Below we will see three important points for SEO On Page that we must take into account given their relevance.
Web speed and performance
The loading speed of a website and its performance directly affect SEO. A slow or poorly performing website can lead to SEO penalties while a fast, well-performing website will be favored in search results.
There are many tools to check and analyze web speed, among others we can find:
- Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Google Search Console.
- WebPageTest.
The elements that most affect the loading speed of a website are images and heavy multimedia elements, we must avoid them and/or optimize them as much as possible.
The recommended image size for SEO is:
- In sliders, cover images, large images… etc: 100 kb
- Rest of not so important or main images: 50 kb.
A recommended technique is to use thumbnails for images in such a way that what is initially loaded is the image thumbnail with a minimum weight and, when the user clicks on it, the image with a higher resolution appears. This prevents the website from having to load images in high resolution and with a high weight.
For the two previous points, GIMP is a free image editing program that will allow you to reduce the weight of an image and create its thumbnail.
Regarding heavy multimedia elements such as videos, try to replace them with links to the location where they are located or HTML embeds as in YouTube videos.
For both images and multimedia elements, a good practice is to use some type of service such as CDN or Content Delivery Network. Basically it consists of a service that allows us to replicate resources in different parts of the world so that the user’s download is faster and does not depend on where they are located. With this we will be able to reduce the loading time of the website.
Http vs https in SEO
This factor came into play at Google a while ago. Basically Google penalizes http websites for being insecure, while favoring those that go for https in the search results.
However, be careful, changing from http to https is not trivial and it is advisable to consult a professional to carry out this migration.
Duplicate content and SEO penalties
Duplicate content is also a reason for penalties from search engines. Sometimes it may be intentional and sometimes not.
An example of intentional duplicate content is spam websites whose sole objective is to attract traffic by copying content from other websites.
Another example of intentional duplicate content is what we do ourselves on our website, copying and pasting the same information on different pages of the website. It is recommended not to repeat the same information or write the information that we want to repeat but with different words and format.
An example of unintentional duplicate content could be that we first publish an article on a social network and then on our website. The content of our website will be marked as duplicate because it was first published on the social network.
Another example is that our content manager generates two or more URLs for the same content, which is why, even if we use a content manager, we always have to be aware of everything it generates.
Be careful with this type of practice because, even if it is not intentional, we can earn an SEO penalty.
On the Internet there are many free alternatives to detect duplicate content, like the one you will find in the link.
