Technical SEO refers to behind-the-scenes elements that empower your organic growth engine, such as site architecture, mobile optimization, and page speed.
These are the common steps you have to follow in order to optimize your site technically:
- Perform a site audit.
- Create a plan to address the area where you fall short.
What is Technical SEO?
It refers to anything you do that makes your site easier to search engine to crawl and index. Technical SEO, content strategy, and link building, all of these parameters work in tandem to help your pages rank higher in search engine. You have to look after the technical superiority of your website, it consist architecture of website and one thing you have to keep in mind while, building a website is make your site mobile friendly, the reason behind that is, from 2015 50% of searches made on Google comes from mobile devices. So, Google start giving first priority to those websites which are mobile friendly. when we talk about page loading time, it is also a important point to improve your website’s visitors as well as it gives you a good hike in your SERP rankings, you have to optimize your site in such a way that it will take as minimum time as possible to open the pages of your website. The time taken by page to open once you clicked on the one of the result from SERP is known as page speed of particular website. It is also known as page speed, and efforts made to improve the site speed is called page speed optimization.
Why it is Important?
Your content might be the most thorough, useful, and well written, but unless a search engine can crawl it, very few people will ever see it. No doubt, content is very important part of SEO, but what if the content written by you is not shown to the user. So, make sure that your content should be visible to interested audience. Because as you know, that Google only recommend that content which is user friendly and easy to access for users, in order to do that we optimize our site’s technically and make sure that our website should be technically strong, such as take less time to open the pages, and also have sitemap xml file, robot.txt etc.
Technical SEO Audit Fundamental
Audit your Preferred Domain
Your domain is the URL that people type to arrive your site’ like digitalizedcappuccino.wordpress.com. Your website domain impact whether people can find you through search and provides a consistent way to identify your site.
Once you set your preferred domain, make sure that all variants, meaning www, non-www, http, and index.html, all permanently redirect to original version of your site.
Implement SSL
SSL stands for secure sockets layer, create a layer of protection between web server (the software responsible for fulfilling an online request) and browser, thereby making your site secure. When a user sent information to your website, like payment or contact info, that information is less likely to be hacked because you have SSL to protect them.
An SSL certificate is denoted by a domain that starts with https://.
such as https://digitalizedcappuccino.wordpress.com/ is considered as more secure than website starting with http//.
After you set up SSL, you’ll need to migrate any non-SSL pages from http to https. It’s a tall order but worth the effort in the name of ranking.
Here are steps you need to take:
- Redirect all http://yourwebsite.com pages to https://yourwebsite.com.
- Update all canonical and hreflang tags accordingly.
- Update the URL on your sitemap (located at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml) and your robots.txt (located at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt).
- 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 migrate over.
Optimize Page Speed
Do you know how long a visitor will wait for your website to load? Six Seconds … and that’s being generous.
Site speed isn’t important for user experience and conversion – it’s also a ranking factor.
Use these tips for improve average page load time.
- Compress Heavy Images. Compression reduce the size of your images as well as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, so they take up less space and load page faster.
- Check your Redirect Consistently. A 301 redirects is the second process you have to implement. 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 codes that’re lazy. It’s like writing – may be in first draft, you make your point in 6 sentences. In second draft you make it in 3. The more efficient code is, the more quickly the page will load (in general)
- Consider a content distribution network (CDN). CDNs are distributed web server that stores copies of your website in various geographical locations and deliver site based on searcher’s location.
- Try not to plugin happy. Outdated plugin often causes security vulnerabilities, that make your website susceptible to malicious hackers who can harm your rankings. Make sure you’re always use latest versions of plugins and minimize your use to most essential.
- Take advantage of cache plugins. Cache plugin stores 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 the instructions that server need to read before they can process HTML, or body of your webpage, i.e. the thing visitors want to see on your site. Using async means server can process the HTML and Script simultaneously, thereby decreasing the delay and increasing the page load time.
Crawlability Checklist
Crawlability is the foundation of your technical SEO strategy. Search bots will crawl your pages to gather information about your site.
If these bots are somehow blocked from crawling, they can’t index or rank your pages.
- Create an XML sitemap.
- Maximize your crawl budget.
- Optimize your site architecture.
- Set a URL structure.
- Utilize robots.txt.
- Add breadcrumb menus.
- Use pagination.
- Check your SEO log files.
1.Create an XML Sitemap
An XML Sitemap helps search bots to understand and crawl your web pages. You can think of it as map of your website. You’ll submit your site map to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster once it’s complete. Remember to keep your sitemap up-to-date as you can add and remove your web pages.
2.Maximize your Crawl Budget
Your crawl budget refers to the pages and resources on your site search bots will crawl.
Because crawl budget isn’t infinite, make sure you’re prioritizing your most important pages for crawling.
Here are few tips to ensure that maximizing your crawl budget:
- Remove canonicalize duplicate pages.
- Fix or redirect any broken link.
- Make sure your CSS and JavaScript files are crawlable.
- Check your crawl stats regularly and watch for sudden dips or increases.
- Make sure any bot or page you’ve Disallowed from crawling is meant to be blocked.
- Keep your site map updated and submit it to appropriate webmaster tools.
- Prune your website of unnecessary and outdated content.
- Watch out for dynamically generated URLs, which can make number of pages on your site skyrocket.
3.Optimize your site Architecture
Your website has multiple pages. Those pages need to be organized in way that allow search engine to easily find and crawl them. In the same way as building is based on architectural design, your site structure is that how you organize the pages on your site.
4.Set a URL Structure
URL structure refers to how you structure your URLs, which could be determined by your site architecture. URL can have subdirectories, like blog.hubspot.com, and/subfolders, like hubspot.com/blog, that indicate where the URL leads.
Here are few more tips about how to write a URLs:
- Use lower case letter.
- Use dashes to separate words.
- Make them short and descriptive.
- Avoid using unnecessary characters and words (including preposition).
- Include your target keywords.
Once you have your URL structure buttoned up, you’ll submit a list of URLs of your important pages to search engine in form of an XML site map. Doing so gives search bots an additional context about your website so they don’t have to figure it when they crawl.
5 Utilize robots.txt
When a web robot crawls your site, it will first check the robots.txt, otherwise known as Robot Exclusion Protocol. This protocol can allow or disallow a specific web robot to crawl your site, including specific sections or even pages of your site. If you’d like to prevent bots from indexing your site, you’ll use a NOINDEX robots or meta tag.
6 Add Breadcrumb Menus
Remember the old fable Hensel and Gretel where, two children dropped breadcrumb on the ground to find their way back home? Well they were on to something.
Breadcrumbs are exactly what they sound likes – a trail that guides user to back to the start of their journey on your website. It’s a menu pages that tells the users how their current page is relates to the rest of the site.
And they’re not just for website visitors; search bots use them too.
Breadcrumbs should be to things: 1) visible to user so they can easily navigate your web pages without using the back button, and 2) have structured markup language to give accurate context to search bots that are crawling your site.
7 Use Pagination
Pagination uses code to tell search engines when pages with distinct URLs are related to each other. For instance, you may have a content series that you have backup into chapters or multiple web pages. If you want to make it easy for search bots to discover and crawl these pages, then you’ll use pagination.
The way it works is pretty simple, you’ll go to the <head> of the page and one the series and use
rel=”next” to tell the search bot which page to crawl second. Then, on page two you’ll use, rel=”previous” to indicate the prior page and rel=”next” to subsequent page, and so on.
Its’s look like this…
The page one:
On page two:
Note that pagination is useful for crawl discovery, but is no longer supported by Google to batch index pages as it once was.
8 Check your SEO Log Files
Web server record and store log data about every they take on your site in log files. The data recorded includes the time and date of the request, the content requested, and the requesting IP address.
Indexability Checklist
As search bots crawl your website, they begin indexing pages based on their topic and relevance to that topic. Once indexed, your page is eligible to rank on the SERPs. Here are some factors that can help your pages get indexed.
- Unblocks search bots from accessing pages.
- Remove duplicate content.
- Audit your redirects.
- Check the mobile-responsiveness of your website.
- Fix HTTP errors.
1 Unblock search bots from accessing pages
You want to ensure that bots are sent to your preferred pages and that they can access them freely. Google’s robot.txt tester will give you a list of pages that are disallowed and you can use Google Search Console’s inspect tool to determine the cause of blocked pages.
2 Remove duplicate content
Duplicate content confuses search bots and negatively impact your indexability. Remember to use canonical URLs to establish your preferred pages.
3 Audit your redirects
Verify that all of your URL set up properly. Redirect loops, broken URLs, or- worse- improper redirect can cause issues when your site is being indexed. To avoid this, audit all of your redirects regularly.
4 Check the mobile-responsiveness of your site
if your website is not mobile-friendly now, then you’re far behind where you need to be. As early as 2016, Google started mobile indexing sites first, prioritizing the mobile experience over desktop. Today, that indexing is enable by default. To keep up with this important trend, you can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to check where your website needs to improve.
5 Fix HTTP Errors
HTTP stands for Hyper Text Markup Protocol, but you probably don’t care about that.
HTTP errors can impede the work of search bots by blocking them from important content on your site. It is therefore, incredibly important to address these errors quickly and thoroughly.
Here are some important redirects:
- 301 Permanent Redirects are used to permanently send traffic from one URL to another. Your CMS allow you to set these redirects, but too many of these can slow down your site and degrade your user’s experience as each additional redirect adds to page load time. Aim for zero redirects chain, if possible as too many will cause search engine to give up crawling that page.
- 302 Temporary Redirect is a way to temporarily redirect traffic from one URL to a different webpage. While this status code will automatically send users to new webpage, the cached title tag, URL and description will remain consistent with the origin URL. If the temporary redirect place long enough, though, it will treat as a permanent redirect and those elements will pass to the destination URL.
- 403 Forbidden Messages mean that the content user has requested is restricted based on access permission or due to server misconfiguration.
- 404 Error Pages tell user’s that page you have requested doesn’t exist, either it’s being removed or they typed a wrong URL. It’s always a good idea to make 404 pages that are on-brand and engaging to keep visitors on your site.
- 405 Method Not Allowed means that your website server recognized and still blocked the access method, resulting in error message.
- 500 Internal Server Error is a general error message that means your web server is experiencing an issue delivering your site to the requesting party.
- 502 Bad Gateway Error is related to miscommunication, or invalid response between servers.
- 503 Service Unavailable tells you that while you server is functioning properly, it is unable to fulfill your request.
- 504 Gateway Timeout means a server did not receive a timely response from your webserver to access the requested information.
Whatever the reason of these errors, it’s important to address them and keep users and search engines both happy and to keep both coming back to your site.
Renderability Checklist
Before we dive into this topic, it’s important to know about the difference between SEO accessibility and web accessibility. The latter revolves around making your web page easy to navigate for users with disabilities or impairments, like blindness or Dyslexia for example. Many elements of the web accessibility overlap with SEO best practices. However, an SEO accessibility audit doesn’t account for everything you’d need to do to make your site more accessible to visitors who are disabled.
We’re going to focus on SEO accessibility, or rendering, in this section, but keep web accessibility in top of mind as you develop and maintain your website.
An accessible site is based on ease of rendering. Below are the website elements to review your renderability audit.
Server Performance
As you learned above, server timeout and errors will cause HTTP errors that hinder users and bots from accessing your site. If you notice that server is experiencing an issue, use resources provided above to troubleshoot and resolve them. Failure to do so in timely manner can result in search engine removing your webpage from their index as it is a poor experience to show a broken page to a user.
HTTP Status
Similar to server performance, HTTP errors prevent access to your webpages. You can use a web crawler, like Screaming Fog, Botify, and Deep crawl to perform a comprehensive error audit of your site.
Load Time and Page Size
If your page takes too time to load, the bounce rate is not only the problem you have to worry about. A delay in page load time can result in server error that will block bots from your web pages, or have them crawl partially loaded version that are missing important sections of content.
JavaScript Rendering
Google admittedly have difficult time processing JavaScript (JS), and therefore, recommends to employ pre-rendered content to improve accessibility.
Orphan Pages
Every page on your site should linked to at least one page – preferably more, depending upon how important page is. When page has no internal links, it’s called orphan page. Like an article with no introduction, these pages lack the context that bots need to understand how they should be indexed.
Page Depth
Page depth refers to how many layers down a page exists in your site a structure, i.e. how many clicks away from homepage it is.
Regardless of how many layers in your site structure, keep important pages like your product and contact pages- no more than three clicks deep.
Redirect Chains
When you decide to redirect traffic from one page to another, you’re paying a price. That price is crawl efficiency. Redirect can slow down crawling, increase page load time, and render your site inaccessible if these redirects are not set up properly. For all of these reasons try to keep redirect to as minimum as possible.
Rank ability Checklist
How to improve ranking from a technical SEO standpoint. Getting your pages to rank involves some of the on-page and off-page elements that we mentioned before but from technical lens.
Internal and External linking
Links helps search bots understand where a page fits in a grand scheme of query and gives context for how to rank a page. Links guide a search bot (and users) to related content and transfer page importance. Overall, linking improves, crawling, indexing, and your ability to rank.
Backlink Quality
Backlink– links from other sites back to your own- provides a vote of confidence for your site. They tell search bots that external website believes your page is high-quality and worth crawling. As these votes add up, search bots notice and treat your site as more credible. However, quality of back link matters a lot.
There are many ways to get quality backlinks to your site, like outreach to relevant publications, claiming unlinked mentions, providing helpful content that others site wants to link to.
Content Cluster
Content clusters links are related content so search bots can easily find, crawl, and index all of the pages you own on a particular topic. They act as a self-promotion tool to show search engines how much you know about the topic, so they are more likely to rank your site as an authority for any related search query.
Your rank ability is the main determinant in organic traffic growth because studies show that searchers are more likely to click on the top three search results on SERPs.
Click ability Checklist
While click-through rate is everything to do with search behavior, there are things you can do to improve click ability on SERPs. While meta descriptions and page titles do impact CTR, we’re going to focus on the technical elements because that’s why you are here.
Click ability Checklist
- Use structured data.
- Win SERP feature.
- Optimize your featured snippet.
- Consider Google Console.
1 Use Structured Data
Structured data refers to a specific vocabulary called schema to categories and label elements on your webpage for search bots. Schema make it crystal clear what each element is, how it relates to your site, and how to interpret it. Basically, structured data tells bots, “this is a video”, “this is a product”, or “this is a recipe” leaving no room for interpretation.
To be clear, using structured data is not a “click ability factor” but it does help organize your content in such a way that make it easy for search bots to understand, index and potentially rank your pages.
2 Win SERP Features.
SERP features, otherwise known as a rich result, are double edged sword. If you win them and get the click-through you are golden. If, not your organic results are pushed down the page beneath sponsored ads, text answer boxes, video carousels, and the like.
Rich results are those elements that don’t follow the page title, URL, meta description format of other search results. For example, the image below shows two SERP features- a video carousel and “People Also Ask” box- above the first organic result.
3 Optimize for Featured Snippets
One unicorn SERP feature that has nothing to do with schema markup is Featured Snippets, those boxes above the search results that provide concise answer to search queries.
Featured snippets are intended to get the searchers the answers to their queries as quickly as possible. According to Google, providing the best answer to the searcher’s query is the only to win snippet.
Consider Google Search
Google Discover is a relatively new algorithmic listing of content by category and specifically for mobile users. It’s no secret that Google has been doubling down on the mobile experience; with moreover 50% of searches comes from mobile, it’s no surprise either. The tool allows users to build a library of content by selecting categories of interest (think: Gardening, music or politics).
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