Technical SEO is the backend hero of your website.
You might feel confident and become optimistic when you have done many backlinks, guest posts, on-page optimization, and invested in Google ads. However, your website may still struggle to get even a sufficient number of traffic if your website’s technical SEO is not optimized properly.
And it makes sense because subdomains, robots.txt files, crawl budgets, schema markup, and other technical elements directly affect your website SEO performance.
Before users find your website, it is first Google should be able to find the website through crawling and indexing your web pages then users is able to see the website on Google SERP.
SEO has become more complex and competitive than ever. Billions of websites on the Internet are boxing each other to get on the top of search engine rankings. Therefore, it is essential to focus on every SEO area to maximize the ROI.
In this article, we have mentioned 9 technical SEO tips that will instantly bring huge traffic to your website. These tips will help you to understand the basics of what Google and other search engines expect from your website so you can optimize your website for future success.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO means any technical or website code related optimization or implementation which helps Google and any search engine crawl and index your website easily and accurately. For example-
- Creating an XML sitemap to assist search engines find the web pages more easily.
- Redirecting a newly deleted page with a 301 (permanent) redirect.
- Inserting <Meta> tags which instruct crawl bots on the pages you want to be included in Google’s indexed or left alone.
Technical SEO is a broad field that covers a wide range of SEO elements including:
- XML sitemaps
- Crawling and indexing
- Mobile optimization
- Site speed
- Site structure
- SSL certificates
- Image SEO
- Internal and external links
- Canonical URLs
Technical SEO optimizations can also enhance your website’s user experience but they primarily focus on enabling a website to be found accurately by search engines on the Internet.
How is Technical SEO different from On-Page and Off-Page SEO?
Every SEO technique has the same goal- to bring traffic to a website. But it happens when your website is optimized for different types of SEO implementations.
This factor is important because many SEO experts don’t plan their marketing strategy while differentiating the various aspects of SEO, and consequently they are not able to produce the best results. That is why digital marketers should first need to understand the difference between Technical SEO, On-page, and Off-page SEO to generate better outcomes.
- On-Page SEO refers to optimize the elements on website which users mostly interact with. It contains:
- Internal links
- H1-H6 tags
- Keyword placement
- Content URL slugs
- Image alt-tags
- Off-Page SEO focuses on all the ranking factors which are outside of your website. It includes:
- Backlinks
- Guest posts
- Social media mentions
- Company information on business directories
- Unlinked brand mentions on other websites and publications
- Reviews on popular platforms
Understanding the key differences between these SEO elements and their intended goals will assist you choose a better SEO strategy for your website.
9 Technical SEO Tips That To Instantly Bring Huge Traffic To Your Website
1. Make Site Structure and Navigation User-Friendly
The first and foremost step is to help search engines rank you higher and make your site structure more consistent and navigation user-friendly. An ideal site structure enables both users and search engines to quickly and easily finds the web pages which matters most to them. Here are key areas where you should work upon:
Click depth: Click depth refers to the number of clicks that it takes to get to any given page from the home page. For good results, there should be a limited click depth of up to three clicks.
No orphaned pages: An orphaned page is any web page that has no internal links pointing to it. This not only eliminates the probability of a user finding the page while navigating the site but also communicates to search engines that the page isn’t important. You should use the best SEO tools to identify such pages and link to them from another relevant page on site.
Primary navigation: It is generally at the top of every website. Primary navigation is crucial to communicate your website’s most important pages. The pages you incorporate, and their related anchor text tells Google what to rank you for. To implement it:
- Must include the target keyword in anchor text
- Include your product or service pages focused in the navigation
- Don’t incorporate over 30 links as the value of every individual link begins to become diluted
Breadcrumbs: These are the internal links which are not found in the primary navigation menu that show a visual of the URL folder structure of the page you are on. Breadcrumbs allow a user to see where they are within the website and use them to smoothly return to where they came from. So you should check whether your web navigation allows users to do it easily or not.
2. Create a scalable and strategic URL structure
A consistent URL structure easily helps users to understand where they are while navigating your website. It also tells search engines about exactly what you do. Here are the URL best practices to follow:
Create logical parent: Child folder structure relationships: Instead of having each page live one level down from the root domain, consider adding parent-child URL relationships whenever possible.
Keep them concise: Conjunctions and articles like “and”, “the, “or” won’t improve a user’s understanding of your content from the SERPs or boost your SEO rankings in most cases. Have a wide net and only contain the most relevant terms in your URLs.
Remember to target long-tail keywords: These keywords should be relevant and related to your primary target keyword.
Apart from this, you can create a folder structure that scales, avoid weird characters, and use hyphens to improve your URL structure.
3. Improve Your Site Speed
Site speed is an important part of technical SEO to boost website performance. Google has explicitly declared and quantified their expectations about your website’s Core Web Vitas, which are a set of metrics that focus on the standard of page load performance quality.
Even if you don’t take Google updates seriously users hate when your website takes a longer time to load. Many web developers sometimes overcomplicate their coding and site structure which eventually hampers their site loading speed. Therefore, you should optimize your website for faster loading by implementing the below techniques:
- Limit third-party resource loading
- Deferringasync loading unnecessary scripts
- Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool
- Implement a content delivery network (CDN)
- Use a fast DNS (‘domain name system’)
- Switch your images to WebP
- Reduce ‘HTTP requests’ to minimize the use of scripts and plugins
- use one CSS stylesheet
- Compress your web pages
- Minify your website’s code (See Google’s Minify Resource Page for this)
- Optimize images and videos
4. Ensure Your Website is Crawlable by Search Engines
One of the primary goals of technical SEO is to make sure that your website is able to be found and indexed by Google. This is the basic element that most companies forget or often couldn’t find as the retarding factor in their SEO performance.
You can learn from SEO Company India as well. They specially focus on Google indexing to ensure their client’s website is searchable by search engines. There are three key methods to achieve this which are as follow:
Check Google’s index directly: This is the easiest way to see what pages on your website are being indexed by Google. You can do it with a “site search”.
Check Google Search Console: It is the most helpful search discovery and site health tool. Through Google Search Console, you can see how many pages are currently in Google’s index which pages are indexed, and which are not able to be indexed along with the reason why.
Check Screaming Frog: It is also a good tool that shows how Google bot crawls your site and will return every page with updated information about indexing.
Optimize Robots.txt file: The Robots.txt file is a small file placed in your website folder structure that provides instructions to search engines crawlers or robots about which web pages on your website you wish to be crawled and indexed.
Google offers a broad overview of how to apply this document and some specific use cases, but in general, you should give these primary instructions in robots.txt file:
- User agent to fix which specific crawlers you want to follow certain rules
- Allow disallow to prevent a crawler from accessing parts of your website that you want or don’t want it to. However, to ensure better searchability, we recommend you disallow search-related pages, URLs that contain parameters, admin pages, and cart & checkout pages in your robots. text file.
- Sitemap location to tell crawlers the URL that your sitemap lives on to make it smoother for them to find and going back.
So the technique is just simple. Audit your web page regularly for desired site indexation.
5. Improve Schema Markup
Schema markup is a form of structured data made by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. Structured data is a form of language which is added to the codebase that communicates data to search engines.
This is a type of structured data that helps provide information about a page and its content- giving context to Google regarding the meaning of a page and improving your organic listings to stand out on the SERPs along with the following things:
- Product information
- Blog information
- Event information
- Local business information
- Knowledge graph of your organization
- Business or product reviews
Currently, search engine uses their complex algorithms to create educated guess about those aspects. There are various kinds of schema markups for structuring data for people, places, organizations, local businesses, reviews, and so on. To make your schema markup more effective, you can use online schema markup generator and tools such as Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, schema.org.
6. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
People now browse websites from different devices. And mobile is the topmost device that is mostly used by users for web browsing. That is why your website needs to create a responsive website design that adjusts itself automatically so that it can be navigated and read easily on any device.
The importance of creating a mobile-friendly website is so high that it has forced top web development companies to adopt a mobile-first approach in the development. Google is clear about the fact that having a responsive website leaves a significant ranking impact by its algorithms.
And with the introduction of Google’s mobile-first approach to indexing content, the need for a mobile-friendly website has become more important than ever. When your website is optimized for mobile devices, you get additional benefits of mobile SEO to generate high traffic to your website.
Here are the tips to ensure your website is mobile-friendly:
- Page elements should be inside the user’s mobile viewpoint
- Text and other page elements should be in a suitable size for better readability
- Scripts and plugins must load on mobile viewpoints
- Page elements shouldn’t be moving constantly on the page and users don’t find it hard to tap and swipe
To make your website more mobile-friendly,
- Enable AMP
AMP is a Google-backed project that aims to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices through the usage of special code known as AMP HTML.
Enabling an AMP version of your web pages loads quickly on mobile devices. It makes your website more mobile-friendly by cutting down your content and code to the minimum size level, leaving text, images, and video intact while disabling scripts, comments, and forms.
7. Fix Broken Links on Your Site
A broken link isn’t only a bad experience for the user, but it can also harm your website’s ability to rank. If you have a web page that was intentionally or unintentionally got deleted, it will show up as a, ‘404 Not Found’ error. This error will take both your users and search engines bots to your “404 page” or a blank page (if you haven’t set it up yet).
So it is critical to make an action plan every time when a page is deleted on your website to make sure those links to broken pages aren’t interrupted. Here are the techniques to help you fix broken links on your site:
- Audit site to find all known 404 pages
- Find out all the pages which are linked to the broken page, and then replace those links with the updated URL(s) of the forwarded page
- Give instruction to either execute a redirect to a new page or ignore the page if it has been rightfully deleted. It can be either be a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect.
8. Implement HTTPS for Better Security
Your website holds critical information about your company, business, and customers. Having a secure website is not only essential for both users and search engines but also to protect your website from unauthorized access.
That is why Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is used to enhance the security of a website. It basically adds an extra layer of security due to the SSL distribution by making a private and public access key on the server to verify the ownership and authenticity of a website. This verification layer protects from various cyber-attacks.
When you implement an SSL certificate to your website, you will then be rewarded with HTTPS, instead of HTTP. Search engines then include the details of your certificate and include a “secure” related message to users once they find your site. So it gives a good message to users and search engines prioritize your site in ranking.
9. Create an XML Sitemap
A sitemap is a set of links that you want search engines to crawl and index. It is like a search roadmap telling Google or other search engines exactly where each page is. Thus, an XML (Extensible markup language) sitemap is used to give certain information that a search engine can use to index your pages more efficiently.
Creating an XML sitemap is highly beneficial for large websites which have lots of content. However, if you have an eCommerce website on a SaaS platform like BigCommerce, Magento, your XML site is automatically created.
Now It’s Your Time to Take Action
In this competitive digital landscape, if you want your website to rank on the top of the SERP page you have to stay ahead in implementing the technical SEO best practices. Conduct SEO technical audit and analyze all aspects carefully to ensure your website adheres to Google and other search engine guidelines and meets user’s expectations.
Google penalizes websites that have a poor structure, slow page speed, and redirect meaninglessly. That is why you need professional SEO services that focus on every single and minor detail to enable your website to rank on the top search results and ultimately bring huge traffic instantly.
Don’t wait until technical SEO issues affects adversely on your site ranking. So it’s time to take action now. Invest today to ensure a bright future for your website.
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