In-depth On-Site SEO Checklist for 2019

Not everything is a ranking factor. Some are for usability, accessibility, and branding. And some of these may not apply to you.

1. Meta Tags

Title Tags – You should include a title with every page on your website. It provides web crawlers with context for indexing and ranking while providing visitors with an insight into your content. Your title should be kept under 70 characters. Doing so will keep your titles from being shortened at the tops of browsers or tabs where they are normally displayed
Description Tags – Optimize the description portion of your markup by ensuring there is a maximum length, with spaces, of no more than 200 characters. Though the description has no value for search ranking, it adds usability and can either drive traffic to or away from, your website. Anything over that character count can result in your descriptions being truncated, or maybe not even being used within SERPs.
Geo-Targeting – Include Geo-meta tags, which provide context for localized searches. Mobile searches rely heavily upon this metric. Use www.geo-tag.de to automatically generate Geo-meta tags.

Language – Ensure you are using appropriate language tags. W3C recommends the use of an HTML attribute instead of the old method of using a meta entry.
Multiple Locations – Multi-regional and multilingual sites should reflect their versatility with easy to discern navigational elements, multi-regional meta tags, and text to help visitors get to the part of the site most appropriate for them.
Hreflang Attribute – HTML markup using the hreflang attribute should be utilized to allow browsers and search engines to control for language automatically.
Canonical Tags – Employ canonical tags to keep from being penalized for duplicate text. In situations where your website’s information needs to appear in more than one place, this coding element lets Google and other search engines know you are not trying to game the system.