Technical SEO is an essential step when optimizing your website because it primes your site for the crawling and indexing phase.
By removing obstacles that could mislead or confuse search engines as they crawl and index your website, you’re ensuring that your SEO is generating your intended results and that people who should be finding your content do find your content.
By following Google’s technical SEO guidelines, you can confirm that the security and structure of your website meets the expectation of search engine algorithms and is rewarded in search results accordingly.
Use This Checklist to Ensure your Technical SEO is Up to Mark
1: Use SSL
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is a digital certificate that establish a secure connection between the client and the server through the secure protocol: HTTPS. It is the best choice for protecting sensitive information, such as credit card details, customer contact details, and search engines prioritize it.
2: Review Your Website’s URL Structure
A proper URL structure helps search engines understand the site’s structure. The site tree also helps you to avoid competing with your own website pages. Here are some of the technical SEO best practices that apply to URL structure:
- Add a relevant keyword to the URL
- Avoid having extra words in URLs
- Use hyphens to separate words
- Make correct use of canonical tags
- Match URLs with page titles
3: Ensure your site is responsive
A responsive website is designed to respond to and adjust itself based on the on which the user views the site.
In today’s world, responsive design is no longer a luxury innovation. It is become a firm standard component of any SEO plan. Search engines reward websites that they can be confident will be accessible to the user whatever they’re on, and it allows web designers to design once and publish the same content everywhere, for all devices.
4: Website Speed Optimization
Website Speed optimization is one of the crucial steps in website optimization. It refers to how fast your website loads on a browser when someone visits it. Slow websites frustrate users and won’t be ranked as highly.
Here’s four quick things you can try:
- Optimize your images
- Optimize JavaScript and CSS
- Remove unwanted plugins
- Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (more on AMPs later)
5: Address duplicate content issues
Duplicate content is when you have identical content on different pages of the same website or on different websites. As Google states: “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information”.
When your website has too much duplicate content, you get less organic traffic, and Google has said that it can lead to a penalty or complete deindexing of a website. Search engine algorithms do reward unique content, so work on increasing that as you remove duplicate content.
6: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Website Tools.
These free tools will help you improve your overall site performance by identifying any issues that might stop it from being indexed/crawled by Google or ranking in organic search results.
6: XML sitemap
A XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website. It is important to note that by submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console, you’re telling Google that you consider the pages in the XML sitemap to be good-quality pages.
7: Enable AMP Pages
Accelerated mobile pages are basically stripped-down HTML copies of existing webpages that provide faster load times than standard HTML5 documents.
It allows the content to be hosted on Google AMP Cache. Google can then serve this cached version immediately when any user clicks on your website in the search results.
8: Add structured data markup to your website.
Last but not least, add structured data markup to your website. This is also called schema markup, and is a type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display website content.
Interested in getting a technical SEO audit of your own website? At Flawless Inbound, we create and overhaul websites, handle all your SEO needs, and provide high-quality conversion-focused content to seal the deal. We’ve helped more than 80 B2B organizations ramp up their digital presence’s effectiveness, and we’d love to get started with you. Check out our page on Marketing Enablement to learn more about what we do, and get in touch.
