Most people have a short attention span especially when browsing online.  A recent survey showed that only half of internet users would spend longer than 15 seconds waiting for a site to load. Many stated that it might discourage them from visiting the site again in the future.

Maintaining site speed is not only vital for developing visitor loyalty, but it is also important for maintaining great SEO. Search engines want to deliver the best results as quickly as possible. Inevitably, slow loading speeds will result in a low time spent on the site and high bounce rates (when users click on your site without visiting any other pages), which cause search engines to rank your site lower in results pages.

Site speed is as important to your SEO strategy as completing keyword research and maintaining a relevant blog. Making sure your website hosting generates the optimum conditions for your site speed is crucial to your success and will improve your overall SEO efforts.

When using Google have you ever noticed those small paragraphs of text under each result? That is a meta description – and the link above which sits below the URL is called a meta title.

Meta titles and descriptions tell users what the site is about before they open it. They are concise, simple pieces of HTML code found in every web page and act as a small summary or preview.

Meta titles and descriptions are absolutely vital in driving traffic to your site. Users frequently choose whether the page listed is relevant and likely to answer their questions by reading that title and description.

An XML file is a sitemap and is basically a list of all of your website’s URLs. It acts as ‘roadmap’ for your website and points search engines such as Google to the most important pages on your website. XML files are very useful for large websites that have archives or a large volume of media-rich content such as videos and images.

Search engines will be able to discover your website and index it If the pages on your website are linked properly regardless of whether or not you have a sitemap. That said, we would still recommend having an XML sitemap as your website will be indexed quicker. This increases the likelihood of your website getting ranked in SERPs.

On page SEO, or on-site SEO, refers to the process of optimising the content that is on your web pages. Making sure that your content is fully optimised for not only your customers but also search engines will contribute to increasing your ranking in search results pages which means more organic traffic driven to your website. On page SEO assists search engines understanding the context behind your content and how relevant it is to search queries.

On page SEO also involves looking at other aspects of your website such as the number of times your keywords are mentioned on each page, and whether your content is broken up with headings. The ease by which your content can be read can impact your on-page SEO score. For example, splitting long passages of text with sub-headings will make it easier for customers to absorb the content they are reading. Scattering keywords or phrases throughout the text confirms to search engines what the web page is about.

Another factor that helps improve your on page SEO is the use of external links. Linking to other pages on the same topic is a further way of letting search engines know what your pages contain. In addition, it also shows that the information on your website is reputable and of good quality. Meta titles and descriptions are shown in SERPs and are what searchers see first. By including your keywords in both your meta title and description you can increase your click-through rate.

Some factors of on page SEO overlap with technical SEO. For example, by making sure your images are sized correctly, you can keep them at a high quality whilst increasing the loading speed of your web pages.

Structured data is defined data that is searchable, easy to find and evaluate. Including structured data on your webpage allows search engines such as Google categorise and classify your site more easily.

Structured data is often quantitative - it involves numbers and/or other data that can be counted. For example, structured data on a cooking blog would consist of baking times and ingredient amounts.

A robots.txt file tells search engines and their associated ‘crawlers’ what URLs the crawler can use to access your website and is used mainly to manage crawler traffic to your site.

404 or HTTP 404 Not Found errors are response status codes that indicate the server cannot find a page or resource. Links that result in a 404 are considered ‘broken’ or ‘dead’.

Whilst not necessarily impacting your SEO, they may cause visitors to your site to close the window or navigate away. As such, it’s best to fix a 404 error as soon as possible by setting up a link redirect to another page.

A canonical tag tells search engines what page should be displayed in search results. If you have two pages with identical content, adding a canonical tag informs search engines what the master page is and which page is the copy.

Canonical tags are an effective way of telling Google, Bing and other search engines which URLs they should be indexing, and prevent the issues that can arise from duplicate pages.