My SEO checklist for blog posts

Here’s the checklist we work through when publishing blog posts for Saber Feedback. Maybe it is useful to you too.

Some of this checklist is specific to the way we use Jekyll.


After a blog post is written or updated, check the following before and after publishing:

Content

  • Has the copy been proof-read by another human being?
  • Is the publish date correct?
  • If updating an existing post, have you changed the publish date to the date of the update?
  • Is the category correct?
  • Is the permalink correctly based on the page title and target keyword? For example the blog post “Does your business need a user feedback tool” is targeting the keyword “user feedback tool”, so the permalink should be “/blog/user-feedback-tool/”
  • Is the permalink all lower case and ending with a forward slash?

Title

  • Does the HTML “Title” represent the page theme?
  • Is the Title between 40 and 65 characters long? (preferably max 60; don’t include product name)
  • Does the page title use “sentence case”? That is, only first word and proper nouns capitalised.

Description

  • Does the HTML description meta tag offer a snippet that is suitable for the Google search results page?
  • Is the description between 50 and 300 characters long, but ideally up to 160 characters?
  • Do the description and title address the needs of the searcher, and not just push our product?

Links

  • Does the link to the page in the blog article list look correct?
  • Do all images have suitable alt tags?
  • Do all links work and open the intended page?
  • Are internal links correctly excluding the domain name?
  • Do we have incoming internal links pointing to this page?

Appearance

  • Does the page render as expected on mobile?
  • Do all images render well on retina displays? normal displays? mobile devices?

Promotion

  • Has the blog post been promoted on our social media channels?
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