Washington Post shares SEO and web performance guidelines

The Washington Post has shared a document outlining ‘proven strategies and guidelines’ around SEO and optimal site practices.

The Washington Post has published a document outlining its internal SEO and web performance best practices that anybody in news SEO will want to read.

The document, Web Performance and SEO Best Practices and Guidelines, outlines what the Post calls “proven strategies and guidelines for optimizing web performance and search engine optimization (SEO).”

SEO and web performance best practices. The Post’s document breaks down all of its guidelines into what is essentially a checklist, consisting of four buckets: on-page SEO, content optimization, technical SEO and off-page SEO.

The web performance guidelines focus on loading, rendering and responsiveness. It also shares many of the tools it uses to monitor performance – including Lighthouse, WebPageTest, Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

The purpose of the guidelines. The Post wants to make sure it:

• Provides a positive user experience.
• Increases website visibility.
• Drives organic traffic.
• Improves the site’s overall success.

What they’re saying. The document was officially announced today, although it appears the document was published May 31. The Post said it is publicly sharing its guidelines and tools to help others ensure their “own site practices are optimal”:

• “We identified a need for a Web Performance and SEO engineering team to build technical solutions that support the discovery of our journalism, as the majority of news consumers today read the news digitally. Without proper SEO and web performance, our stories aren’t as accessible to our readers,” according to Arturo Silva, engineering lead.