Search Engine Optimisation LinkedIn Collaborative Articles

How to check your site's mobile-friendliness?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool. Some of its recommendations are simple enough for beginners to apply. Some require technical knowledge. Provides the following diagnosis of issues on mobile (and desktop):

• Performance: First contentful paint, largest contentful paint, blocking time, cumulative layout shift and speed index.

• Accessibility: Image alt attributes and form element labels.

• Best Practices: Content security policy, HTTPS, seamless page load, image aspect ratio, responsive images, HTML doctype, charset declaration, Chrome devtools issues and source maps.

• SEO: Non-crawlable links, small or overlapping tap targets, structured data, meta title, meta description, valid robots.txt, canonical links and absence of plugins.

What are some common user behavior patterns to consider when optimizing your website?

Most website visitors follow the 'F' pattern while reading our page content. In sequence:

1. Across the top of the page. Horizontally. From left to right. To read our H1 heading or page title.

2. Down the left side of the page. Vertically. From top to bottom. To skim through our H2 headings. And our bullet points in each para.

3. Back across the page. Horizontally. From left to right. To read what they found interesting/relevant/new in Step 2. Glancing particularly at text in bold. Or in italics. Or underlined.

Optimising our page layout is especially important for lengthy product descriptions or articles. Because no visitor reads every word.

Best to place our call-to-action (CTA) button at the end of the middle stem of our "F".

How can you ensure your website is easily indexed by search engines?

Bing Webmaster Tools provide a wealth of data. Just like Google Search Console.

• Search Performance: View impressions, clicks, click-through rates and average positions. By keyword. And by page.

• URL Inspection: Inspect any URL. And request indexing if no issues.

• Site Explorer: View your indexed/non-indexed URLs. By month.

• Sitemaps: Submit your sitemap. View results of previous submissions (URLs discovered, errors and warnings).

• IndexNow: Notify search engines of your updates. Automatically.

• Backlinks.

• Keyword Research.

• Site Scans: Start a new scan. Analyse results of previous scans. Take corrective action on errors/warnings.

• Block URLs.

• Robots.txt Tester.

• Verify Bingbot.

• Microsoft Clarity (like Google Analytics).

How can you optimize your checkout process for better on-page SEO?

The following elements typically lead to frictionless checkouts.

• Use a one-page checkout process as far as possible. Most shopping cart platforms have adopted this as a standard feature anyway.

• Allow guest checkout. Keep account creation/sign-up as optional. Enable already-registered buyers to log in, of course. To benefit from auto-fill.

• Keep shipping address same as billing address by default. Make the buyer fill it in only if different.

• Minimise surprises. Implement an on-the-fly shipping fee/duty/tax calculator. This will make the final landed cost visible to the customer upfront. Which, in turn, will reduce abandon rate.

• Add an "Order Preview" page. With an itemised breakdown.

• Ensure payment security and data privacy.

How to optimize title tags and H1 tags for SEO?

• Although Google has clarified that a page may have multiple H1 tags, I prefer staying with only one.

• Although we're allowed to have a H1 tag that's different from the meta title, I prefer keeping them the same.

• To avoid duplicate content, I follow the standard practice of creating a parent page and of listing variants (colours/sizes/capacities etc), if any, on that single page. This way, too, I stay with a common H1 tag for all variants.

• I avoid repeating any keywords from the H1 tag in any of the H2 tags. And use semantically related keywords instead.

• I stop at H3. Sometimes at H2 itself. And use bullets after that. Have never been able to get myself to use H4.

• I use bold a lot. Italics only for quotes. Underline never.

How can you effectively repurpose and update your content for better performance?

One way to repurpose content is from long-form to short-form.

Each of our best-performing articles is typically 1250 words or more in length. Which is how it qualifies as long-form. And usually gets indexed earlier by Google.

And although an article covers only one over-arching topic (identifiable by the page title or H1 tag), it is really a logical collection of numerous sub-topics. Each of which is identifiable by its H2 tag. And consists of one or more paras.

Typically these H2 tags are mutually exclusive. So we can build a post on each of them. By:

• Updating facts and figures.

• Adding examples.

• Simplifying the language wherever possible.

Each such post would qualify as short-form content, of course. With its own banner image.