SEO Cheat Sheet and Checklist

Basics β€Ό

The most important for letting crawlers understand your page.

Meta tags

Add them in the <head> section.

<title>SEO Cheat Sheet</title>
<meta name="description" content="This online SEO cheat sheet lists everyting to rank first...">
<meta name="keywords" content="seo,cheat,sheet">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://htmlcheatsheet.com/seo/" />

Image

<img src="/images/logo.png" alt="cheat sheet" width="36" height="50">

NoFollow Link

<a href="https://htmlcheatsheet.com/" target="_blank" rel="external nofollow">HTML Cheat Sheet</a>
Always follow Google Webmaster Guidelines and avoid blackhat SEO techniques!
Make sure your content is unique, shareable, helpful and informative.

Checklist

Check as many as you can.
On-Page SEO
Keyword in URL, title, description, body. Check readability.
Check links
Check both internal and external links. Scan the site for broken links.
SSL ( https:// )
Set up the hosting SSL certificate to load the site with https:// and redirect with .htacess
User-friendly URLs
Short URLs containing the main keywords. For Wordpress see settings.
Redirect www / non-www
Use only www or non-www versions and redirect to one with .htacess.
Canonical URL
Make sure there's no duplicate content or set up canonical meta tags.
robots.txt
Check your robots.txt and make sure you allow indexing.
ads.txt
For AdSense:
google.com, pub-9728962508602593, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0
Site map
Generate a sitemap page listing all links and submit an XML sitemap to webmaster tools.
Speed up
Check loading speed and improve where possible.
Optimize media
Compress images and other media files that slow down page
Compress code
Minimize your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other codes where possible.
Validate
Crawl your site and look for invalid code and usability issues.
Shareability
Add social share buttons, Facebook like.
Social
Enable commenting, rating and other user interactions.
Mobile friendly
Build responsive design and crawl with Google's mobile friendly tester. It's recommended to have AMP pages.
Content delivery network
A CDN, like Cloudflare improves speed, security and offers free SSL.
Uptime monitors
Get an alert when your server falls down with a free uptime monitor.
Google Analytics
Install a tracking code to analize traffic.
Search Console
Set up Google Search Console and link it to the Analytics account.
Get links
Share your link on relavant sites and forums. Reverse (copy) your competitor’s backlinks (ahrefs (not free) or Ubersuggest). Pursue unlinked mentions.

AdsπŸ“£

We show ads to support this free website.

Structured Data 📉

Describe what's your page about with structured data.
Schemas for structured data encoding on web pages.

JSON

Add script in the <head>

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@graph":[
  {"@type": "WebSite",
    "name": "Text Fancy",
    "url": "https://textfancy.com/",
    "description":"Free online Fancy Text generator"},
  {"@type":"ImageObject",
    "@id":"https://textfancy.com/#primaryimage",
    "url":"https://textfancy.com/img/og.jpg",
    "width":700,
    "height":346,
    "caption":"Fancy Text generator online"}
]}
</script>

Microdata

<body itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage">
<h1 itemprop="name">Fancy Text Generator</h1>
<p itemprop="description">Free online fancy text generators, converters and more..</p>
<div itemprop="publisher" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<h4 class="footer">About <span itemprop="name">Unicode Characters</span></h4>
</div>
<a itemprop="license"
rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/deed.en_US"><img
src="/images/cc_logo.png" alt="Creative Commons logo" /></a>
</body>

Open Graph 🌐

Define social media meta data.
Let Facebook and other social networks understand your page.
Add the og tags in the <head> among other meta tags.

Website

<meta property="og:title" content="Text Fancy" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://textfancy.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://textfancy.com/img/og.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Free online fancy text generators" />

Article

<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:title" content="Fancy text converter">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Text Fancy">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://textfancy.com/font-converter/">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://textfancy.com/img/og.jpg">
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2023-01-01">
<meta property="article:author" content="https://www.facebook.com/Text-Fancy/">

OG image size: 1200 × 630px or 1.9:1 ratio

Robots.txt 🤖

Allow or block web crawlers on your site.
Decide which pages you wish to block by web crawlers.

Allow Everything Except 1 Dir

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Sitemap: https://htmlcheatsheet.com/sitemap.xml

Disallow All

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Block Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /no-index.html

User Agents

  • Googlebot
  • Googlebot-News
  • Googlebot-Image
  • Googlebot-Mobile
  • Mediapartners
  • Bingbot
  • Baiduspider
  • Yandexbot
  • facebot
  • FacebookExternalHit
  • Rogerbot
  • Slurp
  • DuckDuckBot
  • ia_archiver

Arguments

Nofollow, Noindex, Noarchive, NoODP (Do not show Open Directory Project description), or combined (noindex, nofollow)

Noindex Meta Tag

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

NoFollow Link

<a href="https://htmlcheatsheet.com/" target="_blank" rel="external nofollow">HTML Cheat Sheet</a>

.htaccess

A file located in the root directory.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Redirect 301 /wp-login.php http://404.com/
Redirect 301 /xmlrpc.php http://404.com/
Redirect 301 /api.php http://404.com/
Redirect 301 /lequ.php http://404.com/
Redirect 301 /action.php http://404.com/
Redirect 301 /log_in.php http://404.com/

Error pages

ErrorDocument 401 /unauthorized.html
ErrorDocument 403 "Forbidden Error"
ErrorDocument 404 /page-not-found.html
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.example.com/server-error

Permanent Redirect

Redirect 301 /api.php http://404.com/

Force WWW

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

Force Non-WWW

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Force https

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301,NE] 

Force https With JavaScript

var loc = window.location.href+'';
if (loc.indexOf('http://')==0){
  window.location.href = loc.replace('http://','https://');
}

Disable Directory Browsing

Options -Indexes
Enable:
Options +Indexes

Block Hotlinking

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]

Block Access

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Block IP Address

Deny from 123.123.123.123

AdsπŸ“£

We show ads to support this free website.

Languages 💋

Localization and alternate languages

Define for the <html> tag

<html lang="en">

Alternate Language

The linked pages must link back.

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://cube3x3.com/como-resolver-un-cubo-rubik-es/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt" href="https://cube3x3.com/como-resolver-o-cubo-magico-pt/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://cube3x3.com/comment-resoudre-le-cube-rubik-fr/" />

Site Map

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://cube3x3.com/how-to-solve-a-rubiks-cube/</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://cube3x3.com/como-resolver-un-cubo-rubik-es/" />
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt" href="https://cube3x3.com/como-resolver-o-cubo-magico-pt/" />
  </url>
</urlset>

Rich Snippets 💰

Let crawlers understand your content and page structure.

Common Use

Breadcrumb, Business Information, Contact Data, Email Markup, Events, Media Content, Mobile Apps, People, Rating, Recipes

Breadcrumbs

Home / Emojis / Animals

<ol itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BreadcrumbList">
  <li itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ListItem">
    <a itemprop="item" href="https://textfancy.com/emoji/">
      <span itemprop="name">Emojis</span>
    </a>
    <meta itemprop="position" content="1" />
  </li> / 
  <li itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ListItem">
    <a itemprop="item" href="https://textfancy.com/emoji/animals/">
      <span itemprop="name">Animals</span>
    </a>
    <meta itemprop="position" content="2" />
  </li>
</ol>

Rating

🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊 Rating: 5.0 - Review by Frici Koma

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
  <div itemprop="itemReviewed" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
    <span itemprop="name">SEO CheatSheet</span>
  </div>
  <span itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
    <span itemprop="ratingValue">5</span>
  </span> stars -
  <strong>"<span itemprop="name">A good read.</span>" </strong>
  <span itemprop="author">Frici Koma</span>
  <span itemprop="reviewBody">I enjoyed reading the SEO CheatSheet :)</span>
</div>

Site Map 🗺

Lists all pages of a website.

XML file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
 <loc>https://htmlcheatsheet.com/</loc>
 <lastmod>2020-02-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
 </sitemap>
 <sitemap>
 <loc>https://htmlcheatsheet.com/css/</loc>
 <lastmod>2020-01-01</lastmod>
</sitemap>

Link from .htaccess

Sitemap: https://htmlcheatsheet.com/sitemap.xml

Twitter Cards 🐦

Rich media for Twitter sharing.
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://htmlcheatsheet.com/seo/">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="SEO Cheat Sheet">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@RuwixCube">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Short description comes here.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://htmlcheatsheet.com/seo/seo-cheat-sheet.jpg">

Links πŸ”—

About Twitter Cards

AdsπŸ“£

We show ads to support this free website.

Domain 🁚

How to register a domain?

Going online starts with registering a good domain.

.com
Use the most recognizable top-level domain. People type this at default.
Contain keyword
Pick a domain name that contains your keyword. Preferably no numbers and dash.
Buy premium domain
Most good domains are taken. Look around on domain marketplaces and auctions (links below)

Relaunch Checklist

Go through these after a rewamp.

Upgrading, moving to new domain or relaunching a website? Make sure it fulfills everything in the list:

Check internal linking
Update XML Sitemap
Broken link scan
Remove noindex from robots.txt
301 redirect to new URLs
You might go through the launch checklist.

Wordpress 𝓦

Wordpress is the most popular content management system.

SEO Plugins

Set Up Permalinks

Settings / Permalinks: set Post name

Hosting 💻

Ideas related to hosting.
Set up HTTPS
Content Delivery Network
Caching
Firewall
Security
HTML
CSS
Apply CSS
Preview

The SEO Cheat Sheet

This online SEO cheat sheet lists everyting you need to know and do to rank your website as high as possible among the Google search results. It foolows recommendations by Google to build a white hat and spam-free search engine optimisation strategy. There's no need to implement everything in your porject but do as much as you can.

This technical SEO checklist template works great especially for existing websites. It doesn't talk about keyword research, domain registration and the planning before starting a project.

online seo cheatsheet

Make sure you save this link to help your next project.