SEO FAQs

Your website health score is based on numerous indicators, not limited to page load speeds, image size, non-optimized meta titles and descriptions, widgets on used on your website, podcasts or other RSS feeds, and links from your website out to other websites on the internet. 

All of these factors, and more, affect how search engines will index your website. Google's algorithms are constantly updating to help provide the best user experience and most reliable information. Fixing errors will help your website rank higher in searches, help your customers find you and ultimately grow your business. 

Domain trust describes the trust "value" given to a website (domain) by search engines. The higher the number, the higher the trust value, which is critical for ranking in the top 10 results of a search.

The same concept applies for pages on your website where there is "page trust".  

A sitemap (or XML sitemap) is much like a table of contents of your website for search engines, but in XML code. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console when your site is new or has undergone changes can help Google to Index your website quicker than it would otherwise. Connecting Google Search Console to your website directly can also tell you how people find your website, what pages they see, and can help indicate indexing issues and help you to troubleshoot.

Though the maximum length of a URL in the address bar is 2048 characters, URLs should be kept to 50-60 characters, not more than 75. Longer URLs may prevent some browsers from processing them correctly. 

An H1 Header is like a title to your webpage. It should be placed at the top of your web page and contain valuable keywords pertaining to your business and especially the content of the web page. This can be coded in your web page or assigned in the text design of your web page. You should only have ONE H1 and each page should have one. Search engines use this H1 to help index a web page appropriately.

"H1 tag missing" means that page has no H1 designated. 

H1 headings must be unique for each visible page. Duplicate H1 headings on different pages prevent search engines from understanding which page is relevant to the search query. Pages with duplicate headers are less likely to rank well, as they can confuse search engines about the page topic.

Titles refer to page title or meta titles for a web page and is what is displayed in search results. You will find these in your SEO settings for a particular web page. They should NOT be identical to the page title, blog title, or H1 on a web page, and they should be unique and relevant to the content of the page or blog. 

Titles need to be 50 to 60 characters long. If the title is longer than 60 characters, search engines will cut it off and users will not see the entire title in search engine results pages. A title that is too short misses an opportunity for better ranking in search engine results pages.

While search engines DO NOT USE DESCRIPTIONS AS A RANKING FACTOR, it is a useful tool for attracting website visitors since this description is what shows in the search engine results. What you say here can strike a chord in a user and convince someone to click on and go to your website. If the description is relevant to your page, website, and business, you could gain some engagement with a prospect. 

The length of the description is also relevant with an ideal length of 150-160 characters.

Low word count indicates less than 250 words on the page. Generally speaking, all pages should have at least 250 words and, in most cases, should be 1200-1500. You want at least 1,000 words for blog posts.

Alt-text is the alternative text used to describe images to search engines by web pages. Alt-text should tell a search engine exactly what the image is. This also helps people who are visually impaired who use screen reading tools. It is useful to include relevant keywords in alt-text but it is most important to accurately describe the image so that a person could easily understand what you are describing.

Many things can slow down web page loading speed. Most commonly we find that images are too large, videos are loaded directly on the website, there are issues with plugins or themes (WordPress), and/or there are direct feeds to the website (like social media, podcast or YouTube). When users find a web page that is slow to load, they leave so this is one of the most critical issues to fix on a website.

For images, it is best to keep them to 500KB or less. For videos, it is recommended you use Vimeo or YouTube to store the videos then link to them on your website. For podcasts, we recommend having the summary on your website and an RSS feed to link to the podcast host. We do not recommend having any direct feed of social media on your website due to the speed issues it causes.

Finding the proper image size for a website can be tricky. Most search engine give priority to mobile friendly function for websites so when we design websites we need to keep that in mind. Some platforms allow you to view different versions in the development stages but not all do. When images are too large the layout can shift and the page load speed can increase. Two factors that we know Google ranks for and if you score poorly here your website will rank lower in search results. Typically we recommend images be smaller than 500KB.

Anchor text is the clickable text you use on your website for a hyperlink. For instance, if you want to link to another page within your website, you might enter: Check out our About page to learn more about our founder, Lori.  I this case, "Check out our About page" is the anchor text. 

"nofollow" is an attribute assigned to link code on a website telling search engines not to follow the link being tagged. In contrast, "follow" links are links that should be followed. 

Here is a detailed article that explains this concept well: https://www.semrush.com/blog/linkbuilding-dofollow-vs-nofollow-semrushchat/.

If your website has landing pages used for something like an opt-in or a page that is available only to people when you give them the link or URL, it is a webpage with no inbound links. Users do not have access to this page in any way unless you supply the link or URL. You should go into the settings for this page and set it to not be indexed by search engines. Or set it to NOT be public. Otherwise, having an unlinked webpage will create an error in your SEO audit. The most important thing to remember is that if the search engine can see it, everyone should be able to find it and see it. If it is hidden from public view, then set it to be hidden from search engines. 

Broken links are links on your website that go to unavailable pages, which has a negative impact on your site. Broken links are also referred to as 404 pages or 404 errors. All broken links should be removed or fixed from your website for improved SEO. 

3XX Status codes indicate an issue with the access to images on your website. This can happen when pages are redirected to new URLs. It forces the search engine to send additional requests to download an image and can significantly increase the page load time for a website if there are many of these requests.

4XX Status codes indicate a page or resource that cannot be accessed. If you have ever seen a webpage that says "404 Page Not Found" this is a 4XX status code. Since this provides a poor user experience for the visitor we recommend these get fixed immediately. Pages of your website that change their status code to a 4XX will get removed from search engines' indexes.

5XX  status codes are related to servers where your website is hosted. This status code indicates a problem with the web servier sometimes only a temporary issue. Sometimes meaning that some techical work was being done on the server at the time of the search engine's crawl of your website. If this problem occurs regularly, reach out to your hosting platform.

Redirects are the functionality used when the URL for a page changes. We set up redirects to avoid broken links and to automatically forward from the old URL to the new. Permanent redirects are called 301 redirects. Temporary redirects include 302, 303, and 307 response codes. (Long-term use of temporary redirects is highly discouraged for strong SEO.)

CSS and Javascript errors refer to added code or code associated with building the actual platform your website is built on. Some code can be minified and some code that is no longer used can be removed. This goes beyond our SEO packages and in some cases cannot be rectified unless your website is moved to a more SEO-oriented platform (as some platforms are definitely built more SEO-friendly than others). In general, we encourage you to add as little custom code as possible to your website.

Similar to CSS and Javascript errors, excessive HTML code can negatively impact how websites perform, primarily in terms of page-loading speed.  As with CSS and Javascript, avoid adding HTML code to your site whenever possible. 

Correcting HTML (or any code-related) issues is not part of BizBolster's SEO plans.

Canonical is a term related to importance of some pages in a website. Web pages that are set as canonical (often by the platform) are read as the most valuable pages in your website and will be indexed accordingly. You can manually add code to a website to ensure that certain pages are seen as canonical.

robots.txt is code that is on webpages to speak directly to search engines. For example, if you have a webpage the is only a thank you page for clients who have signed up for something a robots.txt code can be added (automated by your platform if selected or manually added if preferred) to indicate to the search engine not to index the page. It is not meant for public consumption so it does not need to be optimized nor do you want it to show up in search results. 

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint: LCP measures the loading speed of the largest visual elements on the page, including images, text blocks, videos, etc.

FID (First Input Display): FID measures the time between a user's click on a page and the browser's response to the action. 

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): CLS measures if there is any shift in page visual elements during the page's loading.

FCP (First Contentful Paint): FCP shows how much time it takes for the user to see the first content-rick element on the page (such as text or image).

TTI (Time to Interactive): TTI measures the time from the moment a page starts loading to the moment a stable response to the user's action is made.

TBT (Total Blocking Time): TBT measures the total blocking time during which a page is unavailable for user input.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages used to create simple mobile websites that load almost instantly. Most website platforms support AMP conversion of your mobile pages.