Technical SEO is one of those terms that can create anxiety, especially if it pops up at a job interview or out of your boss’ mouth. It’s the word “technical” that can throw your mind into a downward spiral especially if you’re more on the creative side of SEO.
But fear not, technical SEO is the foundation that will give your content the best fighting chance to find its way up the rankings. If you want to have the best odds in the SEO game, technical SEO should be considered along with all of the content rules you’re so religiously following. Here’s everything you need to know about technical SEO, in layman’s terms.
Heed the Need for Speed
Slow websites not only turn off visitors, they also are a ranking factor. “Time-to-first-byte” (TTFB) is directly related to rankings. It’s the amount of time it takes for your site to load once someone clicks your link in a search. Since most people desert at just three seconds, even if you still rank despite a slow loading site, the user won’t wait around to find out why Google has ranked you at the top.
Slow sites are a major cause for “pogo-sticking,” when people use the back button to get back to their search results when they don’t like what they found. The more this happens, the lower your ranking will drop. And to add insult to injury your competitors will rise. To avoid these issues, test your page using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and make sure you score at least an 80. You can also use GTmetrix to find out just what is causing issues so you know what to fix to repair damage to your ranking.
Speed Tips
If you do have speed issues try these common quick fixes:
- Compress image files for image optimization
- Use vector images when possible
- Combine images into sprites when possible
Be Mobile Friendly
Mobile-friendliness is very important to Google. If you haven’t designed your site to be responsive or to be mobile friendly fix it right away. As soon as you do your rankings will begin to improve.
The only way to be sure your site is mobile friendly is to use, you guessed it, Google’s mobile-friendly checker tool.
If you haven’t set your site up to be mobile-friendly there are three ways to fix it:
- Responsive design: This allows your site to adapt to the device being used.
- A desktop and mobile URL: With the introduction of responsive design this has become less common. It is a lot of work, as you have twice as many web pages to manage and there is also more than one-page size to worry about.
- Serve different content based on the device: You can set your site up to check for mobile use and then choose which pages to show them. If they aren’t on a mobile device visitors will see a default page. This has an added benefit as it creates backlinks which will improve your ranking.
Avoid Common Mobile Design Mistakes
There’s more to being mobile-friendly. You have to make sure you are avoiding common design mistakes that will negatively affect your website including:
- Flash video: Avoid flash videos and opt for HTML5 videos instead.
- Bad redirects: Send mobile users to the page that best matches their search instead of redirecting them to the home page.
- 404s: Make sure dynamic URLs are not sending 404 messages to mobile users.
- Interstitials and pop-ups: These are annoying at the best of times, but even worse on mobiles where it can be impossible to close them.
- Wrong cross-links: Make sure all of your links go to a mobile page, not suddenly defaulting to a desktop version.
- Slow load: As already mentioned, slow loads mean people will leave. Because mobile connections are already slow to begin with, you can’t take a risk of loads slower than a few seconds.
Strong Site Architecture
Google uses spiders to suss out sites and keep pages updated. The simpler your architecture, the easier it is to keep your pages indexed. This means faster and higher rankings. To make your site more “crawlable” use these four components:
1. Create HTML and XML sitemaps so you appeal to humans and spiders. HTML sitemaps can be views by visitors and spiders. They do not have to be prominent. An XML sitemap is for spider eyes only. Use these instructions as there are several steps involved in creating your map and submitting it to Google. Make sure to add sitemap locations to your robots.txt file so spiders know where to check.
2. Silo content by breaking it into different categories. This allows spiders to land on a page in your site and easily navigate from a category to all the recent posts related to that category page. This becomes a challenge for sites with tons of content or ecommerce sites with tons of products. The key is to make it easy for content to be accessed with just a few clicks.
3. Avoid issues on your site that will stop spiders from doing their job. Crawl errors can be searched using Google’s Search Console under “Crawl > Crawl errors”. This will provide an overview of issues which can be corrected. Some common errors might include general site errors, server errors, domain name system errors and failure to retrieve your robots.txt file.
Page Redirects
Most sites require redirects at some point. Here are some potential issues with redirects and how to resolve them:
301 and 302
The most common redirects would be temporary (302) or permanent (301). Redirects can cause issues for search engines when not handled properly.
For permanent moves, search engines will automatically apply any acquired authority from the old page to the new page. In the case of a temporary redirect, search engines see that the page is temporary and therefore won’t use the same authority as it did for the original page.
This is a problem for temporary pages as it can lead to a loss of traffic. Therefore you should always use the 301 permanent redirect unless you have a good reason not to.
404
The good old “page not found message.” It’s a good idea to create a customized page for all of your 404 errors. Sending people to a creative, fun page will help avoid people feeling lost and simply going back to the search page.
404s most commonly occur when you forget to do a 301 redirect, if you move a page or if you have completely deleted a page. It is important to keep track of any external and internal links on your site so you can make sure you know if the page is deleted, it can receive the proper redirect or customized 404 page.
Once again your trusty Search Console Crawl errors can help you search your not found pages. You can click the URLs and determine what has to be done to fix those links. However, you could also have links coming from other sites, so Ahrefs will help you find those broken links. This tool allows you to enter your site and check “Inbound Links” on the menu to find the “Broken Backlinks.”
Bad Content
Make sure your site only contains strong, useful content. Do an audit and look for weak or duplicate content that can ruin your ranking. Duplicate content can not only mean missed traffic but also lead to penalties from Google.
You can avoid duplicate content by first finding it using your trusty Google Search Console under “Search appearance > HTML improvements.” You can then:
- Delete duplicates OR
- Add canonical URLs to let Google know you are aware of the duplicates and show them the preferred version.
Use Structured Data
Structured data isn’t new. It uses “schema” to describe content to search engines in things such as rich snippets.
Schema terms can be added to existing HTML code using Google’s markup helper. Highlight text on the page, and then you will see a menu with attributes to describe the text. You can copy and paste the changes or use the download button to get all the code.