Published on 23 June 2021 (Updated on 25 February 2022)

Summary

1. Easy to read text

If you want to improve the readability of your texts, here is a list of some things to check:

Have you used transition words?

They are important to make your text easy to read and understand. Indeed, they are small words like "for example", "likewise", "although", "in addition" or "to conclude". The list is long, but you can consult this site to help you. Don't forget that these linking words are not only useful for your reader, Google likes well constructed texts.

Are your sentences not too long?

To help reading, it is important that your sentences are not too long. Pausing while reading helps to assimilate the information. Therefore, avoid multi-line sentences with only commas or semicolons.

Are your paragraphs structured?

As with sentence length, paragraph length is important. No one wants to read a text that visually forms a single block without line breaks. Your reader's eye will quickly get tired of reading that paragraph.

Is your content original?

If you want to stand out from the competition, you need to talk about topics they haven't covered yet. Be creative! But not too much, always remember to do your homework before you start writing. You need to provide your reader with valuable content.

A good balance between text, images and videos is also important. You should not have more visual content than text.

If you write your own texts, think about using techniques like storytelling (27 techniques here) to hook a user more easily.

2. Adapted photos

Pixel-perfect sizing

Images must be resized efficiently according to their presence on a web page. An image that is too heavy or poorly resized will slow down the loading of the page. A good practice is to adapt the resized images automatically according to the screen used.

Some CMS manage this feature to improve the performance of your website. Find out which one in this summary table.

Choose the right format

Many image formats exist today:

SVG: to be used for illustration (for example for icons). Its asset is the capacity of animations and the possibility of stretching without loss of quality.
WEBP : Very efficient for some browsers thanks to the considerable reduction in weight. Its disadvantage is that it is not compatible with Safari or other browsers (see the list).
JPG : to be used for photographs.

Setting up a CDN

A CDN (Content Network Delivery) plays a major role in optimizing your images. It allows you to distribute them in the 4 corners of the world to improve the loading but that's not all, it also manages several options like :

GZIP compression -> compresses your files to speed up loading.
Caching time -> avoids reloading files.

More details on the article optimize the loading of web pages

The "alt" tag

Google's robots must understand your image thanks to the alt tag. When you define it, you have to do as if you were describing the image to a blind person so that he can imagine it. This tag also plays a role in the SEO of your images.

The name of the file

The file name also plays a role in the referencing of your files. Some CMS will use the file name to fill the alt tag, so it is important to name it well.

3. The links of the web pages

A good architecture

Your website may have several hundred pages. The tree structure of these pages plays a role in referencing, your pages must be ordered efficiently. Here is an example of page architecture:

https://www.snoweb.io/
https://www.snoweb.io/realisations/
https://www.snoweb.io/realisations/station-spatiale/
https://www.snoweb.io/articles/
https://www.snoweb.io/articles/optimiser-son-site-web/

A well written unique URL

Each of your pages has a unique link, it is the canonical link. It is a reference link for your page. A bit like a unique number.

Here's how the canonical url is inserted in the Snoweb homepage:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.snoweb.io/" />

If you understood what this link is for, then you understood that :

https://www.snoweb.io does not equal https://www.snoweb.io/

(Difference with the '/' at the end)

It is best to never put accents or special characters in a URL.

An efficient internal network

The internal linkage is simply all the links of your site that are linked in your pages.

All the links of the Snoweb website that start with https://snoweb.io/ improve the internal mesh of the Snoweb website.

Optimized typing

Each link on your site can have a different behavior for Google. That's why this part is important to improve your SEO.

For example, you have a blog post and you want to link to an external article. You will have to explain that this link is not to be taken into account by Google's robots. Here is how to do it technically:

<a href=”https://exemple.com/article-exemple” rel=”nofollow”>Mon article externe</a>

Similarly, when you fill in your social network links:

<a href=”https://www.facebook.com/page-entreprise/” rel=”nofollow”>Facebook</a>
<a href=”https://www.linkedin.com/page-entreprise/” rel=”nofollow”>Linkedin</a>
<a href=”https://www.instagram.com/page-entreprise/” rel=”nofollow”>Instagram</a>

4. Adding Google structured data

Structured data allows Google's robots to index your content more easily. They are not mandatory but can help Google to better read your pages and therefore to index them faster.

There are several types:

HowTo: explains a way to do things
WebPage: summarizes the information on a page
FAQ : is presented in the form of questions
Recipe : recipe

Explore the search gallery

Let's take the example of a recipe:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Recipe",
  "name": "Chocolat chaud du père nöel",
  "author": "père noël",
  "image": "http://exemple.com/image.jpg",
  "description": "Le chocolat chaud du père nöel.",
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": "4.8",
    "reviewCount": "7462",
    "bestRating": "5",
    "worstRating": "1"
  },
  "prepTime": "PT30M",
  "totalTime": "PT1H30M",
  "recipeYield": "8",
  "nutrition": {
    "@type": "NutritionInformation",
    "calories": "512 calories"
  },
  "recipeIngredient": [
    "Lait",
    "Chocolat",
    "Chantille",
    "Vanille"
  ]
}

To check if your schemas are correct, it is possible to check them on this link.

If you are first in the Google search on some keywords, the appearance of your page result may change as you can see on this image (below).

4 tips to optimize the content of your web pages