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Adam Riemer apologizes if he rambles in this session because he’s still on Croatian time. We’re going to be going over five sites based on who dropped off their business cards for consideration for review. I’m not going to “out” any of the blogs being reviewed, but I’ll share some of the advice he has based on the sites we’re seeing.
Angular sites load really fast, but Google isn’t able to crawl it. You need to have really good text navigation through your site if you have an Angular site in order to get it crawled. “If anyone tries to build your site in Angular, just say no!”
Use robots.txt to tell Google (and other search engines) which pages to focus on. You can also use it to tell the search engines what pages NOT to crawl.
Google Chrome is now giving users warnings any time they type in a field on a non-secure site. If you are not currently https:// — change that. You’ll need ensure that all of your internal links point to the secure versions. In the short-term, you can use 301 redirects from your old http:// pages to your new https:// pages, but you’re going to want to go back in update your internal links so you’re not using sloppy code.
Use the canonical tags on every page, and make sure they point to the secure version.
Don’t have the lightbox pop up immediately when your site loads, because no one wants to give you their email address until they’ve had a chance to get to know you through your site.
Google Analytics has a tool that will show you how far down your page people are scrolling. (I did not know this. Helpful stuff!)
Don’t waste your links out. If you’re linking to recipe ingredients, you don’t have to link to things like flour and salt, but harder-to-find ingredients are worth linking to.
Go to webpagetest.org to learn your site speed. Site speed is the most relevant metric if you’re concerned with site stickiness. You can make your site faster by using a CDN. Talk to your web host about this.
Get a minimizer to reduce the size of your images for faster load time. Despite how many pitches you get offering “hi-res” images, you don’t need or want high resolution images on your website.
Make sure you include related posts on every post.
X-robots? It’s a tag. Go for no-index, do-follow on tag pages. Yoast has a post about x-robots.
Use Open Graph to use different title tags for Google, Facebook, etc.
That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.
