Search Engine Optimisation - Website Auditing Guide #5
Qamar Zaman
CEO at ZedSoft | Advancing AI in Healthcare, Architecture, and Urban Development | Geospatial Analysis & Predictive Modeling Specialist
In this article we will be concluding the Website Auditing Guide with SEO. We have previously written about understanding the Performance score, Accessibility Score and Best Practices Score when auditing your website. Please find links to these at the bottom of the article. We have also covered information on the Lighthouse audit tool which is detailed in Part 1.
This article features information on how you can best interpret and understand the results of the SEO category. These are important checks that ensure your website is optimised for search engine results ranking.
SEO
The SEO score is determined based on multiple factors such as Document Meta Description, Title Elements, Legible Font Sizes, Use of Plugins, Link Labelling and HTTP Status Codes.
The Score
The SEO score ranges between 0 and 100. It will be determined through a number of audits performed by the Lighthouse audit tool and how many audit checks you have passed. We will cover how each of these will contribute to your overall score.
Document Meta Description
Document Meta Description is about using unique and interesting descriptions that match your website brand. This makes your results more relevant to search users and increases your website traffic. These descriptions are displayed in Google's search results.
Always add a "description" tag in to the <head> section of each of your pages. Below is an example of the Meta Description used on the ZedSoft website.
<meta name="description" content="Our Passion is to Develop New and Sophisticated Software, Optimising and Recreating Outdated Mobile & Web Applications.">
You should make sure that every page has a description, which can be unique to each individual page. Meta Descriptions such as the ZedSoft example above, do not necessarily have to be structured in a sentence format. They can instead contain structured data, here is an example:
<meta name="description" content="Author: A.N. Author,
Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: ï¿¡11.99,
Length: 456 pages">
Using high-quality descriptions that are displayed on Google's search results go a long way to improving your website search traffic. This audit check will fail if your page doesn't have a description. It can also fail if your description "content" attribute is empty.
One thing to note is that the quality of your description is not evaluated by Lighthouse. However, it does play a large role in improving your website search traffic.
Title Elements
Document titles are often seen as the primary piece of information for deciding whether a page is relevant to the users search query. Think of the document title as something the user sees first when their search query is displayed.
We have included an example below of the document title element used in the ZedSoft website.
<!>doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>ZedSoft | Software Development Company</title>
</head>
...
</html>
Make sure that your titles are descriptive and concise, not vague e.g. 'Home'. Do not treat them as description tags and stuff them keywords as this will leave a negative impression and search engines could mark them as spam. Furthermore, make sure that they are not repeated for other web pages.
Legible Font Sizes
In general, font sizes less than 12px are hard to read on mobile devices and will make the audit check fail. This means that it may require users to pinch-to-zoom in order to view the text at a comfortable reading size.
The output of the failed audit check will result in a table with 4 columns:
- Source - The location of the CSS ruleset that is causing the illegible text, here is the location where you can change the text size.
- Selector - A ruleset consists of a selector and a declaration block. A selector will point HTML element, such as a heading, a paragraph or any other section of text. A declaration block is your list of features for that section such as font size and font colour.
- % of Page Text - This is the percentage of the text on the webpage that is affected by the ruleset.
- Font Size - This is the computed size of the text.
One thing to note is if the Lighthouse report indicates that "Text is illegible because of missing viewport config" simply add the following to your <head> tag:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
This will scale the pages to various sizes in order to fit various displays, such as mobile screens, tablet screens and different computer screen sizes.
Use of Plugins
Using plugins on your website can harm your SEO in two main ways:
- Indexing - Search Engines can't index plugin content, meaning that plugin content won't show up in your search results.
- Unsupported Mobile Devices - Many mobile devices don't support plugins, this can cause frustrating experiences for many mobile users.
As an example, you may have visited a website on your mobile device and it showcased a video which was unplayable and therefore got a warning saying, "This video is not available on mobile. Add to playlist to watch it later on PC." This will lead to a poor user experience. An issue such as this can be alleviated by simply using HTML5 standard tags to include videos rather than using proprietary video players.
Lighthouse will check the website page for tags that commonly represent plugins, such as:
- object - The <object> tag is used to define and embed a object such as such as video, audio and Java applets on your web pages.
- embed - The <embed> tag defines a container that is used by an external application such as a plug-in.
- applet - The <applet> tag defines an embedded applet that is used to run an application on your website such as a calculator applet.
The Lighthouse audit tools will flag embedded tags that have specific MIME types. A MIME type is a label that identifies certain types of data and tells the software how to use and manage the data, this is similar to file extensions.
If your MIME type matches any of the following below it will be flagged by the Lighthouse audit tool:
- application/x-java-applet - Java applets are small applications written in the Java programming language.
- application/x-java-bean - This is a reusable software component written in Java that can be manipulated visually in an application builder tool.
- application/x-shockwave-flash - This is used as a container for videos, vector-based animations and sound.
- application/x-silverlight - Microsoft Silverlight (or simply Silverlight) is a deprecated application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications.
Link Labelling
Labelled links are clickable words found in links that help users and search engines to better understand your content.
For example, replacing any generic descriptions, such as "found here" shown in the example below:
<p>Check out our website audit guides, <a href="guides.html">found here</a>.</p>
It would be better to change it to a specific description such as "website audit guides" shown in the example below:
<p>Check out our <a href="guides.html">website audit guides</a>.</p>
The link text should generally indicate clearly to users what type of content they will go to if they click on the link.
Some general rules to follow include avoiding the use of text and description that has no relation to the page's content. Making sure that you format links, so they are easy to spot by users. Having high-quality descriptive terms for all internal links will help improve indexing for your webpages. Lastly, avoid using a URL as link text description since it looks unprofessional, unless you are referencing a site's new web address.
Lighthouse will also flag any following generic link descriptions such as "learn more", "click here", "click this", "here", "right here", "more", "start", "go to" and "go".
As a side note, in order to use the "click here" text descriptive link you should use an aria-label. This is to improve accessibility and SEO. Here is an in-depth guide on using aria-labels.
HTTP Status Codes
Search engines will not properly index pages that return unsuccessful HTTP status codes. This will affect your SEO score as Lighthouse considers this audit check unsuccessful.
Every time you access a website, your browser will send a request to the webserver for the webpage you are trying to access. The webserver, after receiving your request, will process your request and send back the relevant resources and HTTP header. HTTP status codes are delivered to your browser in the HTTP header.
Successful status codes are not often seen when you request a web page or resource. When something goes wrong on your website then you might see one in your browser. You may have encountered a status code before, such as the one below:
When a page is requested, your webserver should return a 2XX or 3XX HTTP status code. Returning HTTP status codes 4XX and 5XX will result in a failed audit check.
The category of codes and what they represent is shown below:
- 1XX informational response – the request was received, continuing process
- 2XX successful – the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
- 3XX redirection – further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
- 4XX client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
- 5XX server error – the server failed to fulfil an apparently valid request
The Lighthouse audit tool will report to you any links, pages or other resources that have unsuccessful HTTP status codes. This is for you to understand and recognise the errors. These errors usually happen when there is a server-side error or can happen when there is a wrong link or missing page.
Additional Items to Manually Check
In this tab are address areas for items which an automated testing tool cannot cover. Therefore, manually check these items to make sure they are working as intended.
Passed Audits
This is a list of all items on your website which have passed the SEO audit check. In here you will find each individual item along with a description to what exactly it does for your website.
To Summarise
Following the SEO audit feedback provided by the Lighthouse audit tool and making changes accordingly is important to making your website search engine optimised, easy to index and crawl by search engines and made mobile-friendly.
We hope that you have understood the importance of implementing certain features to better improve your SEO performance and score. This improves your greater SEO score which will be covered in future articles. Therefore, it's necessary to follow and improve your website based upon the SEO audit feedback.
This article is tailored towards basic SEO. Any advance SEO topics such as the Open Graph Protocol will be covered in future articles.
Please feel free to reach out to contact@zedsoft.co.uk, we can help you explain your website audit scores, perform audit tests and help you find out exactly how your website can be improved. In case you haven't read the previous articles on the Website Auditing Guide, they can be found here: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4
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