Top 5 Elements Most Marketing Websites Forget About — And Kill SEO
When building a house, most people wouldn’t forget to include a front door, but that’s exactly what a lot of design and web development agencies do when it comes to building websites. They spend an excruciating amount of time paying attention to pixel-perfect renditions of photoshop comp, matching fonts, getting breakpoints correct for mobile — especially the home page — thinking that this is the first experience a visitor has with your website. While this may be true if someone types in your website after getting a business card, 99% of the time the visitor’s first experience with your website is not with a page — it’s a Google search result listing.
To build a website pick any Content Management System — Drupal, WordPress or even an AWS Headless CMS — but don’t forget to pay attention to a few key pieces of invisible infrastructure that serve as your website’s front door. Without these invisible elements being considered it may be difficult or impossible to be discovered by Google, and the results shown could be misleading or confusing.
While the entire ecosystem is complex, there are five core elements it’s important not to miss:
- <title>
- Metatag — description
- <H1>
- Sitemap.xml
- URL redirects (website rebuilds)
#1) <title>
The <title> tag is totally invisible element that lives in the HTML of a website (specifically inside the <head> tag). Despite not being visible when you are visiting the website, it is critically important as it determines what shows up as the heading when looking at Google search results:
Forget to include the <title> tag, enter too little or too much text and your website will either not show up in any relevant search results or be super confusing.
#2) Metatag — description
The second invisible element that shows up in search results is the meta description tag:
It’s written a little less intuitively than the <title> tag like so:
<meta name="description" content="YOUR DESCRIPTION GOES HERE" />And if for some reason you don’t include one, Google will do its best to figure out what your page is about by looking at the content. But unless you want your editor to be a robot, it’s a good idea to make sure this exists on your site.
#3) <H1>
While I’ve been describing a lot of invisible elements, the H1 is actually visible on the page. And much like Highlander, there can be only one!
Many website editors and CMSes know this, so they try to make sure there is one and try to keep you from entering more than one… but where there is a will there is a way. In the Bixel Exchange website (a non-profit devoted to entry-level tech job createion) there are actually 10, the first of which is highlighted below:
This is bad because search engines use the <h1> in a similar way to understand what a page is about. With multiple entries you are again forcing robots to make decisions you don’t want them to make…
#4) Sitemap.xml
One of the elements that impacts all the pages on your site and doesn’t exist on the page is the sitemap.xml. This file 1) should exist for you (you should check at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml) 2) and should include a list of all of the pages you want to show up in Google. You can read more about sitemap.xml here on the Google sitemap help page.
#5) URL redirects (website rebuilds)
The last missing piece from our top five list only applies to website rebuilds. So if you are building a website from scratch, congratulations, you can stop reading now. For those of you who are rebuilding a site, don’t forget to index and create a translation layer for all of the old websites links. If you don’t, all of the old website traffic coming from Google is going to drop off a cliff.
Ironically this is often a pitfall that comes along with redesigns that are intended to make websites easier to use and find content more easily. The trouble with this is that most people on your website don’t start at the home page. On our website, for example, over the past for years our home page has only represented 3% of our overall traffic, and was only 1 of over 6,000 landing pages that served as the entry point to our website.
Once you have a list of all of the existing pages of the site, you need to create a map of the URL that page should be redirected to and then set them up as a 301 redirects.
Wrap Up
In short a website is more than just kick ass beautifully rendered html. That is equivalent to a beautiful well thought out interior design for a house; it’s great when you have friends over, but if you forget to add a front door to your house, people aren’t likely to stop by.
