There are many considerations to take into account when assessing the technical health of your own website, and depending on your technical expertise, many things can seem unclear and difficult. Therefore, for many, it may be easiest to work with an SEO partner if you suspect that actions should be taken. In this article, we will give some tips on what you can do yourself, which does not require greater technical expertise.
We will now guide you on what you can do concerning the website's images and url structure, and how these can be optimised.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can be compared to a building's foundation wall on which the website, or the house, is to be built. If there are weaknesses in the foundation, it will not give the best results, no matter how nice the house that stands on it is. The same applies to a website, if there are many technical weaknesses, you will have a poorer experience of the rest of the website.
Optimisation of images on your website
When running an online store, good product images are essential. Good quality of the images, which also make customers want to buy the product, is often the focus, and for many it stops there. If you do nothing more, several important signals the search engines look for will be lost, among other things it is important that the size of the images does not come at the expense of the website's loading speed. If you have a large online store with many products, the images will naturally be a large part of the website's content, and it is therefore extra important that you follow best practice to give users and Google a good overall impression of the website.
The website's images affect the page speed load time
If you have many large images on a website, it can affect how fast the page loads. Google's guidelines state that images should not exceed 300kb, but this can be a challenge to control for an online store. It is not unusual for several users in the company to post products and images, and it is also not unusual for you to receive images for use on the website directly from the manufacturer of the products. The images you get from the manufacturer are rarely optimized for fast loading, and to ensure that the size is as optimal as possible, images should be compressed before uploading if the image exceeds 300kb.
The file name of the image
When naming an image, it can be tempting to leave the name as it is and not make any changes to it. Best practice for images is still to have a descriptive name. This also makes it easier later if you have to clean up the library, as you can easily find the correct image. In addition to this, you can include relevant search phrases in the file name to increase the likelihood that Google will choose to display your image in the search result.
It is important that names of images are as descriptive as possible and use hyphens between each word, rather than using underscores or spaces. It is also important to avoid numbers, periods and special characters (%&) and æ, ø, å to minimize problems with URL compatibility. If the image name contains e.g. Norwegian special characters, they can be replaced as follows; æ = ae, ø = o, å = a.
The image's alt text
The image's alt-text provides additional context to search engines and users, it is this text that is read out by programs for the visually impaired so that they also get an insight into which images are on the website. The text should therefore be as descriptive as possible, under 125 characters. (tip - do not start all text with "picture of", only describe what is on the picture) If you follow all this advice, you will have good conditions for ensuring that your images are as optimal as possible, in addition to being extra user-friendly. If you first clean up the size of the images, it may be just as appropriate to fix the other measures mentioned.
The website's URL structure
When adding new products or pages to the online store, it may be a good idea to have a plan or guide for how the URL structure should be. This will make it easier for users to navigate the website, in addition to sending clearer signals to Google. The URL structure tells Google something about what you can expect to find on the different parts of the website. Below you will get a small introduction to the different links in a URL.
Category level
Behind the first slash in the URL we should find the category, this will look like this "webstore.com/category/". Here we will only find categories, or the top level of pages (for example content database, archive or inspiration content). Here we will start to build the context for Google, and for users in terms of what can be found on a more general level. If your online store sells jewelery and accessories, it will perhaps be webstore.com/watches, or webstore.com/necklace. Then it is easy to understand what kind of content you can expect to find on this page.
Subcategory
It will not always be relevant with a subcategory, but in the vast majority of cases it can be helpful for both users and search engines if you divide things up even more granularly. If we use the examples from the previous section, the URL will look like this: webstore.com/watches/men, or webstore.com/necklace/gold.
Canonicals
The purpose of canonicals is to tell which URL is the "correct" copy, or the main version of the URL. In online shops, products can often to be found in several categories, and thus have several URLs. For a search engine, it will then look like you have duplicate content, which will affect the organic visibility if you do not signal to the search engine that these are copies and that there is a "main" version of the content. This is done by using canonicals. To give the search engine as much context as possible about what each individual product is, canonical should be set to the URL that provides the most information. It will then often be the version of the URL that is the longest. An example could be webstore.com/necklace/women/gold/product-name, this gives more context to the search engine than webstore.com/product-name.
Meta title and meta description
The meta description should give a short and good summary of what can be found on the page in question. If relevant, it may also be appropriate to include a CTA at the end. If you do not stay within Google's requirements for length, the meta description will be truncated with (...) at the end, and searchers in Google will not get all the information. The meta title should similarly give a good description of what the website is about, as this text is the "heading" of the meta description.
Meta description
If you want to meet Google's requirements for length, you should stay below 920 pixels, which is approximately 155 characters. The most important thing when writing is to give the applicants good information, so if the content is extracted only for its length, you can write shorter. As mentioned in the section above, one should not exceed the limit as this can lead to the customer losing information when it is truncated. When including a CTA at the end, this should be as catchy as possible, and preferably not a standardized sentence.
Meta title
In the same way as meta description, the meta title should also tell the user of Google what is on the website, a good meta title will also make it easier to keep track of what is where if you have several tabs up. The meta title should not exceed 60 characters, so that it is not truncated. Accurate information about what is on the page, as well as a catchy meta title will help searchers make the right choice in the search results.
Headings H1, H2 and H3
The headings should explain to the reader what comes in the following paragraph. It is therefore important that they are as descriptive as possible. The names of the different h-tags describe importance and tell something about the structure of the content to both the user of the website and the crawler of the search engines.
H1 – Main Heading; What the content page is about in summary. Used only once!
H2 – Subtitle/subtitle to break up content. Can be used multiple times in the content page.
H3 - Subcategories to further divide the content, which can make the content page easier to read. You can use none or many H3 tags, adapted to the content.
Do you want to know more about what is involved in technical SEO? Get in touch with us and we'll see how we can help you achieve what you want as quickly as possible.