There are many different types of SEOs. Some focus on link building, some focus on content, and others focus on technical SEO. Technical SEO is one of the most important types of SEO because itΓÇÖs all about making sure that your website is search engine friendly.
Technical SEO is most often ignored because it is difficult to master. However, the ability to crawl the internet has never been so important. This piece will not cover all required details in an SEO audit; our goal will be to enhance your current technical SEO strategy by getting ontop of the key advancements you should be ontop of in 2021.
Afterall making as SEO’s one of our key results should be user empathy, to make authoritative websites crawlable on the Google search engines to give people the best result to their queries.
A Quick Rundown of Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to site or database optimization that helps search engine spiders crawl or index your web site more efficiently. Technical SEO is the form of optimizing. ItΓÇÖs a large topic and one that can be difficult to understand. You won’t be able to keep up with the latest updates if you don’t know what to expect.
Some of the basics of technical SEO are ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, making sure your site is accessible in different languages, making sure your site loads fast, and making sure you have a sitemap.
Technical SEO is a very important part of search engine optimisation, its a process every technical SEO agency will go through in the process on establishing a strong project foundation and so should you!
Technical SEO is constantly evolving, and Google is constantly updating the way it ranks sites. The number one thing you can do to stay up-to-date is to read the Google Webmaster Guidelines .
ItΓÇÖs crucial that you understand the basics because technical SEO can make or break your rankings.
How Has Technical SEO Changed In Recent Years?
In recent years, Google has shifted from using links as a ranking factor to using things like engagement and dwell time as ranking factors. Google has also shifted from using links as a ranking factor but to using things like engagement and dwell time as ranking factors.
In the past, a lot of SEOs focused a lot on keyword ranking and a lot of link building. In the past few years, SEO has revolved around user experience and user-centric design.
Creating A Technical SEO Strategy
Developing a technical SEO strategy is a lot like having a blueprint for a building. In order to have a great building, you need a good blueprint. In order to have a great website, you need a good technical SEO strategy. The technical SEO strategy is going to guide you in the process of making the most out of your website.
To develop your technical SEO strategy first pull together a list of issues technical issues that the website needs to resolve and a plan on how to resolve them.
Technical SEO Health Check
There are ten things we look for in a technical SEO health check.
1. HTML and XML sitemaps
2. Indexation and crawl rate
3. Mobile usability
4. Site structure
5. Crawl errors
6. Redirect chains
7. Robots.txt
8. Duplicate content
9. 404s & Broken Links
10. Site Speed
Advanced Tips:
Add structured data markup to your website
Structured data markup is a code added on your website to better assist Google in finding content. This information can help an online research engine to find your URL and provide better content. The service is used to put ratings into reviews.
These enhanced performance gains can enhance your click-through rate (CTR) and generate additional traffic to your site. Because websites with more CTRs generally tend to be given special treatment in search engines, it is worth making the effort to add structured information to a website. For example you can use structured data for the star reviews or price information when looking at useful information.
- Validate Your XML Sitemaps.
- Implement hreflang for International Websites.
- Relevant schema markups.
Remove Duplicate Code & Minify Your Website
Duplicate code is when you have the same code on your website more than once. Duplicate code is not good for search engine optimisation (SEO) because a search engine will see a duplicate code as a duplicate page, and these duplicate pages will lower your overall SEO.
The problem with duplicate code happens mainly because every copy of your website has its own set of redirects and code. Therefore it’s common for duplicate content to take its place when a website is made from different parts. Below are a few ways you can remove duplicate content and get your site back into search engine optimisation shape.
Redirect all pages with duplicate content to one page, then 301 redirect the rest to the original version. For more information on redirects, please read our previous blog post on your homepage.
- Remove all duplicate content from the server side using the following in PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, or IIS.
- Remove all redirects except for the ones to main content (header). Leave the rest.
- Remove all CSS from the page. (CSS can be found in the sitemap in the file directory.) This also includes removing all Javascript.
- Remove all Images and all layouts. This includes removing any background images.
- Make sure your robots.txt file contains only the URL of the duplicate pages.
Install SSL Certificate for Your Website
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is essentially a security protocol designed for encrypted communications between browser and the Web server. Google Chrome and some other browsers introduced a new Not Secure feature in June 2011.
Google introduced SSL as a standard in 2014, and if you haven’t implemented it yet, now it’s time to update, not only for security but also for SEO.
The solution is to install a security certificate on your website and move your website to HTTPS. Once your SSL has been configured you can anticipate that changes are effective within about 10-15 minutes but allow at least 72 hours after turning it over.
Reduce site load time (desktop and mobile)
More than 40% have abandoned websites because of the slow propagation speed of the service. Speed increase can happen all over the Internet in many various ways.
The most common culprit for speed slowdown are large files with heavy data files which can take too long to load. Increasing resolution of web pages and optimized image files can be important improvements.
Additionally browser caching, utilizing CDNs removal of inoperable scripts and files and minimizing HTTP requests help to resolve these common concerns. After having looked at the punch list your website speed will typically be increased immediately.
- Audit page speed with Web Core Vitals
- Eliminate 3rd Party Scripts
- Test Load Times With and Without a CDN
- GZIP Compression
Consider enabling AMP
AMP is one such Google-backed initiative that aims at speeding mobile content deliveries. AMP sites load on smartphones exceptionally fast. They can easily remove your content and codes from them by leaving your text images and video intact but disenabling scripts, forms and questions. Because they run extremely fast AMP websites will have far greater potential to be read and shared thereby improving the dwell time and the number of back links towards your content ΓÇô all the good things from SEO. Google occasionally places AMP websites in prominent places in the results – giving you a valuable boost.
Abandon toxic links
Tools like Screaming Frog and Google search console will have traces of the domains that backlink you. If the website links to you has at least 50 scores you may want to either disable or delete those sites. Once you submit, Google may add ΓÇÿno followΓÇÖ codes to the links which won’t affect your results or your ranking. The first step will be reaching out manually to domains and asking them to remove the links. More often than not these requests haven’t been received either and Google needs to be informed about how you asked this favor.
Key Takeaway
Technical SEO is not as tough as it appears but it’s vital in 2021 and must be undertaken systematically with care. A technically sound website is the difference between a successful SEO campaign and failure.
Make sure you’re utilizing these advanced strategies to improve your rankings.
