Technical SEO is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimization. It doesn’t matter how great your content is; if your site doesn’t resolve technical SEO issues, you won’t rank well in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Not only technical SEO matter for search engine rankings but it also impacts user experience and how a visitor perceives a site.
If a site loads slowly and is not secure, then chances are no visitor will ever visit it again.
That’s why it is important that you should dedicate some time to optimizing your website’s technical aspect too.
So today, we will go over 8 actionable tips you can implement to improve your site’s technical SEO.
8 Tips To Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO
Here are 8 helpful tips to improve the technical aspect of your website.
1. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
In 2015, Google’s algorithm made major changes to prioritize mobile-friendly and responsive websites.
Many top websites were penalized due to the lack of mobile-friendly templates on their websites.
The importance of having a mobile-friendly website has never been greater. Not only do they help in getting better rankings, but they also generate organic traffic.
Statista says more than 58% of web traffic comes from mobile devices since every third person has them. That’s why having a mobile version of your website is as important as a desktop one.
You can use Google’s own mobile-friendly test to check how your site performs on a mobile and what you can do to improve it.
If you want expert help on how to make your site more mobile-friendly, contact Jurisdigital.
2. Make Your XML Sitemap As Efficient As Possible
Sitemaps assist Google in finding and understanding images and videos. As an added benefit, they also assist in indexing your web pages by Google.
The process of creating an XML sitemap is quite straightforward. Using a free plugin such as Yoast or Google XML sitemaps on WordPress, you can easily generate a sitemap.
Once your sitemap has been created, you must submit it to Google Search Console. Following the submission of your XML sitemap, follow these best practices:
- In XML sitemaps, a page that is blocked in robots.txt should not be included
- Ensure that your sitemap prioritizes high-quality pages
- Consider dynamic XML sitemaps if your website contains more than 50,000 URLs
3. Improve The Loading Speed Of Your Website
The speed of your website is important. There is no room for error. Google will penalize your website if it loads slowly.
You’ll rank lower in SERPs, regardless of how good your content is, if your website is slow to load.
The technical SEO aspect of SEO cannot be ignored. The user experience can be seriously affected by a site that takes a long time to load. Here are some steps you can take to make your website faster:
- Upload optimized images on your site. For your blog posts, use compressed formats of images such as JPG. For further compression, you can use a tool such as TinyPNG.
- Make sure the browser cache is enabled. This enables your site to store certain information on visitors’ computers temporarily. By doing so, they do not have to wait for the information to load each time they visit your website.
- Reduce the response time of the server. According to Google, servers should respond within 200 milliseconds.
- Consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Speed up your site using a content delivery network (CDN) such as BunnyCDN or Cloudflare.
4. Use Internal Linking On Your Website
An internal link is a hyperlink that leads to another page on your website.
Even though internal links may influence search rankings differently from external links, they are very important metrics that contribute to establishing an SEO-friendly website architecture.
You can increase the number of links between your website by linking related web pages with several keywords. Remember that external links are also very important, although it is a complicated task, so you should look for help.
5. Check Your Website For Broken Links And Fix Them
The presence of broken links on your website can negatively impact your SEO and the user experience.
The last thing you want is for your site visitors to end up on an error “404 Not Found” page.
This creates a negative first impression, and your website might never be visited again by that person.
You must check your site regularly for broken links and correct them immediately. Broken links can be easily remedied if your site runs on WordPress.
A broken link checker is a free WordPress plugin that automatically scans every 72 hours to detect broken links.
6. Avoid Duplication Of Content By Using Canonical URLs
The first step in improving your website is to remove duplicate content. To scan and resolve duplicate content issues, you should use an SEO tool such as Semrush.
However, there are certain circumstances where duplicate content cannot be avoided. It would help if you use canonical URLs in such cases.
Using canonical URLs is extremely helpful when replicating a blog post across multiple websites.
In particular, they are very useful when hundreds of identical pages exist on a website, such as an eCommerce site.
7. Build An Optimized Site Architecture
There are multiple pages on your website. Search engines should be able to access and crawl these pages easily.
A website’s structure – its information architecture – is critical in this process.
Similar to how a building is designed, your site architecture determines how the pages on your website are organized.
A website that requires many clicks to locate content will take longer for Google to crawl. Consequently, crawling spiders will also take a long time to index your blog pages.
Organize your content so that there is a maximum of a few clicks between the home page and the content you categorize.
Ensure your website has a silo architecture since this will enable Google to index your website more quickly.
Furthermore, it assists search engines in understanding what the content is and how your pages relate to one another.
8. Secure Your Website With An SSL Certificate
SSL certificates, or HTTPS encryption, were confirmed by Google as a ranking factor in a 2014 security update. If you don’t have SSL encryption on your site, you must do it now.
Using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) allows you to prevent online attacks on your website.
The use of this technology reduces the likelihood that any information submitted to your website by a user, like payment detail or contact information, to be compromised.
Following the installation of SSL, it will be necessary to migrate all non-SSL pages (HTTP) to SSL pages (HTTPS).
Regarding ranking improvements, it is a challenging task but worth the effort.
Conclusion
Implementing technical SEO strategies can significantly increase your website’s visibility and traffic.
Providing a positive user experience and optimizing your site for search engines can help you improve your rankings.
With the tips outlined in this article, you can quickly improve your site’s technical SEO and get positive results.
