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Elements of an Optimised Web Page

Posted Big Web Media
perfectly-optimized-webpage

How does one built a perfectly optimised webpage?

Hundreds of “best practices” exists on the topic. And as Rand Fishkin from Moz elegantly puts it; this is a challenging question for many in the SEO and web marketing fields. Fortunately for us he has created thus visualizations to explain how he thinks about modern on-page optimization and keyword targeting should work.

Elements of an optimized webpage

Elements of an Optimised WebPage

Uniquely Valuable

  • Page provides authentic, obvious value beyond self-promotion of the host site/author
  • Content quality stands apart from the crowd by a significant margin
  • Text, images, & multimedia are remarkable
  • Page would be described by 80% of visitors as useful, high quality, & unique
  • Searchers who visit would be unlikely to go “back” from the page to choose a different result

Provides Phenomenal UX

  • Content and navigation elements are easily consumed/understood by users
  • Design is aesthetically polished, high quality, and fit authentically with the brand
  • Page layout makes scanning easy & important content elements obvious
  • Page renders fast (<0.5 secs to first response; <4 secs to primary content loaded)
  • A minimal number of browser requests are required to fully load the page
  • Page is browser or device responsive (or specifically optimized to each as appropriate)

 

Keyword-Targeted

  • Page targets a single searcher intent (and associated keyword phrases)
  • Primary keyword phrase is the first words of the title element
  • Primary keyword phrase appears in page URL
  • Content is logical & comprehensive, employing related terms/phrases
  • Keyword phrases are highlighted with bold/italic/sizing/etc as appropriate
  • Primary keywords are used prominently in the page headline
  • Primary keyword is found in the body content 2X+
  • Secondary keywords appear in headline(s)/title/body as appropriate
  • Images on the page employ descriptive, keyword-rich alt attributes
  • Descriptive anchor text is used in links pointing to the page

Built to be Shared through Social Networks

  • URL is descriptive and makes the page’s topic obvious
  • Includes sharing options to the optimal social networks for the page’s audience
  • Page has inherent sharing value (i.e. those who share it will be praised by their audiences, and additional amplification is likely)
  • As appropriate, employ tags for Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, etc

Multi-Device Ready

  • Renders in every (popular) browser properly
  • Optimised to render legibly & elegantly on every screen size
  • Employs the same URL when requested/loaded on every device

Authorship, Meta Data, Schema & Rich Snippets

  • Page content is associated with the author/publisher in the markup via Google’s rel=”author” or rel=”publisher” attribution
  • As appropriate to the content/topic/vertical, page includes schema.org microdata markup options
  • As appropriate to the content/topic/vertical, page includes Google’s rich snippets markup options
  • Employs primary & secondary keywords in the meta description
  • Meta description inspires interest & click-through from SERPs/social
  • Generally avoids meta keywords (unless used for internal search)
  • As appropriate to country/language, page employs hreflang

Crawler/Bot Accessible

  • URL is static (contains no dynamic parameters)
  • Content is unique to this URL (all duplicates canonicalized to it)
  • Content loads in page’s HTML (not via post-load JS/AJAX/iFrames/etc)
  • No more than 4 clicks are required from any page on the site to reach the URL
  • Redirects from other/older versions use 301s or rel=canonical (not 302s)
  • Redirects from other/older versions come direct (no redirect chains)
  • If the page is temporarily unavailable, status code 503 is returned by the server
  • As appropriate, page is included in an RSS feed; RSS URL is canonicalized/redirects to original
  • Meta robots tag allows crawling & indexing
  • Robots.txt file does not block crawler access
  • Host server does not restrict search crawler IPs
  • Key page elements are character length limited:
    • Title <75 characters
    • URL <90 characters
    • Meta Description <160 characters
  • URL is included in site’s XML Sitemap