SEO

What You Need To Know For SEO

Published

1 year ago

October 29, 2022

Meta tags are the most fundamental part of SEO and making sure that your site’s pages have a good, solid foundation of optimization.

These are the tags that you add to your page’s header to describe the page using syntax that Google understands.

And when it comes to SEO, more often than not, best practices for meta tags are ignored while others take priority.

Sometimes, things like content and links may take priority over things like meta tags. That’s understandable, because content and links can be more important.

But making sure that you optimize these tags correctly can help significantly in terms of how Google understands your page.

For example, a quality meta description can mean the difference between poor website performance in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and better website performance, especially when it comes to a site’s click-through rate (CTR).

Making sure that you include important meta tags can still get results. It all depends on how you use them.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags provide information about the website in the HTML of the page.

Search engines use these pieces of code to help determine what the page is about, and how relevant it is to the keyword being searched.

While this data isn’t visible to visitors, it does play a role in determining where a site appears in search results.

One important meta tag you want to focus on includes the page title: the blue link that appears at the top of the snippet in the search results.

Another important tag you may want to focus on is the meta description, which is often used to show descriptions of pages in search results.

For example, suppose you’re searching for a product like a computer. In that case, the manufacturer’s description of that product (at least, the one it added to the page) might appear in the paragraph snippet below the page title in the search results.

Screenshot from search for [computers], Google, October 2022

Getting Started With Meta Tags

Meta tags are one of the first things you’ll see in a site audit report. They appear in the header above the page content and provide important information about a page.

The first step in understanding what meta tags do is to know why you’d use them.

You might want to include certain words in the description of your product or service, such as price range, features, size, etc., and you could use the keywords meta tag to help describe that.

Or maybe you want to let people know where your site is located, like a city, state, or country. You could use the location meta tag.

If you’re writing a blog post, you might want to add a category meta tag to help others find it.

These are just a few examples of what meta tags can accomplish.

There are many different types of meta tags, including title, description, keyword, image alt text, robots, language, and even schema markup.

This article focuses on the most common ones; specifically, descriptions and keywords.

Why Meta Tags Are Important For SEO

When it comes to SEO, meta tags are highly important. Maybe not quite as important as content or links, but still, they are very important to the overall optimization process.

Better title tags may mean the difference between the success or failure of your page.

Having blank meta tags (such as a blank title or meta description) may mean that Google will choose what it thinks are the best ones for your page. Its algorithm is not perfect and could potentially create less than what you might want to see.

This is why it’s important to ensure that you include at least a physical page title and description for your page. Otherwise, you leave it up to Google’s algorithm to choose it.

Page Title Tags

The page title tag is the main descriptive element of your page.

Your title tag is the one thing that everyone sees when they come across your site in the Google search results.

This is why it is crucial to ensure it accurately reflects the page’s content. If you’re writing a blog post, you want to ensure that the page title accurately reflects the post’s content.

You want people to know exactly where they are and what they’re looking at.

While some sites still rank very well despite having poor title tags, others don’t seem to care much about the title tag.

Why do some sites not spend as much effort on the title tag while others continue their usual optimizations? Well, it seems like it depends on the type of site. Some sites focus heavily on video, while others focus heavily on text. Some sites are focused on a specific topic, while others cover multiple topics.

There are many different reasons why a site might choose not to put any effort into its title tags. However, the truth is that having a quality title tag can be a great determining factor in how Google understands your page.

If you’re building a brand new site, you probably won’t need to worry too much about SEO efforts on your title tag. However, once your site starts getting traffic, you’ll want to track things like bounce and conversion rates.

By tracking those metrics, you’ll be able to determine whether the title tag is actually impacting your performance, and where to go from there in terms of how to better optimize it.

Google’s Search Essentials documentation explains the following about page title best practices and how to influence them in the search results correctly:

You want to ensure that every single page of your site has a physical title tag with a page title actually specified.
Descriptive and concise page titles are Google’s recommendation. It doesn’t want to see anything vague such as “Home” for the home page. Also, it does not want to see “profile” for a person’s profile. Google also recommends avoiding unnecessarily long and verbose text, as it is highly likely to be truncated in the search results.
Be sure that you avoid boilerplate and redundant text in your page title. What happens here is that the boilerplate text causes confusion between pages for users as well as search engines. So, Google recommends distinct and descriptive text in your page titles. It also discourages utilizing long text that doesn’t change, with the exception of certain pieces of information. Don’t include text within your page title that’s not useful to users or that would be considered uninformative.
Google also doesn’t like keyword stuffing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have descriptive terms in your page title. However, you don’t want to include the same words and phrases many times. Doing so could be similar to keyword stuffing, making your search results look spammy to Google and its users.
Branding your page title is an acceptable practice for Google. You can either include it at the beginning of the page title or at the end, per Google’s guidelines. Make sure it’s separate and unique from the rest of the text. In order to accomplish this, you could use a delimiter symbol, which includes colons, pipes, or hyphens. This can help you avoid making your site’s branding look like a repetitive portion of the page title.
Make it clear which part of the text is actually the main title. According to Google’s recommendations, it examines a variety of sources when it generates title links. These sources include things like the main visual title, prominent text in the body copy, and heading elements. Google also recommends varying the size of the main title on the page, for example.
Google also recommends making sure that your page title matches what’s on the page. Google explains that if it thinks the title doesn’t match the page’s primary content, it might end up choosing different text as part of the page title link. It’s best to have the same page title in <h1> tag to reduce the probability of rewriting by titles on SERP.

What Else Has Google Said About Page Titles?

Aside from its Search Essentials, there are several things that Google has mentioned about page titles that should be observed.

“We do use it for ranking, but it’s not the most critical part of a page. So it’s not worthwhile filling it with keywords to hope that it works that way. In general, we try to recognise when a title tag is stuffed with keywords because that’s also a bad user experience for users in the search results. If they’re looking to understand what these pages are about and they just see a jumble of keywords, then that doesn’t really help.” – John Mueller, Google 2016

“I’d just write natural titles, the way you’d want them to appear in search, and how you’d want to present them for users. Slash (separators) is fine & can perform well anywhere.” – John Mueller, Google 2020

“Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time.”– Google Search Central Blog, 2021

“If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag may appear in the first line of the results.” –Google, 2020

“We introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system. This is because we think our new system is producing titles that work better for documents overall, to describe what they are about, regardless of the particular query.” – Google Search Central Blog, 2021

Meta Description Tags

Another meta tag that’s important to SEO is the meta description tag.

This is the very short snippet paragraph underneath the page title within the search results. As long as you utilize a more accurate description than what you can ascertain from the on-page content, Google will use it.

This meta tag is not much of something used for ranking. Instead, it’s something that’s used to entice and inform users about the page in general.

It creates a short and relevant summary of what that specific web page is actually about. In its simplest form, this is basically a sales pitch for your website. It’s meant to convince the user that your page is exactly what they are looking for.

Google explains that there is no limit to the length of the meta description and that it truncates the snippet on the SERPs as needed – and this is usually done on a device-width basis.

Best Practices For Writing Meta Descriptions

Despite the apparent lack of control when it comes to rankings, writing meta descriptions is still an important part of any SEO professional’s arsenal. This can mean the difference between significant CTR from the SERPs, as opposed to sub-standard CTRs.

This is why it makes sense to make both page titles and meta descriptions a focus of your own SEO efforts whenever you optimize a page.

Google’s Search Essentials explains what it looks for in meta descriptions.

Note that meta descriptions should be visible on the webpage. If they are not visible, Google will ignore them in 99% of cases.

Make Sure That Every Meta Description On Your Site Is Unique

Google explains that identical, and even similar, meta descriptions on multiple site pages are not helpful when these pages appear in the SERPs.

It recommends that SEO pros create meta descriptions that are unique and that accurately describe the specific page.

On the main home page (or aggregation pages), it also recommends that you utilize site-level descriptions and then use page-level descriptions on all other types of pages.

Ensure That Your Description Includes Relevant Information About The Content

Google recommends including relevant information within the meta description that reflects the actual page.

For news and blog posts, it explains that these meta descriptions can list the author, the publication date, and byline information that would otherwise not be displayed.

In addition, product pages that have specific information scattered throughout the page that might be helpful for users could be included here, too.

Google adds that any great meta description can provide all the relevant information a user might need to decide to visit that particular page.

Automatically Generating Meta Descriptions

It’s possible to generate your web page’s meta descriptions programmatically. (Not only possible, but Google actively encourages doing so in its Search Essentials documentation.)

This is especially true for larger sites with thousands of pages.

Google doesn’t expect the average user to be able to handwrite meta descriptions on larger sites. It still recommends ensuring that these meta descriptions are varied and human-readable.

For example, don’t go in assuming you can programmatically create meta descriptions that are terrible quality and expect to have a good day from an SEO perspective.

It also recommends avoiding long strings of keywords in the meta descriptions – don’t do that here, either!

Make Sure Your Meta Descriptions Are Of High Enough Quality

Google’s recommendations also highlight the quality of meta descriptions. It also wants to see significantly high quality here – and make sure that your meta descriptions really are descriptive.

What Else Has Google Said About Meta Descriptions?

The Google Search Essentials documentation is a good start, but they don’t contain all the information that Google might consider.

The following is a collection of what Google has said elsewhere on the web about meta descriptions:

“You kind of have to balance your time and think is it really worthwhile to like go through a hundred thousand pages and write a new description or should I just like keep this in mind when I’m making new pages and not worry so much about this limit of a hundred and sixty characters or whatever it used to be because I think especially when we make changes like this they they tend to go back and forth a little bit until we find the right balance.” – John Mueller, 2017

“It’s not the case that changing your descriptions or making them longer or shorter or tweaking them or putting keywords in there will affect your site’s ranking.” – John Mueller 2017

“Because meta descriptions are usually visible only to search engines and other software, webmasters sometimes forget about them, leaving them completely empty. It’s also common, for the same reason, that the same meta description is used across multiple (and sometimes many) pages. On the flip side, it’s also relatively common that the description is completely off-topic, low quality, or outright spammy. These issues tarnish our users’ search experience, so we prefer to ignore such meta descriptions.” – Google 2017

“Keep in mind that we adjust the description based on the user’s query. So if you’re doing a site query and seeing this in your search results for your site that’s not necessarily what a normal user would see when they see a search as well.” – John Mueller, Google 2017

How To Add A Meta Robots Tag To Your Page

The meta robots tag allows you to control indexing and crawling of your pages. In short, this allows you to take advantage of a more granular approach to controlling the indexation of individual pages.

It is important to note that this setting can be read and followed only when the page itself is crawlable and accessible to Google.

For example, don’t think disallowing a page and noindexing it will benefit you.

Although there are situations where Google might ignore the robots.txt file, you want to ensure that, in most cases, you are allowing the crawling and indexing of the page so Google can physically observe that particular rule.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
(…)
</head>
<body>(…)</body>
</html>

The code snippet above shows how to add the meta robots tag to your pages.

In the overall page code structure, this should be added to the top of the page, within the code, between the beginning and ending head tags.

How To Add A Meta Viewport Tag To Your Page

The meta viewport tag is an important part of meta tags that are added to the page and has to do with making sure that your site is a fully responsive website design.

In short, this meta tag provides specific instructions to the browser on how to render your page on a mobile device. This tag also shows Google that the page itself is mobile-friendly.

Setting The Viewport

In general, the rule is to include the viewport meta tag on every page you want optimized for a mobile device. The parameters within this tag control the page’s dimensions and scaling attributes.

First, mobile browsers will render a page at the width of a desktop screen (at its minimum, around 980px, but this can vary across devices).

Then, they will attempt to make the content appear better by adjusting it to fit the screen and increasing font sizes.

As a result, this might mean that font sizes could appear inconsistent to different users. To rectify this, one could potentially just use a system font instead.

The following screenshot shows how to include and configure the meta viewport tag within your code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
 <head>
 …
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> …
 </head>
 …

How To Add The Meta Charset Tag To Your Web Page

The charset meta tag is a tag that allows you to define specific character encoding for your page. This tag is important because it helps provide the vehicle that the browser uses to output characters to text.

If you don’t have the charset tag defined, a browser might output garbage text because of this lack of understanding of the input text. Without this tag, the browser must make an uninformed guess quickly.

While not extremely important in terms of SEO ranking factors, it is important if you want to make sure that your page is as cross-browser and cross-platform as possible.

If you don’t add it, it’s not the end of the world. The HTML5 specification does include UTF-8 character encoding by default.

But, if you want to use another type of character encoding for your page – for whatever reason – then, by all means, you may want to seriously consider adding this tag in those situations.

No Sitelinks Search Box Meta Tag

Did you know that specific meta tags can help you control the appearance of your search results?

One such meta tag is the no sitelinks search box meta tag:

<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox">

If, for some reason, you don’t want a sitelinks search box to appear on the Google SERPs, then you can simply use this meta tag to remove it.

Here is how you would implement the nositelinkssearchbox meta tag on pages where you don’t want the search box to appear:

Screenshot of a Sitelinks Search Box example on the Google SERPs.

Screenshot from search for [pinterest], Google, October 2022

Again, this would be added in between the beginning and ending head tags of your page.

For Google Discover

Adding a simple meta tag can increase clicks from Google Discover by 300%. Here’s the code snippet:

"<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large" />"

Meta Tags Are An Important Part Of SEO

There are those who believe that meta tags rank a distant third or fourth on the tier of responsibilities when it comes to optimizing your web pages.

But, when it comes to achieving higher rankings, optimizing your meta tags correctly can sometimes put you ahead of the pack.

Don’t think of them as the be-all and end-all when it comes to your SEO efforts; instead, they are more supplemental in nature.

Just make sure that you continue to keep your meta tags updated as needed. For example, if your pages change, you don’t want to have a different page title and meta description than the content that’s reflected on the page.

You also don’t want to have meta tags that are substandard in quality.

In the end, you want to make sure that you have some focus on optimizing these tags – because they can take a page from mediocre to great.

More resources:

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

SEO

2024 WordPress Vulnerability Report Shows Errors Sites Keep Making

Published

2 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Max

2024 Annual WordPress security report by WPScan

WordPress security scanner WPScan’s 2024 WordPress vulnerability report calls attention to WordPress vulnerability trends and suggests the kinds of things website publishers (and SEOs) should be looking out for.

Some of the key findings from the report were that just over 20% of vulnerabilities were rated as high or critical level threats, with medium severity threats, at 67% of reported vulnerabilities, making up the majority. Many regard medium level vulnerabilities as if they are low-level threats and that’s a mistake because they’re not low level and should be regarded as deserving attention.

The WPScan report advised:

“While severity doesn’t translate directly to the risk of exploitation, it’s an important guideline for website owners to make an educated decision about when to disable or update the extension.”

WordPress Vulnerability Severity Distribution

Critical level vulnerabilities, the highest level of threat, represented only 2.38% of vulnerabilities, which is essentially good news for WordPress publishers. Yet as mentioned earlier, when combined with the percentages of high level threats (17.68%) the number or concerning vulnerabilities rises to almost 20%.

Here are the percentages by severity ratings:

Critical 2.38%
Low 12.83%
High 17.68%
Medium 67.12%

Authenticated Versus Unauthenticated

Authenticated vulnerabilities are those that require an attacker to first attain user credentials and their accompanying permission levels in order to exploit a particular vulnerability. Exploits that require subscriber-level authentication are the most exploitable of the authenticated exploits and those that require administrator level access present the least risk (although not always a low risk for a variety of reasons).

Unauthenticated attacks are generally the easiest to exploit because anyone can launch an attack without having to first acquire a user credential.

The WPScan vulnerability report found that about 22% of reported vulnerabilities required subscriber level or no authentication at all, representing the most exploitable vulnerabilities. On the other end of the scale of the exploitability are vulnerabilities requiring admin permission levels representing a total of 30.71% of reported vulnerabilities.

Permission Levels Required For Exploits

Vulnerabilities requiring administrator level credentials represented the highest percentage of exploits, followed by Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) with 24.74% of vulnerabilities. This is interesting because CSRF is an attack that uses social engineering to get a victim to click a link from which the user’s permission levels are acquired. This is a mistake that WordPress publishers should be aware of because all it takes is for an admin level user to follow a link which then enables the hacker to assume admin level privileges to the WordPress website.

The following is the percentages of exploits ordered by roles necessary to launch an attack.

Ascending Order Of User Roles For Vulnerabilities

Author 2.19%
Subscriber 10.4%
Unauthenticated 12.35%
Contributor 19.62%
CSRF 24.74%
Admin 30.71%

Most Common Vulnerability Types Requiring Minimal Authentication

Broken Access Control in the context of WordPress refers to a security failure that can allow an attacker without necessary permission credentials to gain access to higher credential permissions.

In the section of the report that looks at the occurrences and vulnerabilities underlying unauthenticated or subscriber level vulnerabilities reported (Occurrence vs Vulnerability on Unauthenticated or Subscriber+ reports), WPScan breaks down the percentages for each vulnerability type that is most common for exploits that are the easiest to launch (because they require minimal to no user credential authentication).

The WPScan threat report noted that Broken Access Control represents a whopping 84.99% followed by SQL injection (20.64%).

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) defines Broken Access Control as:

“Access control, sometimes called authorization, is how a web application grants access to content and functions to some users and not others. These checks are performed after authentication, and govern what ‘authorized’ users are allowed to do.
Access control sounds like a simple problem but is insidiously difficult to implement correctly. A web application’s access control model is closely tied to the content and functions that the site provides. In addition, the users may fall into a number of groups or roles with different abilities or privileges.”

SQL injection, at 20.64% represents the second most prevalent type of vulnerability, which WPScan referred to as both “high severity and risk” in the context of vulnerabilities requiring minimal authentication levels because attackers can access and/or tamper with the database which is the heart of every WordPress website.

These are the percentages:

Broken Access Control 84.99%
SQL Injection 20.64%
Cross-Site Scripting 9.4%
Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload 5.28%
Sensitive Data Disclosure 4.59%
Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) 3.67%
Remote Code Execution 2.52%
Other 14.45%

Vulnerabilities In The WordPress Core Itself

The overwhelming majority of vulnerability issues were reported in third-party plugins and themes. However, there were in 2023 a total of 13 vulnerabilities reported in the WordPress core itself. Out of the thirteen vulnerabilities only one of them was rated as a high severity threat, which is the second highest level, with Critical being the highest level vulnerability threat, a rating scoring system maintained by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).

The WordPress core platform itself is held to the highest standards and benefits from a worldwide community that is vigilant in discovering and patching vulnerabilities.

Website Security Should Be Considered As Technical SEO

Site audits don’t normally cover website security but in my opinion every responsible audit should at least talk about security headers. As I’ve been saying for years, website security quickly becomes an SEO issue once a website’s ranking start disappearing from the search engine results pages (SERPs) due to being compromised by a vulnerability. That’s why it’s critical to be proactive about website security.

According to the WPScan report, the main point of entry for hacked websites were leaked credentials and weak passwords. Ensuring strong password standards plus two-factor authentication is an important part of every website’s security stance.

Using security headers is another way to help protect against Cross-Site Scripting and other kinds of vulnerabilities.

Lastly, a WordPress firewall and website hardening are also useful proactive approaches to website security. I once added a forum to a brand new website I created and it was immediately under attack within minutes. Believe it or not, virtually every website worldwide is under attack 24 hours a day by bots scanning for vulnerabilities.

Read the WPScan Report:

WPScan 2024 Website Threat Report

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ljupco Smokovski

SEO

An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices For Mobile SEO

Published

22 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Max

Mobile SEO: An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices

Over the years, search engines have encouraged businesses to improve mobile experience on their websites. More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile, and in some cases based on the industry, mobile traffic can reach up to 90%.

Since Google has completed its switch to mobile-first indexing, the question is no longer “if” your website should be optimized for mobile, but how well it is adapted to meet these criteria. A new challenge has emerged for SEO professionals with the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay (FID) starting March, 12 2024.

Thus, understanding mobile SEO’s latest advancements, especially with the shift to INP, is crucial. This guide offers practical steps to optimize your site effectively for today’s mobile-focused SEO requirements.

What Is Mobile SEO And Why Is It Important?

The goal of mobile SEO is to optimize your website to attain better visibility in search engine results specifically tailored for mobile devices.

This form of SEO not only aims to boost search engine rankings, but also prioritizes enhancing mobile user experience through both content and technology.

While, in many ways, mobile SEO and traditional SEO share similar practices, additional steps related to site rendering and content are required to meet the needs of mobile users and the speed requirements of mobile devices.

Does this need to be a priority for your website? How urgent is it?

Consider this: 58% of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices.

If you aren’t focused on mobile users, there is a good chance you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of traffic.

Mobile-First Indexing

Additionally, as of 2023, Google has switched its crawlers to a mobile-first indexing priority.

This means that the mobile experience of your site is critical to maintaining efficient indexing, which is the step before ranking algorithms come into play.

How Much Of Your Traffic Is From Mobile?

How much traffic potential you have with mobile users can depend on various factors, including your industry (B2B sites might attract primarily desktop users, for example) and the search intent your content addresses (users might prefer desktop for larger purchases, for example).

Regardless of where your industry and the search intent of your users might be, the future will demand that you optimize your site experience for mobile devices.

How can you assess your current mix of mobile vs. desktop users?

An easy way to see what percentage of your users is on mobile is to go into Google Analytics 4.

Click Reports in the left column.
Click on the Insights icon on the right side of the screen.
Scroll down to Suggested Questions and click on it.
Click on Technology.
Click on Top Device model by Users.
Then click on Top Device category by Users under Related Results.
The breakdown of Top Device category will match the date range selected at the top of GA4.

Screenshot from GA4, March 2024

You can also set up a report in Looker Studio.

Add your site to the Data source.
Add Device category to the Dimension field.
Add 30-day active users to the Metric field.
Click on Chart to select the view that works best for you.

A screen capture from Looker Studio showing a pie chart with a breakdown of mobile, desktop, tablet, and Smart TV users for a site

Screenshot from Looker Studio, March 2024

You can add more Dimensions to really dig into the data to see which pages attract which type of users, what the mobile-to-desktop mix is by country, which search engines send the most mobile users, and so much more.

How To Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Now that you know how to build a report on mobile and desktop usage, you need to figure out if your site is optimized for mobile traffic.

While Google removed the mobile-friendly testing tool from Google Search Console in December 2023, there are still a number of useful tools for evaluating your site for mobile users.

Bing still has a mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you the following:

Viewport is configured correctly.
Page content fits device width.
Text on the page is readable.
Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly.
Any other issues detected.

Google’s Lighthouse Chrome extension provides you with an evaluation of your site’s performance across several factors, including load times, accessibility, and SEO.

To use, install the Lighthouse Chrome extension.

Go to your website in your browser.
Click on the orange lighthouse icon in your browser’s address bar.
Click Generate Report.
A new tab will open and display your scores once the evaluation is complete.

An image showing the Lighthouse Scores for a website.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

You can also use the Lighthouse report in Developer Tools in Chrome.

Simply click on the three dots next to the address bar.
Select “More Tools.”
Select Developer Tools.
Click on the Lighthouse tab.
Choose “Mobile” and click the “Analyze page load” button.

An image showing how to get to Lighthouse within Google Chrome Developer Tools.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

Another option that Google offers is the PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool. Simply add your URL into the field and click Analyze.

PSI will integrate any Core Web Vitals scores into the resulting view so you can see what your users are experiencing when they come to your site.

An image showing the PageSpeed Insights scores for a website.

Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, March 2024

Other tools, like WebPageTest.org, will graphically display the processes and load times for everything it takes to display your webpages.

With this information, you can see which processes block the loading of your pages, which ones take the longest to load, and how this affects your overall page load times.

You can also emulate the mobile experience by using Developer Tools in Chrome, which allows you to switch back and forth between a desktop and mobile experience.

An image showing how to change the device emulation for a site within Google Chrome Developer Tools

Screenshot from Google Chrome Developer Tools, March 2024

Lastly, use your own mobile device to load and navigate your website:

Does it take forever to load?
Are you able to navigate your site to find the most important information?
Is it easy to add something to cart?
Can you read the text?

How To Optimize Your Site Mobile-First

With all these tools, keep an eye on the Performance and Accessibility scores, as these directly affect mobile users.

Expand each section within the PageSpeed Insights report to see what elements are affecting your score.

These sections can give your developers their marching orders for optimizing the mobile experience.

While mobile speeds for cellular networks have steadily improved around the world (the average speed in the U.S. has jumped to 27.06 Mbps from 11.14 Mbps in just eight years), speed and usability for mobile users are at a premium.

Best Practices For Mobile Optimization

Unlike traditional SEO, which can focus heavily on ensuring that you are using the language of your users as it relates to the intersection of your products/services and their needs, optimizing for mobile SEO can seem very technical SEO-heavy.

While you still need to be focused on matching your content with the needs of the user, mobile search optimization will require the aid of your developers and designers to be fully effective.

Below are several key factors in mobile SEO to keep in mind as you’re optimizing your site.

Site Rendering

How your site responds to different devices is one of the most important elements in mobile SEO.

The two most common approaches to this are responsive design and dynamic serving.

Responsive design is the most common of the two options.

Using your site’s cascading style sheets (CSS) and flexible layouts, as well as responsive content delivery networks (CDN) and modern image file types, responsive design allows your site to adjust to a variety of screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions.

With the responsive design, elements on the page adjust in size and location based on the size of the screen.

You can simply resize the window of your desktop browser and see how this works.

An image showing the difference between Web.dev in a full desktop display vs. a mobile display using responsive design.

Screenshot from web.dev, March 2024

This is the approach that Google recommends.

Adaptive design, also known as dynamic serving, consists of multiple fixed layouts that are dynamically served to the user based on their device.

Sites can have a separate layout for desktop, smartphone, and tablet users. Each design can be modified to remove functionality that may not make sense for certain device types.

This is a less efficient approach, but it does give sites more control over what each device sees.

While these will not be covered here, two other options:

Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which can seamlessly integrate into a mobile app.
Separate mobile site/URL (which is no longer recommended).

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Google has introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a more comprehensive measure of user experience, succeeding First Input Delay. While FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your page (e.g., clicking a link, tapping a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. INP, on the other hand, broadens the scope by measuring the responsiveness of a website throughout the entire lifespan of a page, not just first interaction.

Note that actions such as hovering and scrolling do not influence INP, however, keyboard-driven scrolling or navigational actions are considered keystrokes that may activate events measured by INP but not scrolling which is happeing due to interaction.

Scrolling may indirectly affect INP, for example in scenarios where users scroll through content, and additional content is lazy-loaded from the API. While the act of scrolling itself isn’t included in the INP calculation, the processing, necessary for loading additional content, can create contention on the main thread, thereby increasing interaction latency and adversely affecting the INP score.

What qualifies as an optimal INP score?

An INP under 200ms indicates good responsiveness.
Between 200ms and 500ms needs improvement.
Over 500ms means page has poor responsiveness.

and these are common issues causing poor INP scores:

Long JavaScript Tasks: Heavy JavaScript execution can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to respond to user interactions. Thus break long JS tasks into smaller chunks by using scheduler API.
Large DOM (HTML) Size: A large DOM ( starting from 1500 elements) can severely impact a website’s interactive performance. Every additional DOM element increases the work required to render pages and respond to user interactions.
Inefficient Event Callbacks: Event handlers that execute lengthy or complex operations can significantly affect INP scores. Poorly optimized callbacks attached to user interactions, like clicks, keypress or taps, can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to render visual feedback promptly. For example when handlers perform heavy computations or initiate synchronous network requests such on clicks.

and you can troubleshoot INP issues using free and paid tools.

As a good starting point I would recommend to check your INP scores by geos via treo.sh which will give you a great high level insights where you struggle with most.

INP scores by Geos

Image Optimization

Images add a lot of value to the content on your site and can greatly affect the user experience.

From page speeds to image quality, you could adversely affect the user experience if you haven’t optimized your images.

This is especially true for the mobile experience. Images need to adjust to smaller screens, varying resolutions, and screen orientation.

Use responsive images
Implement lazy loading
Compress your images (use WebP)
Add your images into sitemap

Optimizing images is an entire science, and I advise you to read our comprehensive guide on image SEO how to implement the mentioned recommendations.

Avoid Intrusive Interstitials

Google rarely uses concrete language to state that something is a ranking factor or will result in a penalty, so you know it means business about intrusive interstitials in the mobile experience.

Intrusive interstitials are basically pop-ups on a page that prevent the user from seeing content on the page.

John Mueller, Google’s Senior Search Analyst, stated that they are specifically interested in the first interaction a user has after clicking on a search result.

Examples of intrusive interstitial pop-ups on a mobile site according to Google.

Not all pop-ups are considered bad. Interstitial types that are considered “intrusive” by Google include:

Pop-ups that cover most or all of the page content.
Non-responsive interstitials or pop-ups that are impossible for mobile users to close.
Pop-ups that are not triggered by a user action, such as a scroll or a click.

Structured Data

Most of the tips provided in this guide so far are focused on usability and speed and have an additive effect, but there are changes that can directly influence how your site appears in mobile search results.

Search engine results pages (SERPs) haven’t been the “10 blue links” in a very long time.

They now reflect the diversity of search intent, showing a variety of different sections to meet the needs of users. Local Pack, shopping listing ads, video content, and more dominate the mobile search experience.

As a result, it’s more important than ever to provide structured data markup to the search engines, so they can display rich results for users.

In this example, you can see that both Zojirushi and Amazon have included structured data for their rice cookers, and Google is displaying rich results for both.

An image of a search result for Japanese rice cookers that shows rich results for Zojirushi and Amazon.

Screenshot from search for [Japanese rice cookers], Google, March 2024

Adding structured data markup to your site can influence how well your site shows up for local searches and product-related searches.

Using JSON-LD, you can mark up the business, product, and services data on your pages in Schema markup.

If you use WordPress as the content management system for your site, there are several plugins available that will automatically mark up your content with structured data.

Content Style

When you think about your mobile users and the screens on their devices, this can greatly influence how you write your content.

Rather than long, detailed paragraphs, mobile users prefer concise writing styles for mobile reading.

Each key point in your content should be a single line of text that easily fits on a mobile screen.

Your font sizes should adjust to the screen’s resolution to avoid eye strain for your users.

If possible, allow for a dark or dim mode for your site to further reduce eye strain.

Headers should be concise and address the searcher’s intent. Rather than lengthy section headers, keep it simple.

Finally, make sure that your text renders in a font size that’s readable.

Tap Targets

As important as text size, the tap targets on your pages should be sized and laid out appropriately.

Tap targets include navigation elements, links, form fields, and buttons like “Add to Cart” buttons.

Targets smaller than 48 pixels by 48 pixels and targets that overlap or are overlapped by other page elements will be called out in the Lighthouse report.

Tap targets are essential to the mobile user experience, especially for ecommerce websites, so optimizing them is vital to the health of your online business.

Prioritizing These Tips

If you have delayed making your site mobile-friendly until now, this guide may feel overwhelming. As a result, you may not know what to prioritize first.

As with so many other optimizations in SEO, it’s important to understand which changes will have the greatest impact, and this is just as true for mobile SEO.

Think of SEO as a framework in which your site’s technical aspects are the foundation of your content. Without a solid foundation, even the best content may struggle to rank.

Responsive or Dynamic Rendering: If your site requires the user to zoom and scroll right or left to read the content on your pages, no number of other optimizations can help you. This should be first on your list.
Content Style: Rethink how your users will consume your content online. Avoid very long paragraphs. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” to quote Shakespeare.
Image Optimization: Begin migrating your images to next-gen image formats and optimize your content display network for speed and responsiveness.
Tap Targets: A site that prevents users from navigating or converting into sales won’t be in business long. Make navigation, links, and buttons usable for them.
Structured Data: While this element ranks last in priority on this list, rich results can improve your chances of receiving traffic from a search engine, so add this to your to-do list once you’ve completed the other optimizations.

Summary

From How Search Works, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

If Google’s primary mission is focused on making all the world’s information accessible and useful, then you know they will prefer surfacing sites that align with that vision.

Since a growing percentage of users are on mobile devices, you may want to infer the word “everywhere” added to the end of the mission statement.

Are you missing out on traffic from mobile devices because of a poor mobile experience?

If you hope to remain relevant, make mobile SEO a priority now.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

SEO

HARO Has Been Dead for a While

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Every SEO’s favorite ~~link-building~~ collaboration tool, HARO, was officially killed off for good last week by Cision. It’s now been wrapped into a new product: Connectively.

I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.

I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.

After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:

So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.

Here’s one of them:

Example of an AI-generated pitch in HARO

Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…

I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!

Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:

Example HARO pitch that caught my attention

Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:

I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)

So… I decided to confront him 😉

Here’s what he said:

Shocker.

I pressed him for more details:

I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.

I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:

Example of links build with HARO, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…

If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.

No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.

Sidenote.

Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?

If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.

My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.

For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉

Finding people to request insights from in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).

Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.

Me, indirectly sourcing insights on social media

Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉