Technical SEO
Technical SEO are the practices and tools available to help improve your ranking and domain authority. These practices and tools are used behind the scenes on your website. There are actions that you, as the website owner, can take to improve your website’s technical SEO, as well as actions that your website hosting company can take. The website hosting company you choose can have a big impact on your website. We chose Kualo not only because they are reliable and fast, but also because they run on renewable energy.
There are a few simple techniques that can dramatically improve your ranking in Technical SEO. No specialised coding skills required. An audit of your website to ensure that you have utilized both on-page and off-page SEO optimization techniques.
There are quite a few possible components to technical SEO, and so we’ve divided this into 3 key areas, to keep things clear:
Step 1: Site Speed
Site speed is vitally important. Think about how you search. Do you wait for a slow website to load, or do you leave and go somewhere else? Do you leave the website and try another one? Approximately 40% of individuals will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. A slow loading time can lead to your potential audience “Pogo sticking”. When internet users visit websites, they often don’t stay on one site for very long. Instead, they quickly move from one site to another, similar to the way a pogo stick bounces up and down. This really is a problem for your ranking. Google records the average time spent on your site. Here are some of the projects I’d recommend prioritizing.
1. Check indexing
The pages you want people to find should be able to be indexed by Google. Crawling and indexing are two of the most important aspects of search engines.
The Indexability report in Site Audit can help you find pages that can’t be indexed and figure out why that is. It’s free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
2. Reclaim lost links
Websites tend to change their URLs over the years. Other websites often have links to these old URLs. If users are not taken to the current pages when they click on links, then those links will be of no use to your pages. It’s not too late to do these redirects, which will help you regain any value you may have lost. This is the quickest way to build links.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer can help you find opportunities to recover lost links. To check for broken links on your website, enter your domain into the “Best by Links” report and add a filter for “404 not found” HTTP responses. I usually sort this by “Referring Domains”.
3. Add internal links
An internal link is a link from one page (on the same website) to another page. They help your pages be found and also help the pages have a higher ranking. This tool allows you to quickly find opportunities to improve your site’s internal linking.
This tool allows you to see how often your site is mentioned in relation to specific keywords that you are already ranking for. Then it suggests them as contextual internal link opportunities.
It’s tagged as “product” because it deals with product pages The tool provides an example of “faceted navigation” in a guide to duplicate content. It is classified as “product” because it deals with product pages. As Site Audit is aware that we have a page about faceted navigation, it suggests that we add an internal link to that page.
4. Add schema markup
Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand your content. It also powers many features that can help your website stand out from the rest in search results. Google has a search gallery which showcases the various search features, as well as the schema needed for your site to be eligible.
The projects in this chapter require more work and have less benefit than the quick win projects from the previous chapter. This is just to help you prioritize projects, not to say that you shouldn’t do them.
Page experience signals
These are factors that are not as important, but you should still look at them for the sake of your users. The website’s UX aspects are covered.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of speed metrics that measure how well a website loads and how enjoyable it is to use. They’re part of Google’s Page Experience signals, which are used to measure how user-friendly a website is. The metrics used to measure visual load are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity is First Input Delay (FID).
HTTPS
HTTPS encrypts the communication between your browser and server to prevent attackers from intercepting and tampering with it. This technique protects the confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of most of today’s WWW traffic. You should ensure that your pages are loaded over HTTPS and not HTTP.
When you see a lock icon in the address bar of a website, it is using HTTPS.
Mobile friendliness
This text is discussing how web pages are tested to ensure that they are compatible with mobile devices and easy to use.
How do you know how mobile-friendly your site is? Check the “Mobile Usability” report in Google Search Console.
Interstitials
Interstitials block content from being seen. There are pop-up windows that cover the main content of the page and users may need to interact with them before they disappear.
Hreflang – for multiple languages
The Hreflang attribute is used in HTML to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. The hreflang tag helps search engines determine which version of a page to show a user based on their language preference. This allows them to provide their users with the correct version.
General maintenance / website health
There is not a great deal of difference these tasks will make on your standings, but they are generally positive things to do from the user’s perspective.
Broken links
Links on your site that point to resources that don’t exist. There are two types of links: internal, which go to other pages on your domain, and external, which go to pages on other domains.
Site Audit can be used to quickly find broken links on your website. It’s free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Redirect chains
A redirect chain is a series of redirects between the initial URL and the destination URL.
To find redirect chains on your website, use Site Audit in the Redirects report. It’s free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service from Google that helps you monitor your website’s appearance in their search results and troubleshoot any issues.
This technology can be used to identify and correct technical errors, submit sitemaps, check for structured data problems, and much more.
Each of the search engines Bing, Yandex, and Ahrefs have their own versions. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools can help you improve your website’s SEO performance for free. It allows you to:
- Monitor your website’s SEO health
- Check for 100+ SEO issues
- View all your backlinks
- See all the keywords you rank for
- Find out how much traffic your pages are receiving
- Find internal linking opportunities
- It’s our answer to the limitations of Google Search Console.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
A page that is easy to use on a mobile device has the following: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test checks to see how easy it is for visitors to use your page on a mobile device. A page that is easy to use on a mobile device has the following features: This tool also identifies specific mobile-usability issues, such as text that is too small to read, the use of incompatible plugins, and more.
The test reveals to users what Google’s algorithms would view when they access the page. You can also use the Rich Results Test to see the content Google sees for different types of devices.
Chrome DevTools
Chrome DevTools is Chrome’s built-in web page debugging tool. This tool can help you improve your web page’s performance by identifying and resolving speed issues. It can also help improve web page rendering by identifying potential issues and providing suggestions on how to improve it.
From a technical SEO standpoint, it has endless uses.
Ahrefs Toolbar
The Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows users to access useful SEO data about the pages and websites they visit.
Its free features are:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Broken link checker
- Link highlighter
- SERP positions
In addition, as an Ahrefs user, you get:
- SEO metrics for every site and page you visit, and for Google search results
- Keyword metrics, such as search volume and keyword difficulty, directly in SERP
- SERP results export
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool that analyzes the loading speed of your web pages. The tool also provides recommendations to make pages load faster.
Step 2: Search Engine Tips
But what about making people want to see it right now? What can you do to make people want to see your site right now? So what’s next?
Your customer isn’t the only one reading your site. Your customers will only be able to find your website if a search engine reads it first. This work cannot be done by humans, so graphics that are shiny and attractive will not be helpful. Google employs algorithms known as “crawlers” or “bots” to comb through your site. The information that they gather is used to categorize and rank it.
Technical SEO optimizes your site to be read by non-human visitors as well. If you give Google what it wants—for example, fast, error-free, and well-organized content—it will reward you. If you meet the requirements that they are looking for, you will be ranked higher.
so it shows up in search results SEO best practices for website design include having a strong layout, using canonical information so search engines can easily find your content, and describing the content well in meta descriptions so it appears in search results.
Some tips for creating a good website are to avoid using repetitive terms, having vague descriptions, and using a flat site structure.
1. Strong architecture
This is actually a very simple Technical SEO process. Silo your website. A lot of people’s sites are set up in a flat structure when they first start out. The website has the top level domain and all their pages are located one step below that. Search engines have difficulty understanding which pages on a website are relevant to which topic.
If you use silos to categorize your website, it will be easier for search engines to find all the pages related to the page it is crawling. If your website includes a page titled “The Page” that is filed under the category “SEO,” the crawler will be able to easily connect your relevant content. A well siloed site will rank well. Search engines prefer a fast and easy way to obtain a comprehensive understanding of your website’s layout.
2. Canonical tags
If you are a fan of superhero comics, you may have heard the term “That’s canon.” A text’s canon is the officially recognised original version of the text.
What has that got to do with your website? If you want to indicate which URL is the original source of a page, you can use canonical tags. The ‘canonical’ tag tells Google that no matter where the information from this page is used or linked to, the original source is known to Google.
This makes it more unlikely that Google will think you are creating duplicate content on the web. It can save you from having your ranking penalised.
3. Clear meta descriptions
A meta description is a brief summary of a page’s content. It is typically two to three sentences long and appears under the title in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that the part of the text that the Google searcher sees is the first few characters.
You need to make people want to click on your link by catching their attention. Write in the active voice. Include a call to action. It should include the focus keyword. It should include unique and structured content.
Step 3: Effective Housekeeping
Finally, removing errors and clutter is important. If the search engine crawlers find dead ends, duplicate content, or confusing error codes, your website ranking will suffer. You can identify and eliminate key problems by doing a little bit of searching and reading through your articles. If you complete the following set of tasks, search engines will provide you with a reward. This is where Technical SEO can get more in-depth. Here are just a few headlines.
Do •Scan for crawl errors •Check your error codes
Don’t •Duplicate content •Forget 301 redirects
Don’t Duplicate Content:
Google hates duplicate content! In the past, people have created duplicate content in order to include more keywords related to what they are trying to target. This used to work. Google is aware of what it sees as keyword spamming. They will penalise you for it. Don’t copy content to multiple pages on your site. Link to it if necessary. Don’t create multiple sites with the same content.
Google can see when you are typing the same words in different places. If you do it too much, it will have a negative impact on your ranking.
Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO – Conclusion
Users want a fast responsive experience. Google needs to be sure that your website is a dependable source of information for the people who use their search engine.
There are many more tips for technical SEO not mentioned in this text. We have chosen areas that you can work on to make your site faster and improve your ranking with search engines.
To learn more about this, please speak with one of our team members.
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