This week we wanted to run you through a little term known as SEO.

So, what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the practise of increasing the quantity and the quality of the traffic your website receives through organic search results.

When building a website, it is a crucial part of any SEO strategy, flagging up technical issues before they cause too much damage to your search rankings.

It’s all about links

One of the most common issues associated with SEO is broken, bad, non-secure, or even missing links on a website.

The most common link issue we tend to see on websites are low quality links. These are links that are connected to third party websites that don’t add any value to your search rankings. Broken Links and Dead Links are also extremely common - these are links that have expired, or that have been incorrectly embedded in a website; they lead to nothing.

Non-secure links are littered throughout webpages across the web, they are especially common in sites that have migrated from HTTP to HTTPs.

Content

Google tells developers that the most important ranking factor attributed to your website is content. As you can imagine, trying to quality control content is difficult to identify as it is subjective. This is why Google relies on other signals such as user experience, inbound links, and performance metrics to determine the ‘quality’ of every page on your website.

However, there are two ways we can look to quantify the use of Quality - the first is something knows as ‘Thin Content’. Thin content are pages that lack enough content to justify being a serpent web page. The second is duplicated content, as it sounds, this is multiple pages that have the same content on them.

This rule isn’t necessarily applicable to all your website pages, google can recognise when you have an ‘index’ or ‘about’ page that will inherently have less content on it. When it comes to duplicate content, google is much tougher on websites, as it is common for many sites to simply copy products in a catalogue and spread them across numerous pages - in order to look more full and substantial.

Titles

Page titles give google one of the strongest on-page signals, as it provides key information about the content displayed on the page. The most common issues that arise are: missing page titles, vagueness, relevancy, and titles being too long to show in the SERP’s.

The most egregious page titles problems crop up on sites that are showing deceptive, dishonest, or click-bait titles to drive clicks. Be honest about what is on each page to make sure this doesn’t seriously harm your rankings.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are what provide users with accurate context about what is on a page before they click on it. The most common issue that crops up with meta descriptions is not that they could be misleading or inaccurate, but that they doesn’t exist at all. Not having this info forces Google to only show the opening sentence on your web page. Make sure that yours are the perfect length - not too long or too short, as these can be hard to see in organic listings.

Loading

This one is unfortunately common, in fact this is one of the most common issues that is flagged during SEO audits. Google is cracking down on this by making the penalty for slow pages even heavier.

In May 2021 , Google will be rolling out a new page signal tool that will measure and benchmark websites for loading times - as part of their new ‘Core Web Initiate’. Pages that fail this test, by failing to load in 2.5 seconds or less, will miss out on a small rankings boost. This leads us onto our next issue..

Image Optimisation

When it comes to uploading and picking pictures for your website, it’s a general rule that keeping the image file size under 1MB is a necessity. Of course, if you are running a photography blog, or specialising in high-quality imagery, then this rule won’t apply. However, to keep your page fast and snappy, try and keep all images the right size.

Another common issue that is found with images is missing alt-text . Google look for this text for users who are vision impaired, therefore may not be able to see what the image should be. Google also uses this information to rank and deliver image results.

While these are by no means all the factors that contribute to a bad page ranking by google, they are certainly a good start to get you on your way up! Never underestimate the power SEO has over your website’s performance.

If you want to know more about what you can do to optimise your site for SEO, get in touch with a member of the team today!