Technical SEO means the website and server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively. It helps your website improve organic rankings.
Technical SEO Checklist
Search engines give special treatment in search results to websites that display specific technical characteristics. For instance, a secure connection, a responsive design, and fast loading time.
In this article, we have mentioned a checklist of essential steps that will help you to ensure the technical SEO is up to scratch. These guidelines allow you to ensure that the site’s structure and security meet the expectation of search engine algorithms and is reimbursed in search results accordingly.
Mobile-friendly
A ‘responsive’ website design adjusts itself automatically to be navigated and read easily on any device.
Google considers that responsive site is a very significant ranking signal by its algorithms. Google’s introduction of a ‘mobile-first’ approach to indexing content, a responsive website is now more critical than ever.
Ensure that the website is fully responsive and will display in the best format possible for mobile, tablet, or desktop users.
Fix duplicate content issues
Duplicate content can confuse users and, indeed, search engine algorithms. You can also use it to try to manipulate search rankings or win more traffic.
As a result, search engines are not keen on it. Google advises webmasters
to fix any duplicate content issues if they find it.
You can fix duplicate content issues by:
- Preventing your CMS from publishing multiple versions of a page or post. For instance, disable Session IDs that are not vital to your website’s functionality and get rid of your content’s printer-friendly versions.
- Using the canonical link element lets search engines know where the ‘main’ version of your content resides.
Speed your site up
Search engines choose quick loading websites: page speed is an important ranking signal.
There are lots of ways you can speed up your site:
- Use fast hosting.
- Use a fast DNS (‘domain name system’), the provider.
- Minimize the ‘HTTP requests’ keep the use of plugins and scripts to a minimum
- Use one CSS stylesheet (the code which is used to tell a website browser how to display your website) rather than multiple CSS stylesheets or inline CSS
- Make sure that use image files are as small as you can (without being too pixelated)
- Compress the web pages (this can be done using a tool called GZIP)
- Minify your site’s code, remove any line breaks, unnecessary spaces, or indentation in your CSS, HTML, and Javascript (see Google’s Minify Resources for help with this).
Use SSL
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security tactic that creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can easily spot a site using SSL: the URL will be like ‘HTTPS://’ instead of ‘HTTP://.’
In 2014 Google announced that they want to see ‘HTTPS everywhere’ and secure HTTPS website’s preferences over non-secure ones in search results.
So it makes sense to make sure that the site is secure can do this by installing an SSL certificate on your website. However, most top website builders now include SSL by default.
Create an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap file helps search engines understand your website while crawling it. It is like a ‘search roadmap’ of sorts, telling search engines exactly where each page is.
It also has useful information about every page on the site, including:
- When the page was last modified
- What are the priorities of your website?
- How frequently it is updated
Add structured data markup
Structured data markup is code that will add to the website to help search engines better understand its content. That data can help search engines index your website more effectively and provide more relevant results.
Also, structured data improves search results through the addition of ‘rich snippets.’ For instance, use structured data to add star ratings to reviews, prices to products, or reviewer information.
Because they are more visually highlight and appealing immediately useful information to searchers. These enhanced results can improve your click-through rate (CTR) and generate additional traffic to your site. Because sites with products featuring higher CTRs are generally considered to receive preferential treatment in search engines. It is worth making an effort to add structured data to your site.
Consider enabling AMP
AMP is a Google-backed project that aims to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices by using unique code known as AMP HTML.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions of your web pages load incredibly quickly on mobile devices. They do this by removing your content and code down to the bare bones, leaving text, images, and video intact but disabling scripts, comments, and forms.
Because they load so fast, AMP versions of pages are far more likely to be read and shared by your users. Increase dwell time and the number of backlinks pointing to your content, do all the work from an SEO point of view. Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in prominent carousels in search results, giving you a vital search bump.
Register the site with Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools are free tools from Google that allow you to submit the website to their search engines for indexing.
When you launch your website, you have to submit its XML sitemap to both Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console that will crawl your new site and start to show results from it in search results.
It allows you to keep an eye on your site’s general performance from a search engine perspective. You can do the things with tools include:
- Test your website’s mobile usability
- Access search analytics
- View backlinks to your site
- Disclaim spammy links and much more.
