5 tips for optimising the SEO structure of a website

"The expression colossus with feet of clay comes from a story in the book of Daniel in the Bible; it refers to a seemingly invulnerable power built on a fragile foundation."

Too many companies invest a lot of time, money, people and thought into SEO strategies that don't work.

Why?

Some organisations and companies have not, for example, prepared the search engines for the correct interpretation of their content strategy. The purpose of this article is to give you some simple tips on the basics that can contribute to a healthy search engine optimisation of your website.

1 - Why improve the *technical* SEO structure of a website?

Having a nice website is good, but what's the point if nobody sees it?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you drive high quality traffic to your website by placing your page at the top of Google's organic results. To put it crudely, it is defined as being the first result when a user searches for your product or service.

Inbound marketing strategies are MUCH more effective than outbound, because it's about the customer getting closer to you, not the other way around.

They are looking for you, so you are there to help them. I let you imagine the difference in the sales process compared to more intrusive sales strategies (phone, email, etc) for example.

So how can you improve your SEO performance? In this article you will find the 5 essential pillars when building a site to start on the right foot.

2 - What are the 3 main performance factors that impact my seo?

I love saying this, but SEO is like baking. There is a recipe and ingredients. If you follow it step by step, you can't go wrong! Algorithms are constantly changing, but today there are three definite factors that are important when it comes to optimising your SEO.

2.1 Speed of loading your site

People don't like to wait. This has a direct impact on your conversion rate. According to a Google x Deloite study:

"Reducing loading time by 0.1 seconds can result in an 8% increase in conversion rates."

Just, Wow. The loading speed of your site is therefore essential, as you will have understood.

So it's a simple reasoning that applies to the loading time of your site. Search engines want to provide the best possible experience for their users, which means :

The performance of your site will be better -> thus offering a better user experience to your visitors -> thus improving your SEO performance

Pro tips: use high quality web hosting servers (e.g. AWS service) to get a quick and plugin-free improvement in load time.

2.2 Accessibility of your pages

Search engines, such as Google, have chosen to make the web inclusive. No one should be excluded and everyone should be able to benefit from the functionalities offered by the tool. What are the elements that determine the accessibility of a web page?

- Image alt attribute: alt="description of your image" allows search engines to read and therefore understand the intention behind your image. This alt attribute of an image, for example, will help search engines represent what is being described, whether it is a blind person or someone with a slow connection where images take time to load.

- Contrast ratios (WCAG rating) According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), standards bodies and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), websites must ensure that all content can be read by everyone.

- Adaptive display. According to recent statistics, mobile searches have now surpassed desktop searches in number. Your site must therefore be accessible and clear on all platforms to provide the best possible experience for users when using search engines. Mobile SEO can become an important strategic action for technical traffic in 2021.

2.3 Good technical basis (Hn, title, schema.org)

The famous "best googles practices". I see that many sites are struggling with their content marketing, keyword strategy and so on, but don't... start with the basics!

Search engine algorithms have a lot of work to do. The Web is filled with an abundance of content, and their goal is to filter it, match it to user queries and provide the right answers as efficiently as possible. Like any busy individual, search engines like Google spend most of their time processing, crawling and indexing the pages that exist on the World Wide Web. You can help them by applying some good practices."

3 - The 5 best practices on Google to optimize my site

Google has set the rules of the game. Follow them to be rewarded (by moving up in the search results).

3.1 Reducing image size improves web loading speed (without plugin)

The heavier your image(s), the longer it takes for the search engine to load them and the slower the "time to first entry" of your site. When uploading JPEG, PNG, etc. images to your site, be sure to limit their weight as much as possible. At Digidop for example, we never load images on our sites with more than 200Kb per image when we develop sites using Webflow.

How to reduce the weight of your image?

Resize images (with Figma or ILOVEIMG)

adapt the size of your file to the layout you wish to import it to.

There is no need to load a 1200 x 1200 pixel logo if you want to display it as a 32x32 pixel icon.

Compressing images with free tools (ILOVEIMG)

We've adopted a foolproof SEO friendly technique from Digidop. Use the FREE ILOVEIMG tool to resize images without losing their aspect ratio, then compress the resized images (the steps should be fairly simple to follow). On average, this can reduce the size of your image file by 10 times.

Pro tips configuration Lazy Load: "Lazy Loading" is a term used in computer programming to describe a type of resource retrieval that defers the loading of content until it is needed. The content may include secondary resources or parts of the main resource that are not visible at first. Lazy loading of your images on your website allows you to have them load on click or scroll. Lazy loading can be very useful for first page loading scenarios.

3.2 Adding structured data: schema.org

Structured data or schema.org is essential if you want your website to be search engine friendly. It provides a defined structure that search engines can read and analyse when they arrive at your site, saving them time as it ensures how they will interpret the content they find when visiting your site. To add this information to your site, follow the many tutorials and blogs that explain how to easily add structured data to any web page using simple HTML scripts that only require a few clicks!

Our favorite markup at Digidop ? FAQ pages, without a doubt. By adding structured data to your FAQs you may have the privilege of seeing your questions and answers displayed at the top of search engines! Photo attached

Need a tool to help you write your rich data? See our article on the 10 best tools for SEO.

3.3 Compliance with the Hn hierarchy structure

Like an essay outline, headings, subheadings and sub-subheadings do not fit anywhere and in any direction on the web! It is important to optimise their organisation. Yes, that's Google's optimization guidelines!

Alors c'est quoi une bonne <!-- fs-richtext-ignore --><Hn> structure ?

✅ 1 single H1 tag per page: the most important one

✅ Pas de saut de <!-- fs-richtext-ignore --><Hn> : H2>H3>H4 puis H3>H2>H3>H4>H5

✅ The H1 tag at the top of your HTML code

❌ H2&GT;H5&GT;H1&GT;H3

3.4 Attribute tag ALT images on each image

Now that your images are optimised for speed (cropped, resized and compressed), it is time to tag them! Indeed, search engines are not yet able to see images, but they can read code! They rely on the alt attributes or the text you insert in the code. It is therefore imperative to include descriptions for your images so that they can first understand what is presented and then describe it to your users who have disabilities such as blindness, etc.

Important: Don't use this tag to include your keywords like crazy. A reminder of the best practice guidelines on Google: provide the best user experience... So be as sincere and precise as possible in the visual description of the image in question

You don't know on which images the ALT attributes of your site are not defined? Quick tutorial that explains you, in 1 minutes, how to identify all the untagged image files.

3.5 Longueur optimisée des <!-- fs-richtext-ignore --><titles> et <meta> description

You've already read a few articles on the subject so I'll skip step 0. Well, no, I'm going to remind you anyway.

Step 0, make sure every page on your site has a title tag and meta description. This is the most important step to increase your CTR in the SERPs by using an optimal title for each page of your website or blog post. Make it catchy, but simply state what the article is about. It is important to add keywords that are relevant to that specific article, as writing something short says more than writing something too long without saying anything useful for the reader. (So I'll stop here for this step 🙂 )

Now we go to the next level 🚀

To optimize this resource and still be user-centric(here are some reminders about Google's goals Google's main goal is to ? *All in chorus* Give users the best possible experience on their browser!) To do this, Google suggests you use pa....

Boom. Frustration. The sentence is cut off.

Because yes, when your title or meta description exceeds a certain number of characters it appears cut, or ends up as '..." which is obviously not optimal for optimizing its click rate and therefore its SEO, and therefore its conversion of new customers and therefore its inbound strategy etc etc, you understood the logic 😆.

It is therefore important to ensure that a precise framework is respected:

✅ Title tag 45 to 55 characters

✅ Meta tag 145 to 155 characters

If you use Webflow you can easily get an overview of how your tags will appear in the SERP. Otherwise, use a character counting solution to quickly test your tags.

Conclusion of the article

Rule number 1: When you do SEO, think logically and optimise the user journey.

Rule number 2: Respect the 5 essential practices for a seo friendly construction base

- Structure Hn type drafting plan

- Title tag with optimised size title max 55 meta max 155

- Alt attribute on all your images and as precise as possible

- Resized and compressed image

- Responsive display (Mobile first ? )

Bonus: Tools to use to audit my site

Speed, tag, indexing problem, calculation of loading speed per second There are plenty of tools! The chance! We help you a little to sort with the SEO diagnostic toolbox preferred by Digidop ( or Link to the article the 10 best tools to optimize your seo)

- Loading speed :

- TestMySite : Think with google

- Google Ligthouse

- ALT, Hn, Title and meta attributes :

Chrome Detailed SEO extension

- Schema.org

Merkle'sSchema markup generator

Do you want to go further in optimising and speeding up the loading speed?

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