Introduction

This series will document my journey to learn SEO and site performance to create an optimized website. My background is in mechanical engineering but with a passion to dabble in programming. Read more in my About Me.

I’ll start by showing some stats of where the site is now with basically no SEO optimization other than what I’ve come across in the past – which is really limited to “use the Yoast SEO free plugin”. I’ll be the first to admit – very little.

Where this site stands now

We will use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to begin.

This does not look great..

We will focus on performance and SEO.

Performance

PageSpeed Insights

The tools provides a deeper breakdown of each category hopefully this will give us some insight on what to do next.

Mobile

The red metrics look to be related to load speeds – this may be due to images I’ve included at too large of size or with no alternates. There is a even deeper overview below:

So there is a lot of new terms in here that I’ll need to research to understand what we can do to correct the issues.

Desktop

Taking a look at the desktop performance things don’t look quite as grim.

At least we see some green in this report. Now the detailed metrics.

SEO

PageSpeed Insights

Google’s tool here for SEO doesn’t give alot of detail see results below:

The first 3 items look to be all mistakes on my end.

“Links do not have descriptive text” – That should be easily corrected, by actually adding descriptions for each link currently it is the default “Read more”.

“Image elements do not have [alt] attributes” – Again just need to go in to each image used on the site and ensure [alt] attribute is entered. I’ll create a short post on that and link it here.

“Links not crawlable” – This is a quick one, it relates to the Instagram social icon, with no link as I have not created one. I’ll fix that in one of two ways, delete the Instagram social icon or create an Instagram – I’ll do the later.

SEO Analyzer

We’ll use a second tool that looks to go a bit deeper on the SEO called SEO Analyzer – it is free to use and hosted through the site h-supertools, which provides a number of other free to use online tools for SEO and digital marketing in general.

Results here are on par with Google Analytics PageSpeed Insights. They provide a pretty in depth report that I’ll dig deeper into in another post.

Next Steps

I will start by trying to understand which parts of this site can be optimized to improve performance. This will likely take a bit of research. I’ll document everything I learn in a new post.

Thanks for reading – stay tuned for updates!

Anthony