What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations
that help search engine spiders to crawl and index your site more effectively
(to help improve organic rankings).
Search engines give preferential treatment in search results
to websites that display certain technical characteristics — for example a
secure connection, a responsive design, or a fast-loading time — and technical
SEO is the work you need to do to ensure your website does so.
Implementing technical SEO on your website can help to
ensure that the security and structure of your site meets the expectation of
search engine algorithms and is rewarded in search results accordingly.
1. Use
TLS.
Transport Layer Security (TLS), the successor of the
now-deprecated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is a security technology which
creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser and provide
communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in
applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use
in securing HTTPS remains the most publicly visible.
You can spot a site using SSL easily, the website URL starts
with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’
In 2014 Google announced that they wanted to see ‘HTTPS
everywhere’, and that secure HTTPS websites were going to be given preference
over non-secure ones in search results.
Ensure your site is secure – this can be done by installing
an SSL certificate on your website.
2. Ensure
your site is mobile-friendly.
When your website is mobile-friendly, it is designed,
developed, and optimized for users on all standard mobile devices.
More internet users and consumers are using their mobile
devices to go online (surf the internet), shop online. Mobile-friendly websites
benefit from a host of additional advantages for example, Google prioritizes
mobile-friendly websites, which means your business cannot afford to be
mobile-unfriendly. Google is responsible for almost 95% of all internet search
traffic, so if your website is pushed down on the search rankings, you will miss
important exposure and business.
A ‘responsive’ website design adjusts itself automatically
so that it can be navigated and read easily on all standard mobile devices (desktop,
notebook, tablet, or mobile).
Google is very clear about the fact that having a responsive
site is considered an extremely major ranking signal by its algorithms. With
the introduction of Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing content, a
responsive website is now more important than ever.
Ensure that your website is fully responsive and will
display in the best format possible for mobile, tablet or desktop users.
3. Speed
your site up.
The lack of speed will kill your site! You may think what is
a few more seconds? Don’t people have time anymore? Turns out they really do
not.
A slow-loading website pushes people to leave it. Especially
on mobile, the slower your site, the more likely it is that visitors will
bounce (leave the site) according to a Google study, it indicates bounce rates
increase with increased page load times.
Just two seconds can make an enormous difference and only
four seconds can increase bounce rates by 100%.
If you want keep visitors on your site, increase
conversions, rank well in search engines, and keep visitors happy, you need to always
provide a wonderful experience in terms of speed and on any screen size.
Search engines prefer sites that load instantly, and page
speed is considered an important ranking signal.
If you want visitors to stick around, make your
site fast.
4. Fix
duplicate content issues.
Duplicate or copied content can appear on the internet in
more than one place and by always make sure to find and fix such content issues
on your site, you can have better rankings along with a great website user
experience.
It contains similar (or the exact same) content being on
multiple pages. It can be found within your website (due to technical issues on
your site) or outside your website (due to others copying your content).
Here is where you can use canonical URLs to prevent problems
caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs (more on
this canonical tag later in the same post).
To put it simply, always keep an eye on duplicate content
issues on your website if you want to increase your search rankings and provide
a better experience to the readers.
Duplicate content can either be confusing for users (and
indeed search engine algorithms). As a result, search engines are not keen on
it, and Google and Bing advise webmasters to fix any duplicate content issues
they find.
5. Create
an XML sitemap.
A Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs for a site
and helps search engines to understand website whilst crawling it, allows
webmasters to include additional information about each URL, when it was last
updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other
URLs of the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently
and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content.
You can think of it as being like a ‘search roadmap’ of
sorts, telling search engines exactly where each page is
6. Consider
enabling AMP.
What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?
AMP is a Google backed project designed as an open standard
for any publisher to have pages load quickly on mobile devices and aims to
speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices using special code known as
AMP HTML.
AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly on
mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code down to the
bare bones, leaving text, images, and video intact but disabling scripts, comments,
and forms.
Now more than ever it is critical that your website looks
good, is easy to use and performs well on all mobile devices. With that in mind
you must find ways to improve the user experience on mobile devices through
enabling AMP on your website.
Because they load so fast, AMP versions of pages are far
more likely to be read and shared by your users, increasing dwell time and the
number of backlinks pointing to your content – all good things from an SEO
point of view. On top of that, Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in
prominent carousels in search results – giving you an important search bump.
7. Add
structured data markup to your website.
Structured data markup is code that you add to your website
to help search engines better understand the content on it. This data can help
search engines index your site more effectively and provide more relevant
results.
Structured data is not just about making your products look
nice and orderly anymore. It is the only way to stay on top of your SEO. Structured
data has several underlying factors that manipulate everything from user
experience to click-through rate and more.
Google does not recognize structured data by itself as a
ranking factor, it is how you manipulate the structured data and what you do
with it, that affects your SEO and in turn your site traffic, ranking, and
conversion rate.
Structured Data, like any other markup language, is
important for the presentation of your content, in particular, your products
and other information. It also has a variety of uses that improve your SEO and helps
Google understand your content and it is one of the keys to how well you are
defined by search engines and how users can find you and your products.
Structured data also enhances search results through the
addition of ‘rich snippets,’ for example, you can use structured data to add
star ratings to reviews; prices to products; or reviewer information (example
below).
Because they are more visually appealing and highlight
immediately useful information to online explorers, these enhanced results can
improve your click-through rate (CTR) and generate additional traffic to your
site. Because sites with results featuring higher CTRs are considered to
receive preferential treatment in search engines, it is worth making the effort
to add structured data to your site.
8. Register
your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free
tools from Google and Microsoft respectively that allow you to submit your
website to their search engines for indexing.
Google Search Console tools and reports help you measure
your site's search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site
shine in Google Search results.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service as part of
Microsoft's Bing search engine which allows webmasters to add their websites to
the Bing index crawler, see their site's performance in Bing and a lot more.
The service also offers tools for webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and
indexing of their website, submission of new URLs, Sitemap creation, submission
and ping tools, website statistics, consolidation of content submission, and added
content and community resources.
When you are ready to launch your website, you should submit
its XML sitemap to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools so that
they can crawl your new site and start to display results from it in search
results.
These services also allow you to keep an eye on the overall
performance of your site from a search engine prospective - other things you
can do with the tools include:
evaluating your site’s mobile usability
accessing search analytics
viewing backlinks to your site
disavowing spammy links
and much more besides.