SEO Page Speed insights (Google)

Question

Hi All,
Disclaimer: I'm not a coder.
I'm aware the Muse team are always imporving SEO compatability for the code output from Muse.
Recently Google have made availible various development tools to let us admins test our site's performances in relation to Google rankings and search optimisation.
I've been experimenting with these tools on a Muse site I have made in the last 6 months and it returns several errors, which have JS script issues, HTML issues - Particually on mobile.
Links to tools:
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/about
Page Speed insights tool seems to not regconise the Mobile Optimised layout of the Muse site, but instead shows a preview of the desktop version, even though when navigated to on a mobile device, the mobile optimised layout loads fine. URL: www.larasclinic.com (Built & published last with MUSE 6.0)
The tool returns several errors with sugestions on fixes, some of which seem to code fixes. Here's an example:
- Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
Your page has 1 blocking script resources and 3 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.
Optimize CSS Delivery of the following:
http://www.larasclinic.com/css/site_global.css?96667304
http://www.larasclinic.com/css/master_a-master.css?427926077
http://www.larasclinic.com/css/index.css?3883076921
So my questions to the team is...
Q. How many of these fixes as a Muse user can I do myself to insure the site is as SEO strong as possible, avoiding these Google testing errors?
And what features are coming to Muse to optimise the code output and SEO in the future?
I've seen all the recent tutorials on SEO, but it would be good to see a more in-depth, Google Search Ranking related one and how to optimise Muse websites.
All answers appreciated.
Cheers,
Robbie.

Answer 1

Page Speed is a tool for measuring factors that contribute to the page load performance of a web page. It actually has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization or your ranking in Google.
If your concern is page load times, there are many different useful tools available. However, in most cases big changes in page load performance come from reducing the amount of content on a page and ensuring all images are being properly sized and encoded (the latter being something Muse mostly takes care of for you), and not the level sort of changes recommended by PageSpeed. In many cases PageSpeed will list a page of changes where many or most are valid, but the investment to make them all would be large and the net gain in page load performance would be very small relative to other sorts of changes that could/should be made.
For SEO (from a very simplified view) there are two primary factors that contribute to where your page ranks within Google. The first is how well the content of your page(s) correlate to the specific search phrase someone entered in Google. And the second is how "popular" your site is, measured primarily by how many other sites/sources contain links to your pages relative to the popularity of other sites that had a similar correlation to the search phrase.
A 60-second course on SEO is:
1) Pick ~3 search phrases you want to optimize for. Then work to have those phrases and the words in those phrases appear regularly in the content of your pages, paying special attention to .html file names, image file names, headings (marked with h1, h2, etc. tags), page titles, your domain name, image alt text, the text content of the actual pages, etc.
2) Leverage Twitter, Facebook, Blogs in your industry, etc. to generate interest in your site and thus generate links back to your site.
3) Submit your sitemap.xml to Google using Google's Webmaster Tools so they're aware of your site and more likely to re-index it sooner rather than later.
There's tons more to SEO, but that's a start. PageSpeed isn't where you want to be if your goal is to improve SEO.