On-page website optimization

Meta tags are the very title and description a person sees in Google before they ever reach your site; headings are the plan of the text inside the page.

The title is the line people click in the search results and the label on the browser tab. The description is the grey text underneath. Search does not always use it word for word, but it usually decides whether people click you or the neighbour. It is effectively an ad you do not pay for.

Headings H1 to H6 are the order inside the page, like a table of contents in a book. H1 is the name of the page and there is only one of it. H2 marks sections, H3 subsections. A common problem: a heading was made out of plain big bold text and a real H1 is missing altogether — so search reads the page as one undivided lump.

• a separate title and description for every page
• one H1 per page, with no duplicates
• subheadings in the right order, with no levels skipped
• lengths at which the text is not cut off in the results

On shop sites the description is most often either empty or identical across three hundred pages — then Google composes it itself out of a random chunk of text. It looks poor, and the person scrolls past.

The check is simple: search for your company name and look at the line and the description Google shows. If you see a technical string of words or the name of a completely different page, the meta tags definitely need work.

A human-readable URL is a page address written in words: both the visitor and the search engine can tell what is on the page before they even open it.

Compare two lines. The first: site.com/index.php?route=product&id=4728. The second: site.com/interior-doors/. The second one can be read out loud over the phone, it does not look alarming, and it already contains the word people search for. A small thing, but it works everywhere a link shows up.

The address is visible in the results under the heading, in a messenger when a client sends the link to a friend, and in an ad. A string of digits there looks suspicious — people click it less often. On top of that, the address itself is one more hint to search about what the page is about.

• addresses in latin letters, in words, with no extra parameters
• one page — one address, with no variants
• clear nesting: the section first, then the product
• redirects from the old addresses to the new ones

The main risk is changing addresses on a live site without redirects. Old links from search, ads and bookmarks lead nowhere, and the page drops out of the results for a while. That is why readable URLs are switched on together with a list of redirects, never on their own.

If the site has been in search for a few years, do not change addresses just to make them look nicer. First work out what you lose and what you gain; sometimes it is wiser to leave them as they are.

Internal linking means links from one page of your site to another: they lead the visitor onwards and pass search weight between pages.

Picture a shop: someone came in for one thing, and by the till there is a shelf with what goes with it. On a site the same job is done by links inside the text, “related products” blocks and the breadcrumb trail at the top. The person does not go back to Google to keep looking — they carry on with you.

The second part is technical. Search treats a page that many links point to as more important. The homepage is usually the strongest, and every link from it passes part of that strength along. So the pages that bring in money should be one or two clicks from the homepage, not buried deep.

• links inside the text to related services and products
• breadcrumbs: the path from the homepage to the current page
• blocks with “similar” and “bought together”
• not a single page that nothing at all links to

A typical mistake is links labelled “here” and “read more”. Neither the person nor the search engine can tell where they are being sent. The label should name what is on that page: “interior door fitting”.

The simplest check: take the most profitable page on the site and count the clicks from the homepage to it. Three or more — it needs to be moved closer.

A site should open in a few seconds and look right on a phone — otherwise some people leave before they even see what you sell.

Most visitors arrive from a phone, often on mobile data. If a page takes a long time to load, the person simply goes back to the results and taps the next site. Search notices this and gradually pushes slow pages down — but the real loss here is not the positions, it is the clients who left.

Responsive layout means the page rebuilds itself for the width of the screen: the menu folds away, columns stack one under another, the Call button sits where a thumb can reach it. Older sites are often just the desktop version made tiny — you have to pinch and zoom to read the price.

• compressing images without spoiling how they look
• caching — the page is not rebuilt from scratch every time
• removing scripts and fonts that are not used
• testing on a real phone, not only in a measuring tool

To be honest about the ceiling: speed does not depend on our fixes alone. Cheap hosting, a heavy template and a couple of dozen plugins set a limit you cannot jump over. In that case we show exactly what is slowing things down, and you decide whether to change the hosting, change the template, or leave it as it is.

The easiest test: open your site from a phone on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi and count to five. If you have not seen the main thing by then, there is work to do.

Structured data is a set of invisible labels in the page code that tell search: this is a price, this is a review, this is an address, and this is the opening hours.

A person can see at a glance that “1,200 UAH” is a price and that five stars are a rating. A robot only sees text and does not always work it out. Schema.org markup is a commonly agreed dictionary the site uses to say outright what each line means. It changes nothing in how the page looks.

Why it matters to you: your result in the listing can appear wider than the ones around it — with stars, a price, stock availability, questions and answers. Such a snippet (that block in the search results) takes up more room and catches the eye, and it gets clicked more often at the very same position.

• product: price, availability, manufacturer
• organisation: address, phone, opening hours
• reviews and ratings, if they are genuine
• breadcrumbs and question-and-answer blocks

Honestly: markup does not oblige search to draw those stars. Google decides for itself, and for faked reviews it may remove them altogether. So we mark up only what really is on the page and visible to the visitor.

The quickest benefit comes from marking up the organisation: address, phone and opening hours. That is what people look for most often, and it shows clearly right in the results.

This is the housekeeping — the files and settings that let the search robot find your pages at all and not get lost among them.

A sitemap (the sitemap.xml file) is a list of every page worth showing in search. The robot does not have to wander the site at random: it takes a ready-made list. And robots.txt is a note at the entrance: go here, and do not bother with the basket, the customer account and the service pages.

Duplicates are a story of their own: when the same product opens at three addresses (with www and without, with a filter applied, in a print version). Search sees three identical pages and does not know which to show; the strength is split between them and none of them rises. We collect such cases and merge them into one main address.

• a sitemap that updates itself
• a robots.txt with no accidental blocks
• duplicates merged into a single address
• checking for errors in the search engine reports

The nastiest case is a block on indexing left over from the development stage. The site works, it looks good, it has texts — and it is simply not in search at all. One line in a file, and months of work are on pause.

This is the thing to check first of all. If some of your pages never made it into the index, no texts or links pointing at them will work.