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Description of the checks
Here is a list of all checks, with a detailed description and the reason for their designation as a problem or warning:
Meta description can be displayed below your page title in search results. If Google find your description too short or not relevant, it will generate it's own description, based on your page content.
This generated description will be less accurate than a good written description.
Meta description can be displayed below your page title in search results. If Google find your description too long, it may crop it and your potential visitors will not be able to read all its content. Sometimes, long pertinent meta descriptions will be displayed, but in the vast majority of the results, the description's lengths are 150-170 chars.
Meta description is not used by search engines to calculate the rank of the page, but users will read it (if the meta description is selected by Google). The bonus point is that Google will put the keywords searched by the users in bold, so the users can eaily verify that the content of your page fit their needs.
Even if search engines states that they don't use meta description for ranking (source), they can be displayed below the title of your page in search results. Since search engines uses users clics to rank your website, an appealing description can make the difference.
Google has affirmed that they display a shorter text (~155 chars) below the title of the page (source).
Google has told that they do not consider using multiple h1 a bad thing (source), but Google is not the unique search engine out there. Bing webmaster guidelines says "Use only one
H1 is the most visually notable content of your page for your users, and is one of the most important ranking factor for search engines. A good h1 tag content is required in order to progress in SERP.
H1 are crawled by search engines as the title of your page. You may populate them with appropriate content in order to be sure that search engines correctly understand what your pages are all about.
H2 tags are useful because they are explored by search engines and can help them understand the subject of your page (source). It's a "section title", so every time you start talking about a new topic, you can put an h2 tag, which will explain what the content will be about.
Matt Cutts (creator of Google SafeSearch) stated in 2009 that "[...] we use things in the title, things in the URL, even things that are really highlighted, like h2 tags and stuff like that. ". Even if there is not really a more recent acknowledgement, h2 titles are important (but maybe not as important as h1 & title tags).
Your images should always have an alt tag, because it improves accessibility for visually impaired people.
The name of your image is important too, because Google will look at it to know what the picture is about (source).
This is the image without alt tag.
Keywords in URL are a small ranking factor for Google (source), but it will help your users understand the organisation of your website (/?product=50 talk less than /products/camping/). On the other hand Bing says : "URL structure and keyword usage - keep it clean and keyword rich when possible" (source).
Meta keywords were important in this meta tag, however django-check-seo uses these keywords to check all other tests related to keywords. You will be flooded with problems and warnings and this SEO tool will not work as well as it should if you don't add some keywords.
Internal links are useful because they link your content and can give any search engine the structure of your website, so they can create a hierarchy of your pages (and add them to the sitelinks list, for example).
Google is vague about the max number of internal links on your site. Neil Patel advises 3 to 4 internal links in the content of your page (excluding header/footer), but he says that you can go up to 10-20 links if your content is long enough.
Some recent SEO-related articles advise you to add some external links to help SEO on other websites (source) while at the other end an old (2015) study found that links to websites with an high authority help incresing websites ranking (source).
"Thanks to updates like Google Penguin, Google now focuses on link quality (not just link quantity)". There's no need to have too many external links on your main content, but the reputation of the websites you are linking to is important.
Titles tags are ones of the most important things to add to your pages, sinces they are the main text displayed on result search pages.
Titles tags need to describe the content of the page, and need to contain at least a few words.
Only the first ~55-60 chars are displayed on modern search engines results. Writing a longer title is not really required and can lead to make the user miss informations.
Titles tags need to contain at least one keyword, since they are one of the most important content of the page for search engines.
Google recommand to organize your content by adding depth in your url, but advises against putting too much repertories (source).
Yoast says that "In a perfect world, we would place everything in one sublevel at most. Today, many sites use secondary menus to accommodate for additional content" (source).
A study from 2016 found a correlation between URL length & ranking (source).
Yoast provide us some knowledge : "A blog post should contain at least 300 words in order to rank well in the search engines. Long posts will rank more easily than short posts. However, long posts require strong writing skills" (source).
An article from Forbes from 2017 says that "content with 1,000 words or more tends to attract significantly more links and shares", and "the average content length for top 3 rankings was about 750 words, while the average content length for position 20 rankings was about 500 words" (source).
Yoast provide us some knowledge : "A blog post should contain at least 300 words in order to rank well in the search engines. Long posts will rank more easily than short posts. However, long posts require strong writing skills" (source).
An article from Forbes from 2017 says that "content with 1,000 words or more tends to attract significantly more links and shares", and "the average content length for top 3 rankings was about 750 words, while the average content length for position 20 rankings was about 500 words" (source).
Yoast advises to put a keyword in the first sentence of your content. The person who reads it will be relieved because he will quickly retrieve the keyword he was looking for (source).
If you want to know the reasons why we chose these checks in particular.
Checks that are not included inside the project