Information is power, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing. SEO has been around for decades but keeps growing in terms of how it’s practiced as well as the realms it has spread to. The worst part of any evolving concept is finding all the information you need about it in one place.

With the various specializations, subcategories and methods involved in SEO, it’s almost impossible to find a complete guide to what exactly you have to do to improve your SEO.

We’ve curated a list of all the essentials you’ll need to keep your SEO efforts in check. Here’s an overview of the main aspects of SEO we’ve covered:

Basics

Local

Content

Content Outreach

Link Building

Technical SEO

Google Penalties

Social Media

Keywords

Website

Mobile Optimization

Usability

Conversion Science

Project Management

Basics

, but don’t expect it to help your natural search rankings

Use Adwords for your paid search

Get your CEO to contribute to your site. It increases your site’s credibility when he/she is a part of the conversation

Ask your local partners to

Call people to maintain your online relationship with them (phone calls are much harder to ignore than emails)

are based on the SEO work on your site, and you better be following all the rules if you want to rank.

to manage your JavaScript code and keep your page

Continually follow up on your

on your competitor and list yourself wherever they are listed

Report your competitors if you see them breaking

and refer to their original source to authenticate them

to get more content shared and also increase your chances of them linking out to your site

Engage with the other members in the industry by

or “Write a Review” CTA to take your customers to Google+ reviews

like Yoast, Local SEO,etc to optimize your wordpress blog for SEO

. Check Google Search Console for 404/500 errors, duplicate content, missing titles, and other errors that Google may have found.

Keep up with any

. Not only does this provide users with a way of “seeing” your business before they get there, but it also makes your business stand out

Make your Google+ local business profile even better by implementing a

Message all of your customers who’ve left you a review on Yelp and offer them an incentive to come back.

If you’re a restaurant, use an indexable menu.

to generate more reviews from customers

Update your address and phone numbers if you have any old citations

Make sure your pin on any map is accurate

Have you considered getting yourself listed on

Make sure you are listed in all major directories as well as industry specific ones

Ensure that your profiles on major local directory search sites including Google+, Yelp and Yellowpages are claimed( Here’s a DIY Step-by-Step Guide on claiming your listing)

Keep your business profile updated with accurate information, photos, work videos, etc

Make sure you have an active Google My Business page. (You can read about creating a Google My Business page over here.)

for your business to improve your rankings for local keywords

Check to see if your content is properly schema-ed using the

Include NAP on videos as well

It is better to use a

Don’t blindly copy SEO strategies because every company and website are unique

Your NAP must be consistent throughout the web. Use a tool like

Make sure your NAP is available on every page of your website

on Twitter to come up with content ideas

Brainstorm with your whole team. The person with the most number of ideas gets a cash bonus. This is a great way to make content ideation more fun and generate more ideas!

is a great tool to help you curate stuff from the web that could provide inspiration for content ideas

Create a guide for your favorite tool. (Check to see if there’s any around first! )

Create a case study on how things could go wrong. Everybody has studies on things going great.

Post on specific Facebook Groups related to your market asking them about what they have trouble with and how you can help.

Send emails to all of your friends asking for content ideas.

BuzzSumo is a great tool to generate content ideas and

that has a wide reach on the web.

Promote your content on premium websites using tools like

. This tool shows what exactly people are searching for on the Google search. Also it’s a great alternative to Google Keyword Tools.

on Facebook/Survey Monkey, collect the data and convert it into a post.

to get influencers contributions to your content. This is a great way to create a better content and also get the featured influencers to share it.

. You can convert content into slides, infographics or videos.

to see if you have made any spelling or grammar mistakes.

is a great example of it.

Show the read time of a piece to give readers an idea of the depth of your content.

and make it easy for people to link you. You can let users embed them to their sites.

to help you get your content out there.

Run an A/B test on your blog for your pop up messages and see which one works better.

Check how far people get into your content. Use

to come up with better headline ideas.

and find places where you can add fresh content.

on your site to test for duplicate content

Maintain the same theme for all your content

that can easily be shared, rated, reviewed, and commented on.

Search engines can ban your site if you violate copyright laws (or any other laws)

Don’t create content that is different for different IP addresses, OS or browsers. It will look like you’re trying to show the search engine something other than what your readers see

on your page are surrounded by keyword rich text. Search engines look at that content when defining your video.

like youtube, yahoo, msn, etc to get them into SERPs

have your videos on sites

on Google to increase the visibility of your videos for crawling.

Create a video sitemap and add it to your Webmaster account

Make sure the text in your RSS feed is optimized

When you optimize your blog post,

Track how users interact with your content using

for each page so that humans and search engines can understand

Use product images with captions to explain your value proposition

Use videos to keep your visitors engaged

Don’t make many tiny changes to your content because a search engine will think you’re just trying to change your last update date

, it makes it harder to rank.

Your content should be for people, not search engines

on a regular basis to keep getting crawled

Go beyond just written content. Create

on your website to provide quality content

to help you find email IDs.

If you aren’t able to find email Ids, go to whois.domaintools.com and enter the domain name to get the email ids.

and outreach to them about your content piece.

Tag influncer on Facebook when you mention them.

Mention influncer on Twitter when you cite them in your article.

Reach out to authors with similar content.

BuzzStream is one of the popular tools that could make it easier for you to outreach relevant people.

Try searching email ids on Google by using different varitation. Eg.

Reach out to sharers of similar content.

Invite other influencers to write on the similar topics.

to find influencer email and connect with them.

Find similar piece of content to comment on and really engage with the community.

Ask and you shall

; go forth and build links!

can be a great link building strategy if done right

Who knew that typos could result in backlinks?

To quote Agnus Martin – “I think everyone is born 100 percent ego, and after that it’s just adjustment.”

Do you or does your client offer Wi-Fi on premise? Submit to

; this drives traffic and also results in potential backlinks

Promote your existing content using networks like

and redirect them to appropriate pages

Why not offer pro-bono services in exchange for a link or mention?

Disavow links that may get you into trouble

great for links, and traffic too!

Have you tried

Why don’t you consider

Is there an alumni directory that you can get your client into? Harvard lists all alumni started companies under sections like

for every piece of content you create

Ever tried building links using broken links?

Pages containing mostly links aren’t favoured by search engines because they aren’t considered good content

Linking out to relevant sites or blogs can bring you backlinks

Be careful when linking out to other websites. Only link to sites that are relevant to your content

Your homepage should link to your most important pages

Search engines usually don’t include pages that are neither externally nor internally linked to.

. A website without many branded links tends to be associated to manipulative link building

Always try to get branded backlinks

Try to get links from websites who link to your competitor

Get in touch with other small businesses in your industry so you can mutually benefit from links to each other

Use relationships to build backlinks – you can always ask your customers, partners or suppliers to link to your site

Keep track of any bad links through link audits.You can use tools like removeem to make it easier to identify and remove bad links

Your backlinks should be from a wide network of IP address

and .gov domains are a great asset to your website. Try to find any non-profit .edu or .gov sites that are looking for sponsors

The best backlinks take a lot of effort to get. So be ready to work hard for them.

Build links slow and steady. There is no maximum number of links you should have on your website

Try to incorporate your main keyword (or a related word) into your page URL

is great for finding broken links, errors, and crawl problems.

and begin building links, as they are the most important aspect of SEO.

Try to build links from trusted sources; it shows that you are also a trusted site

Have more relevant backlinks to improve your rankings

or backlinks and get penalized!

Create content for other sites so that you can get more backlinks and traffic from them.

Make sure you do a CAPS redirect

Check your website for iframes by running a ‘<iframe> site:{site.com}’ query on Google. If you have iframed content, you should attempt to publish this on your website to get more juice from Google-bots

to check if all pages are indexed; if specific pages are not indexed, you need to do something to get them picked up

If you have a fairly large site, use something like

your outbound links to double check to ensure that you’re not looking like a link farm to Google

You can use

and eliminate anything that’s over 75 charecters as much as possible

to check your HTTP header codes at scale.

to ensure that you’re not redirecting many inner pages to your homepage. This appears manipulative.

. You could actually use something like

Avoid IP detection for search engine bots since most Googlebot queries will come from US servers.

Use something like

to improve caching on your site

to know when your page load time goes up

on your website to ensure that you’re not going to get into trouble.

to block needless pages from being crawled

Even if you have robots.txt setup, use the

for URLs that are not canonical

to get rid out of bad backlinks.

to find if your website has ever been hit by Penguin.

to check for Google algo changes so that you can get a headstart

that could result in a penalty.

to see if your site has been hit by a penalty.

Check to see if you’ve been hit by Google Penguin

Use Quality Scores on twitter and Facebook as a metric to measure performance

Include links to your social profiles in your email signature

to monitor Tweets and mentions for partnership and link building opportunities.

Interview members of your local community and distribute that article on social media

Youtube videos should be associated with your Google Business page

Get personal with your off-site SEO (emails, tweets, and guest posts) to improve engagement

Use social media to complement your SEO strategy

Get your content on slideshare

Thank your readers and followers to widen your network

Get new traffic on old content

to automate your sharing so you don’t have to spend too much time on it.

Use tools like Buffer, Tweetdeck and

Follow interesting people to get new ideas for content and marketing

Make sure your server can handle traffic

– People love lists (top 10s, Fav 5) and this kind of content tends to go viral if it is engaging.

Use Pinterest to find out who’s pinning your content and contact them

Use pictures to capture your audience’s attention (especially on twitter)

Shorten your links on posts/tweets and use more hashtags when promoting posts

Make your content shareable through various forms of social media

tool to extract the email IDs of your competitor’s Facebook page

Create a WCA (website custom audience) on facebook to retarget visitors who have visited your website

You can get even more keyword ideas if you use

to come up with more long-tails to focus on. You never know what keywords you’ve missed!

You can use alternate forms of your keywords such as synonyms, plural, gerunds, and active verbs to make your content more readable while still maintaining your keyword optimization

Use keywords as anchor text. Links are given more priority on web pages.

Your keywords should be in your URL, page title, img tags, headers, and meta description

Each page of your site should focus one particular keyword you want to target

For smaller events, it’s always better to use less popular keywords to reduce any competition with other more known associations

Long tail keywords are a cheaper way to get more traffic

Use keyword phrases in your meta description

Keep your keywords together. It’ll make it easier to rank for keyword phrases

Get keywords from sources such as your customers, suppliers, friends, partners etc

Do research on your keywords before you optimize them to make sure they bring in sales

Use these keywords in your title tags (good titles bring in more traffic!)

Use your own website search bar as a data mine for key words.

You should use your website to build trust among your visitors and engage them so that you can eventually convert them

Your site must be easy to use, navigate AND crawl

Keep your pages close to the root directory, they’ll get priority over the ones lower on your sub-directories

The best way to get a new website crawled is by have one high quality backlink to it

When you buy a domain, be wary of services that block ownership information. Google might think you’re a spammer

Don’t worry too much about PageRank. A page with a high pr can still be outranked by a page with a low pr

Keep your load time to the minimum using Google Page Insight

Make sure your title tags less than 65 characters, so that it isn’t shortened in SERPs

Also try to keep your meta description tags less than 155 characters

If your site is in a language other than english, make sure you mention it in your meta description

Meta refresh tags don’t inform search engines why a redirect is happening, so it’s better to stick to a permanent HTTP 301 redirect

Use HTTP 302 redirects only as a way to tell search engines that you are temporarily redirecting a URL

Only use robots.txt to hide small sections of your site; if you overdo it, your site may be marked “forbidden”

Use search engine accessible text on your site— at least 100 words— to enable search engines to easily understand what the topic of your page is.

Have a separate city and state landing page

If you have a business that has multiple locations, then link the specific location pages of the website.

If you are a single location then link to the home page of the website.

Use a reliable hosting company to avoid any accessibility issues

Make sure your site is regularly backed up so you don’t lose data or rankings

Make sure your site works on any browser and every screen resolution

Older pages rank better, so keep your site live as long as you can

Stick to .com and .org domains over .biz or .us to increase your credibility

Have URLs that are simple and clear

Hyphenate words to separate them.

URL extensions don’t really matter for SEO (ie html, htm, etc)

Your H1 and H2 tags can be used as a way to include alternative target keywords on your page

You can use rich snippets to give search engines any extra information they need to improve your appearance on SERPs

Redirect your old URLs to new ones so that any links leading to the old one will not be wasted.

Use canonical tags, Google Webmaster Tools, or 301 redirects to alter any duplicate content that could cause your site to be indexed and penalized

Don’t ignore your 404 pages . A couple of them here and there are normal, but make sure it doesn’t happen too often.

Take advantage of them and use them to redirect your visitors back to your site.

If you don’t want to redirect them, why don’t you entertain them? Or better yet, give them the reason for coming to your site… your CTA of course!

Optimize your images with keywords in its filename and img alt tag

Enable the “Enhanced image search” option in your Google Webmaster account to help google find your images easily and help your SEO

Optimize your title tag with the city/cities & services you offer.

Add product or service keywords in the title.

Set your website to load on www or non-www

Use Browseo to find any technical errors

Use Google’s keyword research tool to find out what users are searching for.

Check out your competitor’s link profiles using tools like Ahrefs Link Diagnosis, Majestic SEO, and Open Site explorer.

Link to your internal pages in an SEO-friendly way . Give a description that allows search engines to understand it. However, avoid using anchor text in your global navigation because it will look over-optimized. It’s better to stick to in-content links.

Create an XML sitemap to be submitted to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

if you are worried about duplicate content on your website, you can use an HTML sitemap to highlight the URL you want to show

Create a robots.txt file to submit to Webmaster Tools

Use My Site Auditor Report to double-check everything once you are live.

Avoid frames whenever possible and if you do use them, use a noframe tag

Be careful with flash . If your site is loaded with flash elements, have an alternate version of your site in HTML so that search engines and non-flash browsers can view it.

You may use flash for non-priority sections on your page that don’t need to be navigated by a search engine