When it comes to technical SEO, it goes beyond just optimizing content for your site. This is not about writing good and unique content for on-page or getting brand mentions for off-page. It could be defined as measures taken to improve the technical aspects of a website. These are primarily server and site optimizations that can enable search engine spiders to index and crawl your site more effectively. The main goal of technical SEO is to boost organic rankings. Let’s look at some of the things you need to do to effectively implement technical SEO.
Technical SEO Explained Further
It will amaze you to learn that search engines rank certain sites higher than others simply because of their technical features. So, what exactly do you need to do to enhance the technical SEO of your site? The following guidelines will boost the security and structure of your website, helping it satisfy the requirements of search engines and bringing about better rankings in search results.
Use SSL
SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer. This security technology is for setting up an encryption link between browsers and web servers. It is very easy to know a website that uses SSL. Such websites begin with ‘HTTPS://’. On the other hand, websites that begin with ‘HTTP://’ don’t employ SSL technology.
Google announced in 2014 that all websites should adopt the SSL technology because their algorithm was going to give such websites preference over sites that don’t use SSL regarding search results. Therefore, it will not be out of place for you to take extra steps to ensure your website is as secure as possible. Deploying the SSL technology on your site is not difficult. All you need is to install an SSL certificate on the website. You may not need to bother about SSL though if you are using any of the recent site builders. The SSL feature is already enabled on such sites.
A Mobile-Friendly Site Is Necessary for Technical SEO
Building a website that is not responsive in this day and time can be likened to someone shooting himself in the foot. Responsive sites are designed so they can adjust and render themselves on any device automatically. In other words, you can view such sites on any device.
Google has stated it clearly that site responsiveness is one of the parameters the algorithm is looking for when it wants to rank a website. On top of that, a responsive website has now become a necessity, given the 2019 introduction of the mobile-first approach by Google. Therefore, when you are designing your site, ensure it will render beautifully on all devices, including mobile, desktop, and tablets.
Speed Your Site Up
Search engines are always friendly with websites that load up pretty quickly. Unfortunately, one important ranking factor that is often ignored by many people is page speed. There are various measures you can take to increase your site’s page speed. These tips below can help;
- Use a fast host.
- Use a fast DNS provider.
- Reduce the use of HTTP Requests to the barest minimum. Only use plugins and scripts when necessary.
- Avoid using multiple stylesheets or inline CSS. A single CSS stylesheet should be good enough.
- Compressed images are better off than when you use them like that.
- Employ any tool to compress your site’s pages.
- Minify your website’s code. Get rid of anything that is not necessary for your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML codes.
Duplicate Content Issues Should Be Fixed
Duplicate content does not only confuse the people that are trying to process the information on your website. But, they are also confusing the search engine algorithms. Some people try to use it to get more traffic or for manipulating search rankings. That’s the reason search engines do not pay too much attention to duplicate content.
Fixing duplicate content problems can be done in any of two ways. One, prevent your content management system from publishing more than one version of a particular post or page. Two, use the canonical link to point the search engines to where the original version of your content is kept.
Create XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps are files that make it fairly easy for search engines to crawl your website. The concept of a sitemap is very close to that of a roadmap. It tells the search engine where every single page is. Such a file is also meant to contain useful information about your website. Some of such information include:
- The last time a page was modified
- The priority of the page on your website
- How it is frequently updated
On some platforms, the XML site is automatically created. But on some other platforms, a sitemap generator will be necessary to build.
Enable AMP for Technical SEO
This is one of the Google-backed projects; it’s designed to speed up content delivery on mobile devices via the use of AMP HTML – a special kind of code. Web pages in their AMP formats tend to load up much faster on mobile devices. The way they work is that they strip code and content to only what is necessary. Other additional items like comments, forms, and scripts are disabled while videos, images, and texts are left untouched.
Due to their quick loading time, AMP websites tend to appeal more to website users. Users spend more time on such sites and are more likely to share the content than they would have done for non-AMP websites. So, you see that this can increase user engagement and user experience.
Adding SEO Structured Data Markup to your site can help
The job of structured data markup is to enable the search engines better understand the type of content you have on your website. The code will assist Google in indexing your site most effectively. They also enhance search results.
Conclusion
While technical SEO may not be as technically inclined as you may think, it is completely different from on-page and off-page SEOs. The tips described above will help you improve the technical SEO of your website.