Louisa Grant

A score is only useful attached to the thing that caused it, so every page here names the element rather than reporting a number about the page. It has to contain what a person would search for, fit the width available in a result listing, and be distinguishable from every other page on the site. The third is the one that gets skipped, and a site with five pages whose titles all lead with the brand name has five titles competing for one glance. Length is measured in pixels, not characters.

The engine truncates on width, so the number that fits depends on the letters in it. Optimising to a character target is optimising to a figure that does not exist. Descriptions are not a ranking factor and are frequently rewritten by the engine anyway. They matter for the click, so I evaluate them as ad copy rather than as metadata.

Heading structure is the part with the clearest correctness bar. A hierarchy should skip levels rather than sit at one level throughout, because a screen reader user navigating by heading gets nothing from a document with twenty second-level headings. I check that before I comment on phrasing.

What I refuse to produce is a checklist score out of a hundred with no list behind it. If the tool cannot say which sentence to change, it has not told you anything. I also separate the changes that cost nothing from those that need a rewrite. Fixing a title is a five-minute job and fixing a page that ranks for nothing is a project, and mixing them in one report makes the first look like the second.