Search Engine Optimization and Tips
Much is made of SEO and so much time goes into optimizing websites in the quest to improve ranking. The reality is most websites will receive little or no traffic outside of local specific searches nor will you get error-free websites and perfect page speed scores.
If you have say a lawn care service your goal is to get an easy-to-use website that comes up in general local searches in your local area. You don't need to rank in the top 5 pages for lawn care, you want people who see your truck in your area to find you if they don't already have your URL.
SEO defined - SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.
SEO tools can be split into 2 areas. Simple speed/quality testing and in-depth crawl analysis of pages for errors.
SEO Tools for speed and quality.
GTmetrix Performance Report Tool - After construction and during optimization you can use this tool to track your progress in getting your website to load efficiently and test structure. If you have anything really broken you'll see it here. You'll hope to get a B score or better. Inexpensive hosting plans rarely do better than 90%. Your goal is to have a usable website, not to get perfection. Complicated sites, like this one, tend to get lower scores. Sometimes the better the score the more problems you run into as you spent more time changing settings that will break your website on certain devices or browsers. Higher scores are not always better.
GTmetrix score for PhillyTalk.com
Page Speed Insights - Tool for just testing loading time on both mobile and desktop. Again perfection is not the goal.
Page Speed Score for PhillyTalk.com on Mobile
Page Speed Score for PhillyTalk.com on Desktop
web.dev/measure - Page analysis tool with recommendations for improvements. Scores vary from day to day depending on server load. I've read that 75 is a good score. The score below must have been on a really good day :)
web.dev score for PhillyTalk.com
In-Depth Page Analysis Tools
ahrefs - A very detailed tool/service/extension to analyze all pages of your website for errors of all kinds including broken links, broken images, 404 pages, etc. The free version is plenty for smaller sites. Big sites really need the paid version. If you have an older website like this one that's been through server moves and rebuilding this is a must-have tool for finding broken links. Using this I found all the old news links pointing to the local papers were broken and affecting page quality ranking. This applied to hundreds of articles. They have an extension for Chrome and Firefox to check individual pages if you don't want to do a sitewide crawl.
more coming...
