The SEO Basics Checklist is our new small series, in which over the next few days we are going to explain in a very easy way the most important factors that an SEO Professional evaluates when they assess a website, to identify eventual errors and problems in it.

When you open up Google to do a search, the Title Tag is what you see on top of each result. It should be less than 67 characters long to be entirely viewable and contain your focused keyword on this page, which must match the page’s content in a natural way.

Generally, an H1 tag is the title description that Search Engines use to determine what a piece of content is about. Having explained this, it becomes obvious that your focused keyword for this page must be present here, too.

In the subtitles of your article, you can include all your supporting keywords as H2, H3, H4 etc. Make sure you use each of them carefully: the last thing you want to do is confusing the Search Engines on what they should be looking for and how they should push your content out for ranking.

With those titles and subtitles, when we read an article, it’s actually like reading a book, and when Google bots crawl your website, they first look for an H1 tag, to identify that this is the focus of this article.

The meta description, instead, can be 155 characters long. You should make sure that your targeted keyword is present here, as well.

Read more: 10 tips on how to write a good meta description that increases your ranking

Some keywords are extremely competitive. Think of “cat food“, for example: 36,300,000 results. If you want to get a chance to rank for it, you need to let Google know, that page of yours is about “cat food“, in all the places in which Google will try to detect what that page is about, like title, subtitles and meta description.

In most cases, though, this is not sufficient for ranking. You will also need some other criteria that we will list in the next articles of the SEO Basics Checklist series, but these factors are definitely something you can’t neglect.

We assess almost every day websites with duplicate or missing H1s, meaningless H2 (like “Conclusion“) and no specified meta description (which gets then displayed by Google from odd bits of the page’s copy).

If a webpage lacks an H1,  the Search Engines won’t know what it is about: it is, instead, in your interest to make sure that the most notable things, that you want to be found for, are easy to be found there.

Now the next step you should do is to create for your website a Content-Keyword Map (something we will definitely be dedicating a new article to) to link each existing page to each of element of today’s part of the SEO Basics Checklist series: focus keyword, H1, title, supporting keywords, H2, H3, etc, meta description, links and much more.

Let us know how do you assign your H-tags within your website in our comments and in our Social Media channels.

This process is vital for Search Engine Optimisation but it can be particularly time-consuming. If you need our support, just let us know.