How to properly evaluate the quality of your website

One of the main tasks involved with SEO is on page optimisation. It is important that your website is responsive and of a high quality, otherwise both users and Google will not like it.

There are so many different components when it comes to on page optimisation that it can be difficult to know where to start. You must also understand that no website is perfect and there are always improvements you can make to ensure your website is of the highest quality.

As well as this, due to the ever-evolving nature of SEO, on page optimisation needs to be a continuous process. You should look to re-evaluate your website quality on a regular basis to ensure you are keeping up to date with Google’s best practices.

Have a look below at some of the on page tactics you should be looking at on a regular basis:

1. High performing content

One of the most important aspects of your website is the content. Your content needs to be rich and actually useful to readers. If your content is thin and doesn’t provide value to readers then your website is not preforming as well as it should.

Most importantly, your content needs to be unique. You cannot simply copy content from other websites, or even other web pages on your website because Google will pick this up as plagiarism and you could receive a penalty from the search engine giant.

2. H1 tags

This may seem like a small thing, but it is vital that each of your web pages only has one H1 tag. Google bots cannot read your website the same way a person does and heading tags are the way bots understand the hierarchy of the page.

H1 is the main heading tag and there should never be more than one. There can be sub headings within the H1 tag (i.e. H2 tags) and also sub headings within those sub headings (i.e. H3 tags), and so on.

3. XML sitemap

By including a XML sitemap on your website it makes it so much easier for Google bots to crawl your website. Just like in the previous point, bots don’t read your website in the same way as people, so it is important to put the appropriate measures in place to ensure ease of readability.

You also need to ensure that the actual sitemap isn’t too big and there aren’t any blocked pages. As well as this, you also need to check if there are any non-canonical URLs because this will have an impact on the quality of your website.

4. Too many links

Having too many links on your website can be an issue, but it isn’t as much of a problem as before. This is because Google doesn’t penalise sites that have 100+ links on a particular page.

However, you should always aim for quality and not quantity. You do not want to be perceived as spammy. You should also be looking to interlink between different pages on your own site.

5. Meta descriptions

One of the most forgotten areas of on page SEO. If you forget to write meta tags for all of your pages, then Google is likely to generate one automatically through looking at the content.

Your meta tags are usually the first impression potential users will get of your website, so you certainly want to make a good one. Therefore you should look to customise each one of your pages with meta tags.

By cutomising your meta tags you can also include the keywords that are relevant to your page. But also remember not to keyword stuff in the meta tags and only to include keywords naturally.

6. Keyword research

Ask yourself this question, when was the last time you preformed keyword research? Many business owners preform keyword research at the beginning of an SEO campaign and then completely forget about it.

Keyword research needs to be developed on as an ongoing task for your targeted anchors. As your business develops and changes over time so will your keywords. It is important that you are targeting the correct, most effective keywords. Otherwise your SEO efforts will not be efficient.

7. Optimised images

Visuals are an essential component of your website, however, for them to have maximum impact you will need to optimise them. This includes things like, including keywords in the file name and ensuring the file size is compressed.

Images can really have an impact on the size of your website and therefore you need to ensure the file size is small, but without it impacting on the quality of the picture.

You should also look to have the more important components of your website load first, like the content, and then have the non-essential components load second, like the images.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
Executive Editor at Best in Australia. Mike has spent over a decade covering news related to business leaders and entrepreneurs around Australia and across the world. You can contact Mike here.
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