SEO checks to improve rankings
Responsive web design test
By using Google’s mobile-friendly tester, it checks for if your website is mobile-responsive, allowing it to be easily accessible by mobile and tablet devices.
Having a responsive website is known to be a ranking factor for some search engines, such as Google. This is because your website is more accessible with a responsive design than without, allowing it to improve the accessibility factor.
Check for a meta title
The meta title tag should be SEO friendly and well-optimised, using your targeted keywords whilst keeping in mind the page’s relevance. Doing so will help target customer’s search queries be more relatable and relevant to your website.
For best practices for the title tag, you can read Google’s official starter documentation.
Check for a meta description
A meta description is very much similar to the meta title, however, not a ranking factor. The meta description also appears in search results, which helps to describe the topic of your page.
Similarly to the meta title, the meta description should also be optimised for keywords to show both relevance and relatability for the website visitor. As in Google, these keywords are bolded when the visitor searches for those terms, urging them to click onto your listing — helping to improve your click-through-rate.
For best practices, you should again refer to Google’s starter documentation.
Check H1 & H2 tags
Heading tags can range from H1–6, with H1 and H2 likely to be the most influential for SEO purposes.
Using heading tags will allow you to optimise your content with relevant keywords, allowing you to rank better for search terms.
These tags will also allow your website to show the structure and hierarchy of your content, which is important for search engines (such as Google) to understand.
Check missing alt texts
Easy accessibility to your website is important for both the search engine and visitor. Using alt text allows your website to become more accessible for visually impaired people and screen readers.
Having alt text in your images is also an opportunity for allowing more use of keywords throughout your content — allowing you to rank higher not only in normal results but in image-results too.
Check for inline CSS
The inline CSS check is tested by looking for an inline style attribute in your website’s source code.
Having inline CSS is something you should try to avoid (HTML tags that contain the style attribute for example).
This is because CSS styles should all be kept in one file, to allow the same styles to be used throughout the whole website and not just one page.
However, if you have a bespoke dynamic WordPress website; developers may use inline background-image CSS styles to cater to the content management side of things — making this SEO optimisation unavoidable.
Check for a favicon
Favicons are used as an icon to represent your website. These are often shown beside the browser tab’s title on most modern browsers.
Favicons can also be used for when saving links to mobile or tablet device’s home-screens, as app-like icons.
Add Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a software that can provide you with important metrics about your website.
Using Google Analytics is rumoured to be a ranking factor for Google in the SEO world.
We believe that this may be due to the fact that you’re using Google’s product and therefore building an element of trust with them.
Nonetheless, you should always install this software to monitor your SEO rankings.
Create a robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is often located at your domain’s root URL, followed by “/robots.txt” as a suffix.
Having a robots file allows your website to tell search engines such as Google, which pages to track and which pages to exclude from their results.
This can help crawl-bots such as Googlebot send crawlers to the right pages around your website and not waste time crawling and indexing unnecessary URLs.
Google has its own robots.txt tester which you can use if you have the website verified under your Google Search Console account.
Intermediate and advanced SEO
The above SEO ranking factors are just some of the SEO improvements you can make to better rank your website on search engines. If you’d like to implement these and even cover the advance, please be sure to contact us to receive an affordable quotation.