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Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the crawling, indexing, and rendering phase of your website to achieve higher search rankings.
Here are some of the most important topics covered under technical SEO:
โข Crawling
โข Indexing
โข Rendering
โข Mobile
โข Site Structure
โข Site Speed
โข SSL Certificates
โข Image Optimization
10 Actionable Technical SEO Tips
Now that you know the basics of technical SEO, here are 10 tips you can use to improve your siteโs technical SEO and boost your search rankings.
1. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
Letโs start with the most basic technical SEO tip.
One of the major Google algorithm updates in 2015 was to give increased preference to mobile-friendly, responsive websites. In what was termed as โMobilegeddonโ, several top websites were penalized for not adopting a more mobile-friendly web template.
So how do you check the mobile-friendliness of your website? You can use any of the following free tools:
ยท Googleโs Mobile-Friendly Test
ยท HubSpotโs Website Grader
ยท Bingโs Mobile Friendliness Test Tool
ยท GTMetrix
ยท Googleโs Mobile-Friendly Test will determine whether your website meets Googleโs criteria for mobile-optimized website.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test – Technical SEO Tips
HubSpotโs Website Grader and GTMetrix provide deeper insights into what you can do to improve the mobile-friendliness of your website.
2. Create and Optimize Your XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are necessary for Google to find and index your webpages.
Once your sitemap is successfully submitted, follow these tips to optimize your XML Sitemap:
If you block a page in robots.txt, it has no business being in your XML sitemap
Prioritize high-quality pages in your sitemap
3. 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.
That means even if your content is gold standard for that particular topic, your website will rank lower in SERPs than it would if your website had faster load times.
4. Fix Your Site Errors by Running a Weekly Technical Audit
Running a technical audit every week is a must if you want your website to rank well in SERPs on a consistent basis.
5. Optimize Internal Links
An internal link is a hyperlink that points to another page on the same website.
While internal links may not have the same influence on search rankings as external links, they still play a critical role in helping search engines understand the information hierarchy for your website and establishing an SEO-friendly site architecture.
6. Include Your Main Keywords in Image Alt Text
Google canโt see whatโs in an image. Rather it uses metadata such as the image file name and image alt text (alternative text) to determine whatโs in an image.
7. Use Canonical URLs to Avoid 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 on your site.
8. Install an SSL Certificate for Your Website
Google confirmed back in 2014 that SSL certificates aka HTTPS encryptions are now a ranking signal.
9. Check and Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console
Check for crawl errors in Google Search Console once a week and fix them promptly as these are serious technical issues that may hinder the performance of your website and hurt your rankings.
10. Use Google AMP
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. These pages are designed to load super fast on mobile devices.While Google has not made announcement whether implementing AMP is search engine ranking signal, Google has been pushing publishers to use AMP. AMP posts also get highlighted in SERPs as you can see below
To summarize, hereโs the 10-point technical SEO checklist to increase your website traffic:
#1 Optimize your website for mobile devices
#2 Create and Optimize Your XML Sitemap
#3 Boost your websiteโs speed
#4 Fix site errors and warnings with weekly site audits
#5 Optimize internal links
#6 Include your main keywords in image alt text
#7 Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content issues
#8 Install an SSL certificate
#9 Check and fix crawl errors in Google Search Console
#10 Use Google AMP
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