Valuable insights into SiteImprove analysis
SiteImprove is a tool available for aalto.fi editors to improve content created within the website. It helps to identify weaknesses on webpages on different topics —from quality to accessibility and SEO. These topics are intertwined and affect each other greatly. For instance, if alt text is missing, both accessibility and SEO will be negatively impacted.
Quality
Some determining factors of quality according to SiteImprove include:
- Misspellings and broken links.
- Readability: typically misleading in the Aalto University context since some complex terminology is used in research and, therefore, considered difficult to read.
- Image size: any image going above 1Mb will penalise quality performance.
- Attachment format: PDFs are largely considered as the best option for quality and accessibility as opposed to open files such as Word or PowerPoint.
- Sentence size: each sentence should include a maximum of 20-25 words. This is specially important in digital environments.
Accessibility
The EU Directive on web and mobile phone accessibility forces websites and apps of public sector bodies to meet specific accessibility standards. This includes two levels:
- Level A: Alt text for images (text explaining the content of the image), sufficient colour contrast, avoiding different languages on the same webpage, links should be part of the written text (instead of URLs displayed separately).
- Level AA: Responsiveness (the content adapts automatically to any screen size), captions for all videos, repetitive links (the same link displayed more than twice on the same page) are discouraged, content hierarchy through headings (see image), font size sufficiently readable, all caps should be avoided except for acronyms, overuse of italics is discouraged.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) improves content to boost findability on online search engines eg. Google. Some key factors considered in SEO can be seen below.
- Page loading times: the amount time needed for a page to fully load.
- Media files not updated in a long time: online search engines like fresh content.
- 404 pages: broken links or other pages with no information whatsoever.
- Low content word count: pages with too little content.
- Duplicate content: for instance, pages containing the same headline and lead text or pages with content copy-pasted from some other page.
- Redirect chains: a page that has been redirected many times from its original URL.
- Navigation depth beyond 5: when there is a need for more than 5 clicks to access the desired content.
- Too long URLs: if titles are too long, usually URLs are too long. Short URLs are preferred.
More information
SiteImprove will not always be able to recognise all shortcomings but it is definitely a good starting point to clean up your webpages. If you want to use SiteImprove, you need to contact the Digital Experience and Communications team in order to receive the necessary credentials.
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