What You Should Know About Technical SEO

Poor technical SEO can make your website hard to crawl, index, and access. As a consequence, your website may not show on search engine result pages no matter how great your web content is. With this realization, it’s clear that technical SEO is crucial.

The following seven improvements will give you the advantage and help your search rankings need when it comes to technical SEO.

Technical SEO To Improve Search Rankings

Web Hosting

Your web host impacts your rankings in plenty of ways.

For example, website speed is a technical ranking factor. Your server specification and configuration is regulated by your web host, which impacts your site speed.

Server downtime also affects your rankings. Depending on your business, a one-day downtime may not hurt your online visibility. But intermittent and frequent downtimes caused by a poor host will greatly impact your online ranking, so avoid bad hosts at all costs. Downtime can also impact your sales and conversions, especially if your site gets a lot of traffic and sales.

HTTPS

Using HTTPS not only increases your website conversion rate and trustworthiness, but it’s also equally important for technical SEO.

Google announced back in 2014 that using HTTPS will give websites a minor ranking boost. The reason for this was to encourage website owners to make the migration from HTTP to HTTPS ‘to keep everyone safe on the web’.

Indexed Content

Search engines will only rank content that they index. If your content isn’t being correctly indexed, it won’t be ranked.

Make sure that your content is actually being indexed. Go to your search engine and search for “site:yourdomain.com”. If the results display nothing or fewer pages than are available on your site, you might want to confirm that you are not preventing search engines from crawling and indexing your site.

Another thing to do is to check your sitemap to make sure it’s working.

Mobile-First Indexing

Google announced that it will start to roll out mobile-first indexing for web users.

To prepare for this update, switch your current web design to a responsive one so it adapts to all devices. Or you can also design a separate version of your website targeted for mobile users.

Sitemap

A sitemap allows you to list all the pages on your website to give information to search engines about your web content.

If you don’t have a sitemap, you can create one through third party tools. Submit it to search engines or link to it where it could be found and crawled. Make sure it’s automatically updated regularly.

Audit Links from Your Site

Perform regular link auditing on your website. Make sure you cover the following areas:

• Check and remove dead links or broken links to other sites
• Check and ensure that internal links to other pages on your site are properly done
• Redirects should be properly executed by using 301 and 302 redirects
• Identify orphan pages on your site

Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides details about the health of your website. It will inform you about technical issues plaguing your website: issues about crawling, 404 errors, security, mobile usability, etc.

Install this tool and regularly check and follow its advice to guarantee your site’s technical compliance with Google.

Though technical SEO might seem hard, it’s necessary for the success of your website. Keeping your technical SEO up to date and healthy, ensures crawlers can access it and show it to users.

If you need help with your technical SEO, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. SEO is one of our specialties and we’ll make sure you get the personalized attention your site needs!