30. #wcyyc @danaditomaso
HOW TO GET FEATURED SNIPPETS
1. Identify a simple question that’s asked regularly about
what you do.
2. Write a clear and direct answer to the question.
3. Offer more information beyond that actual answer.
4. Make it easy for Google to find.
When you see the words “website performance”, you likely think about site speed. Most people do.
However, I want you to consider site performance beyond just speed.
I don’t want to ignore site speed – it’s still important. Let’s cover why, in case you didn’t already know.
And I think many people underestimate the tiny, tiny amount of time that someone is willing to wait for a site to load.
Not only do you want your site to be indexed quickly, but you want to be sure that people don’t click on your search result, nothing loads, they get annoyed, hit back and visit another site. Google knows when people do that and your site could take a rankings hit as a result.
I will cover what to do to improve site speed briefly.
In fact, I will only mention two plugins in this entire talk.
Most of the issues that we end up seeing are server misconfiguration issues. There’s always dumb code things that happen to kill site speed but fixing server issues make a huge difference.
Use gtmetrix, it’s fantastic.
I’ll quickly run through some of the common server-side issues that we see and fix regularly.
This happens when you have a server that isn’t specifically built for WP sites.
Here is a comparison between two of our sites on two different hosting platforms.
What’s also interesting is that the first paint happens even before the DOM is loaded on the WPEngine site. Getting those blocking and waiting times down is critical.
Blocking, by the way, is the time spent waiting for the connection to finish.
This one is always, always a problem. The server needs to tell the browser to hang onto these files. You need to edit your http headers to set expiry times properly.
Each resource should specify an explicit caching policy that answers the following questions: whether the resource can be cached and by whom, for how long, and if applicable, how it can be efficiently revalidated when the caching policy expires.
Gzip makes your files smaller so they go faster! It’s simple, works great, can reduce sizes by up to 70% and it’s pretty easy to enable!
All this is very well and good but what else can you do? Let’s dig in.
Are you waiting for this slide to load? How annoyed are you? This is what happens when you put a loading animation in while the page loads. It’s okay if a page is a bit “off” as it loads!
Google is basically a toddler and doesn’t know what to do. You need to explain things in simple, simple terms. 99% of our SEO work is changing things to make it easy for Google to understand what we want them to do.
One client had four versions of their site indexed – http, https, dev http, dev https. Google did not know what to do.
Search for this. Did your dev sites come up? That is bad.
I have many GA horror stories but I’ll point out a couple of examples.
Anything at all, really.
Even people who make viruses want to know what’s up.
OLD ONE WORKS JUST GREAT THANK YOU
Learn how it works! Use events! One of the great things about GTM is you can track dwell time on a page, if someone clicks an externa link, if someone downloads a PDF. It just works.
Events are things you measure to understand user behaviour. For example, dwell time. Goals are things that make you money, like someone filling out a form.
Featured snippets are the answer boxes that come up when you Google question phrases. It’s also what your Google device reads back to you when you ask it a question.
In the future, you won’t even need websites, Google will just steal your data and show it on their site!
Step 3 means they’re likely to click and you want that too, not just people reading on Google itself.
And that is never a bad thing.
If you haven’t heard of AMP, it’s Google’s way of speeding up the web.
I feel that AMP is a temporary solution but it’s an important solution in terms of what it means – webpages are so slow to load that Google had to come up with a whole new way to make it happen.
They announced this on Thursday, and it’s an admission that its Instant Articles format is not as popular as other forms of platform publishing.
That’s kind of the point. But you can do forms now, and there is more to come.
There is an AMP plugin made by Automattic but it was last updated 7 months ago – I hope they’ll update it more often. Yoast also has a plugin called Glue that’s worth checking out.
Here are some additional small things to consider that will make a huge difference.
Avoid that redirect – it’ll cost you. All internal links should have trailing slashes.
When I click or tap something I want to know what is going to happen.
Think of how much it sucks when you’re scrolling down a page and suddenly you’re stuck because there is a huge map and no way to get around or past it.
Seriously. Make it bigger. 16px at a minimum.
To wrap up, here is what I’d like you to take away from this presentation.
Ask yourself this when you make development decisions.
And that someone else is probably a customer.
Not everyone is as good with computers as you. Don’t make assumptions. Understand your customer.
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