8 tips to optimise your website for search engines with Sitevision

1. From heavy images to WebP format

Your website's loading time is becoming increasingly important from a search engine optimisation perspective. If the page takes longer than a few seconds to load, there is a high risk that you will lose the visitor.

The larger the images you have on your site, the longer it takes to download them. You can solve this by converting large and resource-intensive images (like JPG) to WebP format. Google – and your visitors – will thank you.

In Sitevision, convert images to WebP with a right-click

2. Work on the title of your pages

The titles are an important part of the search optimisation of your website. Sitevision gives your pages a title automatically, according to the principle "Page name – Site name". This is usually good enough, but you can optimise it further. You can change both the template for page titles for the whole site but also the title for a specific page.

Remember to keep your titles under 60 characters including spaces with the site name. Both title and heading should include the page keywords.

3. Find broken links on your site with the built-in link checker

Broken links make your website less relevant to search engines. And this is a particular concern for users, as broken links lead to fewer successful visits.

Luckily, there is a built-in link check in Sitevision. If the link check is turned on on the website, a link check is automatically performed on all internal and external links every time an editor publishes a page. And the great thing is that you as a webmaster can choose to schedule it or run it manually on all or part of the site.

4. Publish fewer documents

It may be tempting to upload that PDF document instead of putting the text directly on a page, but try to only use documents when you really need them.

Turn the documents into web pages instead and you will drive more traffic to your website. You'll also be doing your visitors a favor. There are, of course, several cases where documents are required or perhaps even an advantage. Make sure that they are optimised PDF files as far as possible with good quality content and document structure.

Tip: See the lecture "Digital publications instead of PDFs – accessible and user-friendly" from Sitevisiondagarna 2019.

5. Make sure you have the right structure for your content

On your website, you have stylesheets such as main heading, subheading, subheading and the like. As well as probably differing in appearance, they also carry different weight with search engines. A subheading/main heading/heading 1/H1 is interpreted as significantly more important by search engines than a subheading, for example.

Sitevision has a built-in accessibility check. This feature, along with the link check, could just as well be called a form of "search optimisation check" because in most cases accessibility and search optimisation go hand in hand.

The accessibility check ensures that your page has the right content structure - that is, that your headings are in the right order. Your templates are most likely correct, but along the way, editors may have added a different order to the headings.

6. Enable web maps (sitemaps)

Sitevision has built-in support for sitemaps (sitemaps.xml). This is a small text file that is used to tell search engines what has changed on the website since the last time and what needs to be re-indexed.

7. Create relevant content

Search engine spiders are pretty restless and getting smarter. They don't like long and complicated texts. And your visitors probably don't either.

Keep your content relevant and easy to read for your visitors, and only write as long as you need to – this will 'automatically' optimise your site for search engines. Don't be afraid to write long texts if necessary. The most important thing is that your visitors feel they get something out of your text. The search engines will notice and pick up on that.

8. What about meta description?

Description does not have any impact on how your website ranks in search results. However, it does affect how your hits look in the search results – and how many people choose to click on your link. A good description should be 120-140 characters including spaces, be based on the keyword for your specific website, clearly explain what the page is about and end with a call-to-action.

In addition, it is common for services like Facebook to use the description tag (and title) when sharing your content.