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Tips to optimize your SEO

Hello,

Today, I would like to detail in this article, how to optimize your websiteSEO.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.

From SEO Definition on Wikipedia.

How to optimize your website SEO?

There are many implementations techniques in order to make a good website visibility and well ranked in search engines.

We will study those with the greatest impact:

Optimize website speed (load time)

This is a crucial aspect, because the search engines bots scrawl sites by simulating mobiles devices.

As a web developer, we most often use browser extensions (Development tools) which allow us to control the loading time of the page, especially in the networks tab.

Many web tools are available, that allow you to measure the loading speed of a website for free, like Gtmetrics or PingDom.

These tools identify different approaches to control sites loading times, by proposing few solutions:

  1. Compress images using Online compressor and Minify files through Minifiers,
  2. Minimize the number of server requests (prefer large JS and CSS files, rather than several small ones),
  3. Attempt to use CDN,
  4. Use CSS Sprites technology.

Optimize display on all types of media (Mobile Friendly):

Since the advent of mobile technologies, indexing robots simulate them and penalize sites that do not have versions suitable for mobiles or tablets.

Stylistic optimizations

A technique allows pages to be styled differently depending on the context (screen size), using the @medias-queries, see my medias-queries memo.

Semantic optimizations

You can target these platforms by developing an adapted version, see my AMP pages article, using micro-datas specified by schema.org.

Google also provides micro-data testing tools

How to choose and configure your web server?

  1. Claim your website and create a Sitemap or use a Sitemap generator and send it through the Webmaster Tools.
  2. Place static images and files in server cache.

For example on Apache, you can use the headers andexpires modules, like this:

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3024000, public"
</FilesMatch>
  1. Use a SSL certificate and force redirection to https or www to non-www,

Let's Encrypt provide free SSL certificates. You can use the rewrite apache module and a.htaccess file to redirect your pages:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)(.+) [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?(.+)
RewriteRule ^ https://%2%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
  1. Create Google and User Friendly URL,
  2. Specify pages Canonical URL,
  3. In the case of multi-lingual sites, manage the href-lang andlocale tags.

You can have very useful tools on Merkle technical SEO Tools website.

If you are looking for a reliable and competent system administrator, you can contact Arnaud Veugeois.

Effectively manage your website presence on the web

Control the display of the shares of your links on social networks

Through meta-datas type open-graph, you can control what is shared when anyone quote your website. For example :

<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<meta property="og:type" content="video.movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />

Optimize your net-linking through quality backlinks

This is about SEO crux of the matter, it is about making people talk about their site on high authority sites (Google Page Rank, Trust Flow and Citation Flow by Majestic)..

What you really need to remember is that interesting and well optimized content with natural referencing (techniques described above) will allow you to make yourself visible on the first items of search engines...

See you soon,

Mathieu