In the race to appear at the top of Google Search Results, there are many factors that determine where your website will appear on this Internet podium.
The Two Sides of the Google Search Results Coin: Speed and SEO
The first factor that will determine your website’s success on Google will be how efficiently and quickly it loads and works. High-performance websites will result in a better user experience and a better chance that the user purchases your product or service. A slow-loading website can turn potential consumers away, resulting in many missed opportunities.
A faster loading website appears higher on Google Search Results than a slow one, which is why it is important to optimize website performance.
What can I do to check and optimize speed?
To assess your website’s speed, there are a couple free tools available online. Google Pagespeed Insights is a free tool from Google that runs a performance test and also provides tips on how to improve website performance.
3 Tips for increasing website speed and performance:
Optimize Images: Images are an engaging part of your website, but loading them can take some time. To optimize images, it is recommended to compress your images, so that you can improve speed without sacrificing quality.
Minimize Plugins: Plugins that add third-party features can contribute to the design of your website, but also take away from the speed and performance. Every so often, we recommend removing unnecessary plugins.
Minimize JavaScript and CSS Files: This can be done by grouping files. This will help in reducing the HTTP requests made to your website, and help the website load faster.
What can I do to improve SEO?
3 Tips for improving SEO performance:
Quality Content: Publishing relevant content that consistently incorporates keywords is a guaranteed method to help search engines better understand your website and direct the correct Internet users to it.
Update Content: Every so often, it is a good idea to review the content to make sure it is clear and aligns with customer needs. Writing blog posts is another great way to supplement the content on your website.
Metadata: Metadata is a description of content on your webpage that you get to write. It is important. There are different types of metadata: title metadata, description metadata, and title metadata. The first two (title and description metadata) will determine what a user sees when your website appears on Google Search Results. The latter (keyword metadata) is a technique used occasionally to help search engines understand the content of a web page.
Robots.txt: another piece of the SEO puzzle that determines where your website appears on Google search result listings.
What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs on a specific webpage can be accessed. Usually, it is used to prevent a file from appearing on Google.
What is the point?
You may be thinking, hey why would I want to block Google search engine crawlers from accessing pages? Won’t that decrease the visibility of my website? Well, let’s take a look at two of the main applications of Robots.txt:
Block a web page: The blocked URL will still appear in search results, the only difference being that there will no longer be a corresponding description attached to it.
Block a media/resource file: This will prevent images, pdfs, and other non-HTML files from appearing in Google Search results
Why should you block these? The primary goal is to reduce crawl traffic. If your website is overwhelmed by Google search engine crawler requests, Internet users may be unable to access your website. Also, you do not want Google’s crawler to access pages or media on your website that is redundant or unimportant. For example, on an online store with an option to filter products by certain categories, each webpage that displays products of one category will be repeating information on the main online store webpage.
Robots.txt can help search engine crawlers better understand the content of your webpage and help drive the correct traffic to your website. We hope that this overview of Robots.txt helped clarify where Robots.txt fits into the big picture of your website’s search engine presence.
We hope that this overview of the three components of website speed and performance will help give your website the edge in the Google Search Results podium.
If you would like a professional to take a look at your websites overall performance contact a professional at designitup 201.747.2191