ifs.com

Title, description, canonical, social tags — what search engines read first.

• Meta descriptionhigh impactlow effort

  Meta description is "Recognized as a leading enterprise software solution provider, IFS develops and delivers ERP, EAM, FSM and ESM to businesses worldwide. From cloud technology to easy-to-use interfaces, our solutions are for customers who maintain assets, manage service operations, or manufacture and distribute goods." (301 characters)

  Search engines truncate descriptions past roughly 160 characters, and very short ones waste the snippet space that persuades searchers to pick your listing over the next one. Rewrite it to 70–160 characters: state what the page offers, work the primary keyword in naturally (matching words get bolded in results), and end with a benefit or call to action. Don't cram in keywords — the description influences clicks, not rankings, so write it for humans.

Headings, copy depth, images, structured data, internal linking.

• Image alt textmedium impactlow effort

  17 of 38 images have alt text

  Alt text is how search engines understand what an image shows — it feeds image-search rankings and is what screen readers announce to blind visitors. Add a short, specific alt attribute to every meaningful image, describing the content rather than listing keywords: alt="Golden retriever puppy playing in snow" beats alt="dog puppy pet animal". Give purely decorative images an empty alt="" instead of omitting the attribute, so assistive technology knows to skip them rather than reading out the filename.

• Heading hierarchylow impactlow effort

  Heading level jumps from h2 ("Trusted by our customers") to h4 ("“If half of our workforce engages with the [IFS Loops] agent once per day, that's three million dollars a year of ROI. More importantly, that's ninety thousand hours we can give back to field service technicians to do their job.”")

  Headings form the page's outline; when levels jump (h2 straight to h4), search engines and screen readers get a broken table of contents and the relationship between sections turns ambiguous. Fix the jump by stepping down one level at a time — promote the deeper heading, or add the missing intermediate level. The usual cause is choosing heading tags for their default font size; set sizes in CSS instead and let the tags reflect actual document structure.

HTTPS, redirects, robots, sitemap, speed, crawlability.

• Fast time to first bytehigh impactmedium effort

  1941 ms

  Time to first byte is the floor under every other speed metric — the browser can't parse, render, or fetch anything until the first byte arrives, so a slow TTFB drags down all Core Web Vitals and tests crawlers' patience. Add caching in front of the origin: full-page caching at a CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly) helps most, followed by server-side caches (Redis, object caching) and indexes on slow database queries. Measure from locations near your actual users — tuning only your fastest region leaves distant visitors just as slow.

• Short redirect chainmedium impactmedium effort

  https://ifsjoin.com/ (301) → https://ifs.com/ (307) → https://www.ifs.com/ (301) → https://www.ifs.com/en

  Every redirect hop adds a round-trip before the visitor sees anything, each hop can leak a little link equity, and crawlers abandon long chains — which can leave the destination page undiscovered. Trace the chain above and point the first URL directly at the final destination in a single 301; commonly this means merging separate http-to-https and non-www-to-www rules into one combined redirect. Also update internal links to reference the final URL directly, so most visitors never enter the chain at all.

• Response compression enabledlow impactlow effort

  no content-encoding header

  This HTML is served uncompressed, so every visitor downloads far more bytes than necessary — text compresses extremely well, and the savings directly speed up first render on slow connections. Enable Brotli or gzip on your server or CDN: in nginx it's "gzip on;" (or the brotli module), in Apache it's mod_deflate via .htaccess, and on most CDNs it's a single toggle. Make sure compression covers all text types (HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, SVG), but skip already-compressed images — recompressing them wastes CPU for no gain.

• Reasonable HTML sizelow impactmedium effort

  1.1 MB

  A very large HTML document slows parsing on every visit and risks exceeding the portion of a file crawlers are willing to fetch — content past the cutoff may simply never be indexed. Slim it down: move large inline <script> and <style> blocks into external cacheable files, strip embedded JSON data blobs and base64-encoded images, and paginate or lazy-load very long listings. Check the most common culprit first: a framework serializing the entire page state or dataset into the document itself.

• Missing pages return 404low impactlow effort

  missing paths return a non-404 status (soft 404)

  URLs that don't exist on your site return a success status instead of 404 — search engines call these soft 404s, keep recrawling them, and may index the useless placeholder pages, wasting crawl budget that should go to real content. Configure your server or framework to return an actual 404 status (or 410 for permanently removed content) along with your error page. The classic mistake is serving a friendly "page not found" template with a 200 status — crawlers ignore the visible message; only the status code counts.