Web basics: Search – Part 1
Improving a site's performance in search is hard work. There's no magic bullet, no quick fix, and no guarantees - and anyone who says differently is selling something. Misinformation, for-profit gurus, information that's years out of date, and the lack of a one-size-fits-all solution make knowing where to start confusing. This is compounded by arcane acronyms, technical terminology with multiple meanings, and search providers that are notoriously tight-lipped about their ranking criteria. Given all that, it's not hard to understand why this aspect of digital marketing leaves business owners apprehensive.
Thankfully there is a way to simplify SEO – focus on the four basic elements that search engines rank positively:
Part 1 – Great user experience
Nothing is more frustrating to a user than a site that doesn't work correctly, is poorly built, is difficult to use across devices or is just confusing to navigate. It's easy to understand why this matters to customers using your site, but its effect on search performance is a bit more nuanced.
Google, and other providers, are putting enormous effort into making their algorithms mimic human user behaviour. This is in part to stop companies from exploiting search results by writing for bots instead of people. More importantly, it's about ensuring that the most relevant results are returned first. To take advantage of this all we need to do is build, design, and develop our websites for real people. When we do that we end up delivering what real people want in a site – a great user experience.
Great user experiences help consumers solve their problems efficiently, but also in a way that respects their needs. Some subjective UX factors will be decided by your audience personas, their purchase preferences, and the products and services you sell. These will influence search performance, so make sure you understand who your customers are and how they want to interact with your brand before you start.
Having said that, not all elements of UX that impact search are subjective. There are objective steps you can take to ensure your site performs well – these steps are part of what's known as 'technical SEO'. When building your new website, or overhauling an old one, build it with clean, valid code. Make sure it follows industry best practices for usability, accessibility, and security.
Invalid or bloated code
Search engines don't care how clean your code is, but problems with your site at the code level can stop search engines from indexing your content correctly. Search engines read a web page very differently from a human user. While we see the whole page, they crawl through the code line by line. Code errors and tag mismatches can cause lines to be skipped, misread, or removed altogether. If search engines can't crawl to the content, they can't index it. These issues can be insidious because they are invisible outside of the code view, meaning your page can look fine in a browser and still be blocked to bots.
Some relatively common issues to check for are improper hierarchal nesting (h1, h2, h3, etc.), unfriendly links, malformed tags, or broken links. All these issues can cause bots to misinterpret or ignore otherwise valuable content.
Improper nesting
For both search engines and human users, page tags should be presented in hierarchal order "nested". Every page must have a heading 1 or 'h1', any heading 2s must be dependant of heading 1, heading 3s dependant of heading 2s, and so on.
Improper nesting could create traps or roadblocks within your content that prevent bots from crawling all of it; if a search engine can't crawl it, it can't rank it.
Search friendly links?
Google's crawlers index your site and content based on plain English, basically they 'read' the site, including the site's URLs (addresses).
The first example is easy to remember and readable by search engines and real people. Unfortunately, many Content Management Systems generate URLs that look more like example two. Your browser understands how to get you to the right place with that code, but there's no context or meaning in the random string of numbers. That means it can't be indexed by search engines, read by accessible browsing tools, or by your customers and prospects.
One other common trip-up is using underscores instead of hyphens. This used to be the standard for URLs, and many older sites still incorporate them in their default page paths. Google recognizes a hyphen as a word separator, but it ignores an underscore and bridges the words. This ruins the search value of your URL:
Malformed Tags and Broken Links?
Because of the technical nature of repairing malformed tags, I'd recommend working with a developer to scan and fix your code. Broken links, however, are quite a bit easier to not only diagnose but fix as well.
In many cases, your CMS will have a built-in link checker which will outline any issues and where to fix them. If not, there are several free error checkers (error 404 validators), including Google's Search Console – which I would encourage anyone managing a website to become familiar with. Once you've scanned your site and found any errors, you can easily update the links on your site to point to the correct page(s).
While you can check for technical SEO issues like these using an online validator service like?validator.w3.org, most require a fair amount of skill to understand and interpret. If you don't have HTML and web development skills in-house, your best bet is to find an external service to assess and address any found issues with your site.