Improving search engine rankings

Lots of people and businesses have websites. One estimate places the number of websites online at over 1 billion!

It's no surprise, then, that if you happen to work in the IT industry, whether it's web hosting, web design, web marketing, and so on, a common question you'll get from people is "How do I increase my Google rankings?". 

That is an open-ended question, there is no single answer. SEO, or, Search Engine Optimization, is a process, and it takes time - much like learning to ride a bike or mastering a new language.

Additionally, not everyone is up-to-date on current best practices. It's no longer as simple as just creating some meta keywords and descriptions and being done with it.

So, what's the answer?

PageSpeed Insights

Now, at first glance of what's in the name, "speed", and what's written on the page, "make your web pages fast on all devices", you would be forgiven for thinking this tool is just about making a website faster. Wrong. It's more than that, a lot more.

It's worth noting that a page load time does impact SEO. If a website takes two minutes to load, that's a poor experience for visitors, and one of the things that search engines like Google and Bing want is to ensure that they're delivering relevant and high-quality results for their visitors, so you do want to ensure your website loads fast to maximise your chances of ranking better.

Putting performance aside, PageSpeed Insights looks at Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO.

In November 2023, a lot of attention was given to the Ethernet Servers website, whereby several issues were fixed, as identified by PageSpeed Insights:

• Background and foreground colors have a sufficient contrast ratio
• Links are distinguishable without relying on color
• Links have descriptive text
• Tap targets are sized appropriately
• Heading elements appear in a sequentially-descending order
• Links are crawlable
• ARIA input fields have accessible names

And that's just to name a few of the fixes!

Not only do search engines love to see high-quality websites that tick their boxes, but your visitors will as well.

For example, the idea behind the "Background and foreground colors have a sufficient contrast ratio" check is to ensure that people with sight issues can still browse a website effectively based on its colour scheme. If someone cannot read some of the text on your site, that's a huge problem and could be costly in the cost of e-commerce.

No matter if a website is for a small community, an e-commerce website, or a personal blog, ensuring you comply with the best practices laid out by PageSpeed Insights is recommended.

Some of the checks focus on performance and may be best addressed by your hosting provider (like Ethernet Servers!), whereas others focus on the content of the website, and may be best addressed by a web developer.

Before hiring an "SEO specialist" (of which many will not deliver on their promises), correcting any issues the tool finds is a good first port of call, and you may like to use something like Google Analytics to be able to track the before and after results.

As always, before making any sort of changes, make sure to create a full backup, so that if something is wrongly modified, it's easy to get things up and running again. Using a versioning system such as GitHub is also a great idea, they allow you to create public or private repositories for free.

Steps to use:
1) Go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/
2) Type in your domain
3) Click "Analyze"

Thanks for reading - wishing you the best of luck creating a more effective website!