Optimize Your Website: Check Your Page Speed, Titles, and XML Sitemaps

Check your Page Speed

With today’s internet speeds, no one wants to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to load. If your site is slow to load, visitors are likely to click the “back” button and quickly exit your site. Page speed is not only important from a usability perspective, but it is becoming increasingly important for SEO purposes.

You can check your page speed here.

If your site is using WordPress, take a few minutes to install the W3 Total Cache plugin and configure the options. This plugin has been known to improve page speed by 40 points or more. Your visitors (and Google) will thank you for it!

Check your Page Titles

Would you go grocery shopping and buy products that aren’t labelled or didn’t tell you what they were? Essentially, that is what a page title is to each page of your site. Your page title is the first thing a searcher will see when your site appears in the SERP’s.

Every page of your site should have a unique page title to show to search engines that each page is unique, and to show visitors what a page is about. Page titles are also an important ranking factor, so use some of your keywords and keep the under 70 characters to ensure they display in full in the SERP’s.

Check your XML Sitemaps

When was the last time you checked your XML sitemap? If your sitemap doesn’t generate automatically, chances are you will have many old URL’s that are 404 error pages, 301 or 302 redirects, have noindex tags, folders that are in your robots.txt folder, or URL’s that have a canonical tag pointing to another page.

Even if you are using a sitemap that updates automatically, take a good look through your XML sitemap and look for any URL’s that shouldn’t and don’t need to be in there and remove them. When you check your sitemap in Webmaster Tools, the number of URL’s submitted should be the same as the number of URL’s indexed.

Think of Google as a pirate; it wants to know exactly where the treasure is and not sail around guessing. Give them their treasure map (or sitemap.xml) and show them where to go!

If you’re serious about crushing it in the digital world, you need to pay attention to your website’s page speed, titles, and XML sitemaps. These are non-negotiables, folks. You gotta make sure your website is lightning fast, your page titles are on point, and your sitemaps are clean. No excuses.

So, have you taken a look at your website lately? Have you run some tests, installed some plugins, and given your sitemaps a good scrub? If not, what are you waiting for? Time is money, and you’re losing both if your website isn’t optimized.

Share your experiences in the comments below, let’s hustle together. Drop your tips, tricks, and hacks. Let’s help each other win the game. I’m all ears, let’s go!