We all know the importance of good content for SERPs, but this is not enough without a good base. Technical SEO is the mode of enhancing the substructure of a site from the beginning to allow the search engines to index and crawl it correctly. Technical SEO doesn’t directly deal with website content, but deal with its elements and setup such as page speed, structured data, and XML sitemaps.
Good technical SEO lays the grounds for ongoing SEO. And with better search results visibility, your site will profit from targeted traffic from the search engines that may be converted into sales. In the following, we will take a look at some of the technical phases of SEO.
Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
This requires figuring out if there is any problem that hinders your website performance when a search engine crawls in. A Technical SEO audit allows you to know the possible opportunities to enhance website performance. One of the best ways to do this is to design a guide of all the technical issues and then resolve them.
The technical SEO audit contains deciphering multiple H1, duplicate content, internal linking errors, URL structure, search robot blockage, page speed, and more. Luckily, a lot of tools can help you conduct this technical SEO audit. These tools can help you find out the errors and fix them.
XML Sitemap
The XML Sitemap has all the URLs of all your website pages and displays the structure of your website to all search engines, including Google. XML sitemap informs the search engine about the structure of your website and what it’s about. With this feature, you can easily find a page that would otherwise be difficult to find.
Make sure your XML file is updated and has all the important pages of your website. You can utilize Content Management System to create these XML files. Moreover, you can write your own code, and if you can’t, seek the help of SEO Expert Hobart.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization can no longer be ignored because most consumers now use mobile devices to a great extent more than they use desktops. If your website is not mobile-friendly, then you are not doing something right. Your web visitors should be able to easily use your website effortlessly from their mobile devices. And this will, in turn, help you increase your website conversion rate.
Ensure your website is properly working on all mobile devices. There are a lot of tools you can use to check your website mobile-friendliness, and one of them includes Google is Mobile-Friendly Test. With this tool, you can enter your site to check if there is an issue.
Robots.txt File
This file will inform the search engine about pages of the website to crawl into and those not to be crawled into. It is important to consider this file because the whole website may have been impeded. This usually occurs during the website development stage, and when it comes live, most web site owners forget to update the robots.txt file, and as a result, the website’s new pages are not crawled and indexed by the search engine.
Make sure you check this file often to ensure it is revised for the new changes you make to your website. Whenever you want to check if your website is working properly, this file should always be the first factor to consider.
Duplicate Content
One of the things search engines dislike is duplicate content. You can find duplicate contents on both off-site and on-site. If your website has a greater number of duplicate contents, you will be penalized by the search engine. Facets are one of the common types of duplicate content. If you want to avoid this form of duplicate content, it is important you differentiate the pages using a meta description, heading tags, and title for the pages.
You need to ensure your page content is unique. Most importantly, you need to consistently update your content to make sure they are unique. One of the best ways to eradicate content in the URL is to create a canonical URL.
Speed
The speed of the website or page is known as the time is taken for your website to load the content of its page. Studies show that 47 percent of internet users expect a page to load in two seconds or less, and out of which 40 percent of internet users say that will leave the site if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Speed is a factor that is highly ranked by Google. So, you need a fast loading website to get better ranking in the search engines. One of the best tools to use to find out if your website has any problem with your website loading is Google’s Page Insights.