Name three accomplishments you have achieved in relation to search engine optimization (SEO) during the last year.

Are these methods centered around finding the right keywords, creating meta descriptions, and building backlinks?

If so, you’re not alone. When talking about SEO, these strategies are usually the initial ones that marketers put into practice.

Utilizing these methods will raise your web page’s appearance in natural search rankings, but they are not the only tools that you should be utilizing. There are other strategies associated with SEO.

What is technical SEO?

Understanding Technical SEO

Technical SEO can be broken down into chunks that are easier to understand. If you’re similar to me, breaking down large projects into smaller tasks and making to-do lists works well. It may sound incredible, however the entirety of what we have examined up to now can be broken down into five sections, for each of which concrete activities ought to be addressed.

This graphic is a great representation of the innate hierarchy of the five technical SEO components, similar to Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs but with a fresh, SEO-centered take. In place of Accessibility, we will use the widely accepted term “Rendering”.

Technical SEO Audit Fundamentals

Prior to carrying out your technical SEO audit, there are a few groundwork pieces that you must establish.

Let’s go over the main principles of technical SEO before proceeding with the rest of your website assessment.

Audit Your Preferred Domain

The webpage address that people type into their browsers in order to access your site is called a domain, such as hubspot.com. The domain name of your website affects if people can locate your site using a search engine, and serves as a recognizable point of reference.

When you decide which version of your website’s URL you prefer, you are letting search engines know if they should show the www or no-www version in the results. For example, you might select www.yourwebsite.com over yourwebsite.com. Search engines should be directed to consider the www version of the site as the highest priority, and all visitors should be redirected to this URL. Search engines will think that the two variations are completely different websites, thus leading to scattered gains in SEO.

Before, Google requested you to specify which variation of your URL that you favor. Google will now choose the best version and show it to the people doing the search. If you would rather designate which version of your domain should be applied, you can use canonical tags, which will be discussed shortly. In either case, when you settle on which website link you wish to use, make sure that all versions, like the ones with ‘www’, with no ‘www’, with ‘http’, and with ‘index.html’, all direct to that exact one.

Implement SSL

This phrase is something that you may be familiar with because it carries a lot of significance. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) forms a shield between the web server (the program that processes online requests) and the internet browser, making sure that your website is secure. When a user transmits data to your webpage, such as credit card or contact information, it is more safeguarded from getting stolen since you have SSL encryption to guard it.

An SSL certificate can be distinguished by the prefix “https://” in the domain instead of “http://” and a padlock icon in the address bar.

Search engines give preference to secure sites – in 2014 Google even declared that SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) would have an effect on their ranking system. Ensure that the SSL form of your website is the primary domain you use.

Once you have installed the SSL certificate, you must transfer any pages that do not have SSL from http to https. It’s a major challenge, but worth the time and energy if it means a better ranking. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Redirect all http://yourwebsite.com pages to https://yourwebsite.com.
2. Update all canonical and hreflang tags accordingly.
3. Update the URLs on your sitemap (located at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml) and your robot.txt (located at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt).
4. Set up a new instance of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for your https website and track it to make sure 100% of the traffic migrates over.

Optimize Page Speed

How much time will a person visiting your website give it to load? Six seconds … and that’s being generous. Some evidence suggests that the bounce rate will almost double if the amount of time it takes for a page to load increases from one to five seconds. Making your site load faster should be a priority as you don’t have any time to spare.

Website loading speed is a major consideration for providing users with a good experience along with converting them, and it is also a factor which plays a role in determining rankings.

Use these tips to improve your average page load time:

• Compress all of your files. Compression reduces the size of your images, as well as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, so they take up less space and load faster. 

• Audit redirects regularly. A 301 redirect takes a few seconds to process. Multiply that over several pages or layers of redirects, and you’ll seriously impact your site speed. 

• Trim down your code. Messy code can negatively impact your site speed. Messy code means code that’s lazy. It’s like writing — maybe in the first draft, you make your point in 6 sentences. In the second draft, you make it in 3. The more efficient code is, the more quickly the page will load (in general). Once you clean things up, you’ll minify and compress your code.
• Consider a content distribution network (CDN). CDNs are distributed web servers that store copies of your website in various geographical locations and deliver your site based on the searcher’s location. Since the information between servers has a shorter distance to travel, your site loads faster for the requesting party.

• Try not to go plugin happy. Outdated plugins often have security vulnerabilities that make your website susceptible to malicious hackers who can harm your website’s rankings. Make sure you’re always using the latest versions of plugins and minimize your use to the most essential. In the same vein, consider using custom-made themes, as pre-made website themes often come with a lot of unnecessary code. 

• Take advantage of cache plugins. Cache plugins store a static version of your site to send to returning users, thereby decreasing the time to load the site during repeat visits. 

• Use asynchronous (async) loading. Scripts are instructions that servers need to read before they can process the HTML, or body, of your webpage, i.e. the things visitors want to see on your site. Typically, scripts are placed in the <head> of a website (think: your Google Tag Manager script), where they are prioritized over the content on the rest of the page. Using async code means the server can process the HTML and script simultaneously, thereby decreasing the delay and increasing page load time.

To find out where your website is lagging behind in its speed, you can use this tool offered by Google.

Once you have taken care of the basic requirements for technical SEO, you can start to focus on the next stage – making it possible for search engine bots to access and traverse your website.

6 Tips for Improving Your Site’s Technical SEO

1. Make site structure and navigation user-friendly.

A great way to achieve a higher and more consistent ranking on search engines is to create a website design that is easy to use and includes clear navigation links. The way you organize the pages of your website goes beyond just the main menu that appears at the top. A website that is set up well can make it effortless for both users and search engines to quickly identify the most relevant pages.

2. Make sure your site speed isn’t lagging.

Website performance and page loading speeds have been a substantial aspect of succeeding in search results for a long time, but becoming particularly significant in June 2021 with Google’s Page Experience Update.

Google has made it clear how they measure and judge the performance quality of a website using the Core Web Vitals, which are some standards they have outlined. The most crucial items here are the biggest contentful paint, initial input delay, and summed up layout shift. Users expect your website to be able to be loaded in a short amount of time, not to exceed three seconds, in order to make Google happy. The more time it takes for the website to load, the less probable users will remain.

3. Check to see if your site is crawlable by search engines.

A crucial objective of technical SEO is to make sure that your website is easy to locate and analyze by Google. There are three primary methods of achieving this and checking to see if your content is currently being crawled by Google:

• Check Google’s index directly. The quickest way to see what pages on your site are being indexed by Google, is to check Google directly. You can do this with a “site:” search. If you want to see how many pages are indexed on WebMD, your search would be “site:https://www.webmd.com/”. If you wanted to verify sleep apnea content indexation, it would be “site:https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-apnea/”. 
• Check Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a fantastic search discovery and website health tool created by Google. One of its features is checking to see how many pages are currently in Google’s index, which pages are indexed, and which pages are currently not able to be indexed alongside the reason why. 
• Check Screaming Frog. Screaming frog is a great tool that mirrors how Googlebot crawls your site and will return every page with a status to let you know if it’s currently indexable, crawlable, or any combination of both. 

You should inspect your webpages regularly to ensure desirable indexation across the entire website. Each page should be provided with a status that dictates what action to take – such as deciding to maintain its indexing, deliberately indexing a page that wasn’t being indexed before, or removing its indexing from a page that was earlier indexed.

4. Use schema.org structured data markup.

Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex all create structured data, and this is known as Schema markup. Structured data is an expressive language that is included in the programming code to convey information to search engines. The Schema website offers guidance on how to get started and contains an exhaustive collection of schema words.

Schema markup was developed for the purpose of aiding businesses in expressing to search engines more clearly the goods, amenities, procedures and other offerings they provide. This conveys relevant data about the organization. At the present, search engines use their intricate algorithms to form very knowledgeable guesses about those elements.

5. Eliminate dead links on your site. 

A faulty connection is not just a troublesome experience for the user, but it could also negatively impact your site’s ability to rise in the search engine rankings. If a page is missing due to it being removed deliberately or accidentally, the result will be an error message of 404 “Not Found”. This mistake will direct both your website visitors and search engine crawlers to your “404 page” or to a blank page when you have not set one up.

It is essential to devise an approach every time a web page is gotten rid of from your site and make certain that the connections to those damaged pages are not cut off. Here’s how to find and clean up these broken pages and links:

• Crawl site to find all known 404 pages 
• Give an instruction to either implement a redirect to a new page or ignore the page if it should rightfully be deleted. This can either be a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect. 
• Find all of the pages that have linked to the broken page, and replace the links with the updated URL(s) of the forwarded page. 

6. Fix duplicate content issues.

Anytime there is repetition of content across multiple pages on a website, this is known as duplicate content. This occurs when two or more pages have too much that is identical. This is usually material that is replicated word for word or an established layout, frequently referred to as syndicated content.

Google views duplicate content as exceptionally poor due to its minimal degree of difficulty. The mission of any quality search engine is to supply its users with pertinent, accurate, and helpful information. See the discrepancy?

In order to resolve problems with duplicate content, you must start by having your website crawled. Software with website crawling features contain functions to search for duplicated content and log pages that are too much alike.

Once you have pinpointed these webpages, you need to decide which page is your preferred option as the primary page, and how you plan to handle the duplicated content. Delete it? Redirect? Rewrite or refresh?

In situations where pages do not benefit from SEO optimization (such as multiple pages listing the same product, but in different colors), you can use canonical tags to connect them.

Final thoughts

Technical SEO can seem daunting at first. This task involves many components and there is a slight steepness to the learning process. Nevertheless, these inspections are quite basic and after you comprehend the aim behind them, you’ll be well on your way to maintaining a well-maintained presence.

It all boils down to the fact that, if the technical SEO is not done properly, it can undermine your other SEO activities such as link building and formulating a content strategy. It’s not the most exciting element, but it is essential for your website’s success and will remain so.

As time passes, you may be tempted to only do the checks once and not review them again, but try to avoid that desire. It is vital to plan out how often you should assess the technical performance of your website.

Related posts:

How to Perform a Technical SEO Blog Audit The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO 6 Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Site for Easier Conversion How to Get Google to Index Your Site With the Coverage Report