A site with poor technical SEO is like a well-furnished room with dim lights and jammed doors. No matter how beautiful your website design is, it is essential to first fix site speed, crawl ability, and mobile optimization. If you miss these things, expect less traffic and revenue.
But how can this be tackled? Yes, it is possible. Start focusing on key areas like URL structure, security(HTTPS), schema markup, speed, and so on.
If you have heard all but not taken action to fix your site’s technical SEO right now, this article is for you. Read it and start working on your website to rank it in the top SERPs.
What is Technical SEO?
The purpose behind technical SEO is to design and organise your site so that it is easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank it smoothly. In other words, the end results of SEO lie in technical SEO. Regular SEO mostly uses important words and good writing. But Technical SEO makes sure search engines can easily find, understand, and trust your website.
Key Areas of Focus in Technical SEO:
Before discussing specific fixes, it’s important to know the key areas of Technical SEO:
- Site Speed and Performance
- Mobile-Friendliness
- Crawlability and Indexing
- URL Structure
- Duplicate Content Issues
- Security (HTTPS)
- Structured Data (Schema Markup)
These factors directly affect how search engines evaluate and rank your website. But which should you address first? Let’s break it down.
Prioritize Site Speed and Performance
Technical SEO is especially concerned with the speed at which your website loads. It is the key to a good technical SEO to get the website open as soon as possible. And the speed of your webpage has a direct effect on your user’s level of satisfaction and experience. As a result, search engines love fast sites and usually list them higher in search.
How to Improve Site Speed:
Optimize images: Make your pictures visible snow, minus the nonessential information that is required for their smooth operation, as well as other unnecessary space that must be shown in the display field.
Enable browser caching: This is accomplished with the help of these browsers to load your website much faster when your visitors come back repeatedly.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: Make it so clean that there is no unnecessary code or whitespace in minified code.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN places your website in various places on the internet. Then the clients can load your website faster. This impacts your website in a manner similar to what is said above.
For this, consider Page Speed Optimization Services to make these processes smoother and more efficient.
Example: Well, let’s imagine you have lots of PNG pictures on your main page. What if you make them smaller and use a CDN? Your page will open faster. This allows your website visitors to have a good user experience, encourages them to continue, and gives a positive signal to a search engine. Hence, it is likely to be on a higher number of SEOs.
Ensure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
With the majority of individuals utilizing the internet on their cell phones Mobile SEO Services plays the lead role in Technical SEO. Google’s mobile-first indexing means that search engines mostly employ the mobile edition of your site for indexing and ranking.
How to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly:
Responsive design: Make sure your site can adjust its size to be compatible with various screens.
Avoid Flash and Pop-ups: These things may slow down the mobile site or even make the users frustrated.
Use readable fonts: Ensure that the font is easy-to-read on small screens.
Information emanating your page will never get trafficked nor rated if it’s not optimized for mobile devices. This is more so, with Google’s new approach of mobile first.
Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit
Before starting to fix technical SEO issues, it is important to perform a Technical SEO site audit. It will help you recognize what might have gone wrong and provide a guideline for what needs to be done first.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit:
- Crawl your website: Access and examine URLs to discover any crawling issues using tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console.
- Verify your site’s indexing status: Normally, the aim is to index important pages together with the appropriate content and, wherever feasible, a ” no index” tag.
- Check for broken links: The trouble with broken links is that they adversely influence the site users’ experience and the website’s SEO ranking.
A regular SEO Audit will help you keep track of new issues as they arise.
Fix Crawlability and Indexing Issues
Crawlability means the ease with which bots or crawlers can reach website content. If a bot cannot reach a page, it cannot be indexed and will not appear on SERPs.
Key Considerations for Crawlability:
- Robots.txt File: Confirm that your robots.txt file recreation is not inadvertently disallowing the pages that are desired for crawling.
- XML Sitemap: Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines for easier indexing.
- Avoid Deep URL Structures: Make sure important pages aren’t buried deep within your site structure.
Optimize URL Structure
Pretty and issue-specific URLs are sensible not only regarding SEO but also customer-wise. Fitting URL Structures helps improve your site’s crawlability and assists in content-level indexing by search engines.
Best Practices for URL Optimization:
- Use descriptive URLs: Keep URLs short, clean, and related to the content on the page.
- Include keywords in URLs: Ensure that your URLs naturally include your primary keyword.
- Avoid dynamic URLs: Where possible, use static URLs instead of dynamic ones
Example:
Correct: www.example.com/post-title
Incorrect: www.example.com/?id=123).
Eliminate Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is an issue that search engines can run into as they could index a wrong version of a page or remove the site from their index altogether. That is when the technical SEO comes to save the situation and make sure that there are no cases of duplicate content so that all the duplicates can be correctly routed to one URL.
How to Address Duplicate Content:
- Canonical tags: Employ canonical tags to indicate the primary version of a webpage when multiple versions are present.
- 301 redirects: Redirect all duplicate web pages to the first one which, for instance, helps avoid confusion and maintain the particular link.
Basic Factors for Website Safety with HTTPS
When any technical procedure is done, whether website security, speed or SEO, one of the most important parts is the SSL certification (HTTP over SSL – Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). Thus, it decreases the negative feelings of the users. It can still strengthen the search engines ranking the websites and it is the software that allows an authentication process between the potential user and the accessed website. It also shows the latter is a genuine one.
Steps to Secure Your Site:
- Install an SSL Certificate: Having an SSL certificate is very important for making your website more secure, as it will make the communication between the server of the website and the computer be encrypted.
- Redirect HTTP to HTTPS: Be sure to secure your site by redirecting all site traffic to the HTTPS version of the site.
- Fix Mixed Content Issues: Encrypt all mixed resources after switching to security so that only secure sources are accessed.
Implement Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Structured data is very helpful for search engines to understand the content on your website. Schema markup assists in applying structured data to your website so that the search engine can better understand your content.
How to Implement Schema Markup:
Use Google’s structured data testing tool: Review your pages to ensure they all contain correct structured data.
Incorporating correct markup: The local schema is ideal for your online marketing or product-selling web site, as it allows you to manage searches according to your business locations, such as city, street, and postal code.
Last Words
In the technical SEO process, you should first give priority to the most factors such as a quick site speed, mobile usability, and crawlable structures. Running a technical SEO audit on your website empowers you to swiftly and efficiently figure out easy ways of development on your website. By properly focusing on these areas, you are not only raising your search engine results, but you are also ensuring that the users have the best possible experience while on the website.