Technical SEO isn’t as sexy as content creation or outreach. But it’s crucial to your rankings.
Your website’s technical SEO isn’t something that can be overlooked. Even if your site is perfectly optimized from a content perspective, technical issues can seriously impact your rankings in Google and other major search engines.
First of all, it’s important to have fast-loading pages these days. That’s because Google uses site speed as a ranking factor, and it’s especially important on mobile where page speed is even more important.
Second of all, it’s important to have alt tags on all of your images so that Google knows what the image is all about.
Third of all, it’s important to have clean URLs that make sense and are easy for search engines
It’s essential to optimize your site for search bots – otherwise, you’ll end up with pages that don’t get crawled and indexed or pages that Google’s algorithm simply doesn’t like.
Your site’s technical SEO has a big impact on your rankings in search engines, so it’s crucial to make sure it’s set up correctly before you start promoting it online. However, technical SEO is time-consuming – and it’s easy to skip a few steps when you’re in a hurry.
The technical SEO checklist below will help you make sure everything is in order on your site.
Make Your Website Ready For Crawling and Indexing
Crawling bots will visit your website if it has new content, so you should add it to your site regularly. Having fresh content will keep search engine robots interested and prevent them from marking your pages as “low-quality.”
Publishing links to your new web pages on social bookmarking sites will also speed up the process. You should also create an internal link directory that contains all the pages and content of your website.
Your website’s navigation menu, link structure, and content must be easy for human readers to understand. You should also perform an on-page SEO audit. Make sure that no pages are duplicates; if your site has several of the same pages, Google won’t index them. Also, remember that it takes time for Google to crawl a new website before it appears in the SERPs.
Validate Your XML Sitemaps
There are a few ways to validate your XML Sitemaps for technical SEO. One of the most popular methods is to include the priority tag. These tags indicate which pages should be crawled by a search engine spider.
A well-validated XML sitemap helps the search engine spider maximize its crawl budget by highlighting the SEO-relevant content. But there are a few things you must avoid while validating your sitemaps.
One of the most common mistakes is to submit a sitemap with no index URLs. If this happens, Google may consider your sitemap to be irrelevant and not worth indexing.
Besides, a sitemap can have a few “noindex” URLs. These URLs should only be included temporarily. Even if they aren’t indexed by Google, they can still be found by search engines and indicate the quality of your landing pages.
Index Coverage report. This report will show you how many pages are indexed. While you should be happy with 80% or higher, it’s not enough. This could miss some opportunities to expand coverage.
A better way to check index coverage is to use the Index Coverage report. It will show you the index coverage on a finer level and provide more relevant examples of exclusion. In this way, you can fix any problems with indexation.
Optimize Your robots.txt
The three main phases of search are crawling (and rendering), indexing, and ranking. These elements are interrelated, and optimizing your website for these factors can have a site-wide impact on your rankings.
The first step is to optimize your robots.txt file. This file manages which pages should be indexed and crawled. This file must be optimized correctly for your site to benefit from search engine optimization.
In addition to creating a search engine-friendly website, you should optimize the data on your site. Broken links and duplicate content can make Google consider your website un-user-relevant, which will lead to a poor ranking.
Optimize Your URL Structure
It is crucial to optimize your URL structure to attract Google’s attention and improve the user experience. A good URL should be easy to read and provide a brief description of the page’s content. Don’t use stopwords or random characters in your URL. Short URLs are better for Google and your users, as well as search engines.
A simple, clean URL with your primary keyword is the most important aspect of URL structure.
If you’re new to technical SEO, you can start with the most critical aspects and work your way down. Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with the concepts – technical SEO is not as complicated as you think. Start with the big, critical things and fix them one at a time. Then, tackle problems one by one until you have mastered them all.
Optimize Your Website Performance
Using a technical SEO checklist can help you optimize your website for search engines. You can use the same checklist to improve your website’s performance for both visitors and search engines. By following this technical SEO checklist, you will see better results in SERPs and get better visibility and higher volumes of organic traffic.
Using a technical SEO checklist can help you identify the elements that affect your website’s speed. This checklist will also give you recommendations on how to make your website faster. You can optimize images, minify your CSS and take advantage of browser caching, among other tips.
Google has outlined these steps to improve page speed and recommends several options to make your site faster. Another important step is checking whether your analytics service is reporting live data, and installing any necessary code.
A technical SEO checklist is an essential part of any SEO campaign. It helps search engines index and crawls your website, so they can offer you higher search rankings. It also helps your visitors experience your website.
For this reason, you should ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, accessible, and easy to read. It should also load fast. Search engines want to give their users a good user experience, and that includes all aspects of the site. Listed below are 10 steps to optimize your website’s performance for search engines.
Add Structured Data To Your Pages And Posts
When you add structured data to your pages and posts, the search engines can decipher what the content of your page is about. These data, called schema markup, can help Google confirm that your page is about a specific topic and show that information in search results.
With the help of structured data, your pages and posts can be featured at the top of search results, generating more traffic and increasing your conversion rate.
If you’re not sure how to implement schema markup on your pages and posts, here are some guidelines to help you get started:
To add structured data to your pages and posts, you need to first determine which schema format you want to use. Google prefers JSON-LD, but other formats work too. If you’re using an open-source HTML specification, you can use Microdata.
In either case, you can insert structured data within the body or header of your article. Once you’ve decided on a format, you’ll need to write some HTML code.
Remove Duplicate Content
You should be aware of the consequences of having duplicate content on your website. If your web pages have the same content, search engines might be confused. Depending on the circumstances, this could lead to your web pages being ranked lower than they should be.
Even though there are technical reasons why your pages are displayed in different ways, it doesn’t mean that the content on the two pages is identical. By following these eight steps, you can easily remove duplicate content from your website and improve its search rankings.
Having a business website is critical for online sales. To boost organic traffic, increase conversions, and increase revenue, you need a strong SEO strategy. Without a website, your business will get lost in the crowd.
By following the steps above, you can improve your search rankings and increase traffic to your site. If you’re unsure how to optimize your website for technical SEO, check out Jayson David’s guide. Jayson David is a lead writer for Hosting Foundry, a company that can help businesses find the best web host for their needs.
Add hreflang For International Websites
If your website is targeting international users, you’ll most likely want to translate your content. However, this approach can also be detrimental to your search engine rankings. Publishing translated content on different URLs won’t help Google understand your site’s structure and will likely result in suboptimal rankings.
Thankfully, there is a simple solution. Add hreflang to your URLs to ensure your audience has the best possible experience.
You can add hreflang to your URLs to indicate which version of an international website is relevant to the geolocation. For example, if your site is set to France, the French version will be displayed for users in that country.
You can also use the X-Default tag to control which language is displayed to visitors. This can make a big difference in your traffic. Here are some tips for implementing hreflang:
To create a ccTLD, make sure that the corresponding version of your website exists. If it has been translated, the content is available in multiple languages. If it is not, users will be directed to the Startpage of the website, which is known as the default page.
You can also use “x-default” as an alternative value when you create a hreflang tag for your international website.
Conclusion
This checklist isn’t exhaustive and it should be updated frequently as best practices change. But it’s a good starting point that can help you get started on the technical side of SEO.
On the one hand, technical SEO is complex because search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and guidelines.
On the other hand, technical SEO doesn’t have to be complicated – it just requires a bit of research and patience. With the right tools and a bit of practice, you’ll find that your organic traffic will grow over time.
Now that you’ve read this article and learned about the technical SEO checklist in 8 simple steps to push your website higher in search engine ranking results, you are headed in the right direction to understanding SEO and how to optimize for a better ranking in the search engines!
Accomplishing these eight steps isn’t enough for technical SEO optimization; you need to clean up the code and redirect URLs too. By following these 8 steps and fixing the errors on your website, your SEO strategy will be successful and your rankings will improve over time.
