shiny new SEO things

Quick email with a few new site speed & SEO things for you

A quick email here with a few new site speed and SEO things you probably should be aware of that will potentially will give you an edge over the competition.

Cloudflare released several new features over the last few weeks with two that will give you a speed boost and *maybe* an SEO boost.

Google also made a change to how it’s using H1 tags that most of our customers aren’t aware of and may need to fix.

If you’re on one of our maintenance plans we’ll be sorting this for you this month, if not I’ve included some DIY instructions below.

If you need help or more info on any of these just reply to this email and we’ll be happy to assist.

-Brendan

Cloudflare Automatic Signed Exchanges – SXGs

Super nerdy name and a whole bunch of tech underpinning this but basically allows Google to serve up a prefetched copy of your pages to users while they’re in the search results. This means when they click the page is partly preloaded in their browser already so their experience is a much faster page.

We’ve been playing with this across a bunch of test sites and seeing a 20-40% speed boost.

The methodology here is similar to “just in time preloading” which we implement for all speed optimization customers. There’s a good explanation of how this works at https://instant.page

Turn this setting on under Speed->Optimization->Automatic Signed Exchanges

NOTE: this will only work if you’re on a $5/month APO plan or above – which we strongly recommend if you want to load as fast as possible

More details on the Cloudflare website here https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-signed-exchanges/

Crawler Hints

This is probably more beneficial for bigger sites and sites with a lot of pages – basically it provides a method for Cloudflare to tell crawlers and search engines more precisely when or what content has changed. From an SEO perspective this is useful as in theory this will changes get indexed faster.

This is especially useful for big ecommerce sites where products may go in and out of stock frequently.

More on this here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/crawler-hints-how-cloudflare-is-reducing-the-environmental-impact-of-web-searches/

You can turn this on in Cloudflare under Caching->Configuration->Crawler Hints

H1’s becoming more important

Not super new as this change happened in August a lot of customers haven’t heard about this. In a nutshell, Google is now rewriting *some* SEO title tags and replacing with the H1 heading on a page.

This means you might see reduced SEO traffic because of lower CTR as a result of this Google change. Ultimately Google is signalling here that H1 tags have more importance.

More on that here: https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/news/google-is-rewriting-title-tags-in-serps/

Moving forward we’re including H1 heading tag issue reports for our monthly maintenance clients as well as checking for basic SEO issues around title tags, meta descriptions and indexability.

Broadly, it’s probably worth doing a review of your H1 tags to make sure each page has a H1 tag, has only 1x H1 tag and that it makes sense. It’s very common to see older websites with multiple H1 tags or issues around logos being wrapped in H1 tags which is not technically correct or ideal from an SEO perspective.

Brendan Tully
Principal Consultant – WPSpeedfix.com
brendan@wpspeedfix.com Don’t want to get emails like this? Manage subscription preferences . Robotmedia Pty Ltd – Suite 2, Level 3/2 Boston Ct, Varsity Lakes QLD 4227, Australia