With our long history and high success rate building and hosting web sites that work, the following highlights our recommended best practices for web site development and hosting. Lets face it, your competitors are using the exact same keywords you use and your visitors are searching with those keywords. Google actually ranks your site on the performance and technical quality.
- All sites must be secured. This means it's accessed with the https:// prefix.
- The site must use a Subject Alternative Name certificate. That means the certificate will work for your root domain name, www.domain.com and static.domain.com.
- A Organization Verified or Enhanced Verified certificate will give your visitors confidence they are dealing with a legitimate business, however, using the Domain Verified certificate that can be activated with your site hosting is good enough for search engines.
- Any attempt to access your site without the https:// prefix, must automatically redirect the users to the secure version of the site.
- Your site must be accessed with the https://www.domain.com URL.
- Other possible URL's like https://domain.com http://domain.com must redirect to https://www.ieditweb.com
- Each page must have a proper canonical link. This a information hidden in the code for that page that says what the official URL is for accessing the page.
When a web server delivers a page it usually needs to do extra work when communicating with the web browser. This is not the case for content like images, scripts and style sheets. As a result, these can be delivered from a special URL that doesn't do that extra work. This will make your pages load faster. In our case we deliver this content from https://static.domain.com
There are actually two ways to connect computers on the Internet. IPv4 is the old way that dates back to 1980. This protocol does not have enough addresses for every user or web site to have its own address. There are many tricks used to get around this problem but they are not perfect. More and more Internet Service Providers offer IPv6 and this protocol is faster and has a seemingly unlimited number of addresses (actually 2.4 X 1036). If your visitor can access your site with this modern protocol, you must make it available to them for an optimal experience.
A web server works using a HTTP protocol. The most current version is HTTP 2. To get the best performance your web host must support this new protocol.
- The iEditWeb Site Auditor should be run after the site goes live for the first time.
- The iEditWeb Site Auditor should be run after any significant content or design changes.
- The iEditWeb Site Auditor should be run every 6 months if there are any changes.
Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO, W3C Valid and Protocols results should be 100% unless there is a know technical reason this cannot be accomplished. A valid reason for less that 100% is that the page includes a third party application. Performance should be greater that 80% and most pages should be greater that 90%.
- Your site must be connected to Google Search Console with iEditWeb as an owner.
- The sitemap for the site must be submitted to Google Search Console.
- Your site must have Matomo Analytics enabled.
- Under Matomo, the site must be connected to Google Search Console.
- If Google reports new indexing problems, the should be fixed if possible.
- Matomo should be examined periodically to improve SEO results.
- Examine the monthly reports Google sends about site performance.
- Examine Google Search Console for more insight into site performance.
- If iEditWeb releases optimizations for the content manager, the site should get published without the 'Quick Publish' option.
- Using the above tools, determine if the site if meeting your marketing goals and make adjustments to the site as needed.
