Let’s start from the beginning. First thing first you need to understand that Google, Bing and the other search engines do not refer to an entire website, but to many pages, one by one. And it’s because all these pages are indexed by the search engines that it will make a site well optimized. You should keep this fact in mind when working on a website. This is why optimizing pages is so important and the only way to proceed.

Secondly, a non-optimized page is a web page facing issues. Indeed, when we talk about an optimized web page, we are referring to a page that is properly written, structured,  technically healthy and that meets the SEO compliance criteria established by search engines such as Google. This is exactly what search engines are expecting from you!

As defined in Google’s Guidelines, a compliant web page meets a few clearly identified criteria. They can be grouped into three main families: technique, content, and notoriety. During the SEO audit process, each page will be sifted through these criteria. So we can consider that a web page is optimized when all errors found have been corrected.

A compliant page will only be correctly indexed by search engines. Indeed, it is not because the web page is compliant and relevant that it will be ranked in a better position than your competitors.

It’s very important to keep in mind that more than 90% of organic traffic appearing on search engine result pages is concentrated on the first page with a maximum of ten positions. So, you can imagine that the competition is very high.

In such a context, the quality factor is one of the most important to take into account. This is the reason why it is important to regularly check what your competitors are doing and to be inspired by it to enhance your content and consequently your SEO. This what we call “competitive intelligence“.

Being focus on the technical part is a good thing but your website is not made for Google but for your audience. This is where we talk about User Experience (UX). The User Experience is evaluated based on 4 main criteria:

• the bounce rate,
• the time spend on a page
• the number of page views
• the return rate of users

Creating quality, attractive and useful content is therefore fundamental if you want your users to share your content and thus develop your reputation on the Web.

To help understand how to proceed to improve your web page optimization, this guide should allow you to rank some of your pages on the top places of Google.