Many people underestimate the importance of technical SEO in a website’s success. If technical SEO is not implemented, your website can face many different problems. You may not get enough traffic or fail to hit the target audience effectively. All the renowned web experts will tell you to work on technical SEO if you want your website to get regular hits and rank higher on search engine platforms. However, this is where most people get confused. Sure, everyone knows about SEO but what is technical SEO? If you don’t know what it is, rest assured we have you covered.
Technical SEO is a form of SEO in which actions are taken to ensure that a website is following all the guidelines set out by search engines. Technical SEO can help you get higher rankings for your website from search engines. There are plenty of technical SEO techniques you can instill in your current module without the help of a third party service provider. However, if you feel they are too technical for you to handle on your own, you can hire a Digital Marketing Company and let them handle the technical optimization of your website.
Now that you know what technical SEO is, here is a comprehensive checklist that you should follow in 2019 to get the most out of your website:
1. Site Speed
Factually speaking, people will never waste their time waiting for a website to load. More often than not, people turn to other websites instead of waiting around for a website to load. So imagine if your website has the same problem, will it get regular visits? Probably not. Which is why you need to make sure your site is not slow. Slow sites do not get ranked effectively by search engines and as a result, they do not gain the traffic that they want to attract.
Google PageSpeed Insights can help you analyze your website’s speed. It will not only tell you the problems with your website but will also suggest solutions. You can use this tool without the help of a third party. Other steps you can take to improve site speed include decreasing server response time and decompressing images. So they very first step you should take to improve your SEO efforts is focusing on the load speed of your site.
2. Mobile-Friendly
The number of mobile searches is far greater than desktop searches now, so if your website isn’t mobile friendly, then it won’t get indexed by search engines. You may have experienced it yourself too when you open a website on your phone and it doesn’t load properly. Half of the website remains hidden and you can’t even scroll properly. When that happens, it means that the site is not optimized for mobile phones. This is exactly why mobile optimization is so important for your search engine rankings.
Rest assured you can easily make your website mobile-friendly. Start by decompressing images so that the site will load faster on smartphones. You should focus on long-tail keywords because the increase in the number of voice searches mean that long-tail keywords are more relevant today than shorter keywords. You can check your site’s mobile-friendliness with the help of few online tools.
3. Crawl Errors
In order to make sure there are no crawl errors in your site. To find crawl errors, you will have to crawl the website yourself. There are plenty of tools available online that can help you crawl your website. Deep Crawl and seoClarity are two of the most used tools for checking crawl errors. Google Search Console can also help you find out crawl errors in your website.
If your website has crawl errors, then search engines will not be able to crawl and index your website, so it is better to remove the errors as soon as possible. Go through all the 4xx and 5xx error pages so you can decide where they should be redirected.
4. Broken Links
Nothing can hurt your website’s reputation like broken links. They will negatively impact your site’s SEO, and all your efforts to rank higher on search engines will go to waste. Before you can fix broken links, you will have to find them. Free online tools such as DrLinkCheck can help you locate broken links on your website.
Once you have gathered a list of all the broken links on your website, you can fix them. There are two basic ways to fix broken links. One is to complete the missing information in the URL to make sure the link work properly. The other method is by redirecting the broken links to actual pages on your website. This way you can direct anyone who attempts to open a broken link to a page instead of them staring an error page on their browser.
5. Analyze URL
URL optimization is essential for your website’s ranking. Google has stated that your site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. So if your website has complex URLs, it won’t impress search engines. You will have to check each and every URL on your website to make sure they are simple and include a hyphen for spacing. Complex URLs confuse crawlers and they fail to index your site properly.
Exclude unnecessary parameters from URLs and make sure that a single item doesn’t have multiple sorting categories. Trim URLs to make them plain and simple. Not only will this be useful for your site’s SEO but it will also make it easier for people to navigate your site.
6. Site StructureSEO however, it will also decide whether or not you will get regular visitors. Your website should be easy to navigate so each time a visitor is on a page; they know exactly where they are and can move to other pages without any difficulty. All the titles on your Top Level Navigation links should be SEO optimized. If website structure is confusing, not only will it turn away traffic but it will also have a negative effect on your SEO.7. Stability
Website stability plays a vital role when it comes to technical SEO. If your website is down most of the time, it will fail to impress search engines and will never obtain a good ranking. It will also turn traffic away from your website. No one has enough time these days to keep refreshing the same page over and over waiting for it to get itself back online. Regularly check your website to make sure it is not down. If the site is facing any server or hosting issues, fix them as quickly as possible, so they don’t damage your ranking.
8. Robot.txt
When Google crawls through your website, there are certain things like images and source files that should not pop-up. Robot.txt files make sure that such files do not show up in Google’s search results. If you are unsure about your website’s Robot.txt files, you can check it with the help of Google Console. Rest assured with the right tools you can easily maintain source files effectively.
9. XML Sitemap
The XML sitemap is a tool that helps Google effectively crawl through your website. It lines up all the important pages that you want Google to crawl through.
If there are pages on your website that you don’t want Google to go through, then you can easily exclude them from the XML sitemap. Examples of these pages include duplicate content and error pages. You can create XML sitemap with the help of any online tool, find the tool which best suits your specifications and use it to your advantage.
You can make your website better this year by following this comprehensive technical SEO checklist. At the end of the day your website performance depends heavily on how well you optimize each aspect of your website for SEO purposes.