What does it mean for a site to be to be SEO ready?

As a developer, I try to help my clients understand what I’m doing to support their SEO efforts and what they should expect from me. I recognise it’s not always clear what developers can or should be doing to optimise a site for search and sharing, so I’d like to share with you my thoughts on the technical side of SEO and how you can talk to your developer about it.

With regards to SEO, I believe a web developer working on your site has two core responsibilities.

☝️ First — To help other websites and search engines understand the structure of your site and the content on it.

✌️ Second — To optimise your site’s performance so that Google knows visitors will be able to load pages fast.

Let me explain each of these in a little more detail.

🔖 Metadata:

Search engines are quite smart and can learn a lot about your content with no optimisations whatsoever. However, they can make mistakes, misjudge the importance of something or not understand the nuance of your content.

This is why websites should leverage metadata to explicitly communicate the important parts of each page and take control over how the site is understood.

There are a few ways you can do this. You might already be familiar with metatags such as the  open graph protocol . This is commonly used to unfurl links and give a preview for your pages. When you’ve sent a link in a chat or on social media and it’s displayed nicely with an image — this is probably because of open graph meta tags.

Iframely  provides a great tool to test your open graph and popular platform tags.

Open Graph is widely used by many platforms but you should also consider if platforms important to your company have their own tags. For example, Twitter allows you to  define how preview content should be displayed  in tweets, and Pinterest allows you to  determine if content from your site can be pinned .

A more advanced technique that can be used in addition to this is  SchemaOrg . This helps search engines to gain a deeper understanding of your page and present your content in more desirable locations. When searching for a company on Google and see their details to the right or a carousel of articles at the top — this is probably because that site has supported it with SchemaOrg definitions.

With SchemaOrg you can let computers know that a page isn’t just about your company, but that your company is a local dry cleaning service, or a self-storage center. You can indicate that your content isn’t just an article, it’s an FAQ page that Google can use to show customers that your company is a reliable source of information on this topic.

You can test your SchemaOrg support using Google’s  rich results tool . You can even generate SchemaOrg scripts using  this free tool .

With metadata tools like these, it’s much easier to understand how computers are understanding your site.

⚡ Performance:

Recently it’s become even more important to make sure your site is performant — especially for users who reach your site via Google search results. This is because search engines know better than anyone how many users give up on a website because of its poor performance.

In an effort to combat this, Google has announced new metrics that will be used to identify and de-prioritize sites that aren’t optimised. These metrics are referred to as  Core Web Vitals . Here are a few that you should keep an eye on for your site;

• Largest Contentful Paint  is how long it takes to load the largest thing on the screen. Google expects this to happen within 2.5 seconds. So you’ll have to be careful about loading videos and big images on your site.
• First Input Delay  is the time before a user can interact with the functionality on a page. This should be under 100ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift  measures one of the most frustrating things about websites. Have you ever gone to click something only for it to move down because an image or advert loaded in? THIS is cumulative layout shift, and Google is incentivising websites to stop it.

Measuring these requires a bit more explanation, but your web developer should be able to explain how well your site is doing. If you’re interested I could go into detail in a future tip.

📝 A quick Note…

Before wrapping this up I think it’s important to acknowledge that technical SEO is just one building block of your SEO strategy.

Having your site SEO ready is a very important optimization for most businesses, but it’s important to acknowledge that  the content on your site is still the most important part when ranking on Google . That’s why these technical tips should be paired with content advice from an SEO strategist or content marketer.

Thank you for taking the time to read my tips, I hope you learned a thing or two!

If you have any questions, or tips of your own to add — please do leave a comment. I’d love to talk more about this.