SEO, or search engine optimization is a critical component of every online marketing strategy. It’s often easy to overlook how important SEO can be in the grand scheme of marketing and creating and maintaining an online presence, but there are some great ways to get started with SEO and become more knowledgeable about it. An excellent place to start is with technical SEO smart tips, easy tricks & amazing tools.
Technical SEO is one of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimization. You may have the most incredible piece of content for a popular topic in your niche, but if your site has unresolved technical SEO issues, you’ll struggle to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).
As a result, it’s really important that you spend some time optimizing the technical SEO of your website.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website in order to achieve better search rankings. It involves making changes to your website’s code, tags, and content in order to increase how it is crawled, indexed, and rendered by Google.
The team at Yoast summarizes this concept well:
In the most basic terms, technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website to make it more accessible to search engines and crawlers. It is a broad field that covers a wide range of topics:
- Sitemap optimization
- Crawling issues and crawl budget optimization
- Indexing issues
- Mobile-friendly UI/UX
- Site Speed
- Site Structure
- SSL Certification
- Image SEO
- URL Optimization
10 Technical SEO Tips
Now that you know the basics of technical SEO, here are 10 tips you can use to improve your site’s technical SEO and boost your search rankings.
- Mobile Friendliness:
In 2015, Google made a major update to its algorithm that gave preference to mobile-friendly, responsive websites. The update was called “Mobilegeddon” and it penalized several top websites for not adopting the more mobile-friendly web template.
Fast forward to the present day, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever.
So how do you check the mobile-friendliness of your website?
You can use any of the following free tools:
- Google Mobile Friendly Test
- GTMetrix
- Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will determine whether your website meets Google’s criteria for a mobile-optimized website. GTMetrix provide deeper insights into what you can do to improve the mobile-friendliness of your site.
Keep an eye out for our WordPress Page Speed Optimization Guide.
- Create and Optimize XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are necessary for Google to find and index your webpages.
It’s easy to create an XML sitemap if you’re a WordPress user. Free WordPress plugins, such as Yoast or Google XML Sitemaps, can generate it for you.
Once you’ve created the sitemap, submit it to Google via Google Search Console.
To do this, login to your Google Search Console account and navigate to Sitemaps -> Add a new sitemap and then hit “Submit.”
Once your sitemap is successfully submitted, follow these XML sitemap best practices:
- If you block a page in robots.txt, it has no business being in your XML sitemap
- Prioritize high-quality pages in your sitemap
- If you’ve got a big site with over 50,000 URLs, use dynamic XML sitemaps
- Speed up your website
Site speed matters. Make no mistake: if your site is slow and takes a long time to respond, Google will place a small penalty on your website. This means even if your content is the gold standard for that particular topic, your website will rank lower in SERPs than it would if your website had faster load times.
This is a technical SEO aspect that you simply can’t afford to ignore.
You can use following free tools to test your website:
- GT Metrix
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Pingdom
If your site is taking a long time to load, it can seriously impact user experience.
Following steps can be taken to speed your website:
- Optimize your Images
- Enable Browser Cache
- Enable Compression
- Reduce Server Response Time
- Fix Your Site Errors by Performing Regular Technical SEO Audit
You need to fix your on-page SEO issues by running a weekly technical SEO audit if you’d like to rank higher in SERPs on a consistent basis.
So how to perform a technical SEO audit?
There are several tools that can help you do this.
These include: Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
However, I’d highly recommend Semrush as it is considered the industry gold standard and offers a comprehensive view of the technical aspects of your website.
Semrush will scan your website for errors, warnings, and issues so you can fix them before they get out of control. Recommendations include improving page load speed, fixing broken links, adding missing meta tags to improve your SEO visibility, and more.
- Optimize Internal Links
An internal link is a hyperlink that points to another page on the same website.
Internal links may not have as much influence on search rankings as external links, but they still play a critical role in helping search engines understand the information hierarchy for your website and establishing an SEO-friendly site architecture.
So how can you optimize your internal links? Moz recommends using descriptive keywords in anchor text that give a sense of the keywords the source page is trying to target.
- Include your main keyword in Image ALT Tag
Google can’t see what’s in an image. Rather, it uses metadata such as the image file name and alternative text to determine what’s in an image.
Alt text is an HTML code that describes the appearance and function of an image on a web page.
The most common way to approach alt text is to make it descriptive and include the main keywords that you’re trying to rank for. However, you also want to avoid stuffing it with too many keywords.
- Use of Canonical URLs to eradicate Duplicate Content Issues
Your first priority should always be to delete the duplicate content on your site. Once again, use an SEO tool like Semrush to scan and fix duplicate content issues.
There are cases when duplicate content cannot be avoided. In such instances, use canonical URLs to avoid search engine penalties.
Canonical URLs are handy when you’re replicating a blog post from one website to the other. They are especially useful if you’re running an eCommerce website with hundreds of identical pages.
So in order to avoid content duplication and a Google penalty, set up a canonical URL using the rel-canonical tag. You can add the rel-canonical tag via Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.
- Install an SSL Certificate for your Website
Google confirmed in 2014 that HTTPS encryptions are now a ranking signal. So if you’ve been thinking of getting an SSL certificate, now is the time to upgrade for your website’s security and SEO.
I recommend SSL certificates from Namecheap if you’re looking at cheap, yet effective SSL implementation.
- Check and Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console
Check your site for crawl errors in Google Search Console once a week and fix them promptly. These are serious technical issues that may hinder the performance of your website and hurt your rankings.
While you’re at it, check your robots.txt file as well to make sure you’re not blocking pages that shouldn’t be blocked.
- Fix Broken Links
Broken links are bad for SEO and the user experience.
You wouldn’t want any of your readers to land on a “404 Not Found” page. That just creates a bad first impression and the user may never return to your site again.
Broken links can ruin your website’s usability and SEO efforts, as users will click on a link expecting it to lead them to another page or article but instead receive an error message. This is why you must check for broken links regularly and fix them as soon as possible.
Conclusion:
After reading this article, I hope you’ve learned some new ways to improve your search engine optimization game. Remember that SEO is an ongoing process, so don’t become complacent! Constantly be on the lookout for new tools and strategies that will help you to better optimize your website.
Looking to optimize your website at the technical level, Contact AI Advertisment for best-in-class technical situations for your SEO.
Related Articles:
Why Local SEO is important for SMBs?
How to write the best SEO optimized titles according to Google
Top 10 SEO Metrics You Should Pay Attention To (And 4 That Are a Complete Waste)
Latest SEO Techniques According To Top SEO Experts.