One of the main steps in the entire SEO process is technical SEO. When your technical SEO is perfect, then the SEO efforts yield good results, and if it has some issues, it fails. Technical SEO indicates the process of website optimization to the crawl and index phase. Using technical SEO, a search engine can crawl, access, index, and interpret your website without having any issues. The term ‘technical’ is used as it is not based on website content or promotion. Its main goal is website infrastructure optimization. As technical SEO is vital to drive your business, SEO companies in Delhi provide a complete internet marketing service.
Technical SEO is vital for the following reasons:
- It can create or break your organic rankings.
- Improves the website infrastructure to increase its ranks
- Make the website easy to crawl.
- Make it easy for search engines.
Technical SEO has a significant role in your website rankings. The technical SEO checklist can easily handle it in place.
- Identify Crawl Errors – Crawling specifies the process where a search engine cannot find a specific page. A ‘Crawl Error’ indicates that a search engine cannot see a web page on your site. This is not a good sign, as your website would lose rank. As a website owner, you should ensure that it does not happen. Your goal must be to guarantee that search engines can find all the web pages of your website. Google divides the crawl errors into two sets:
- Site Errors – This would mean the entire website cannot be found. This would be an alarming situation for your business.
- URL Errors – This would relate to one specific URL; these errors can be fixed easily.
Here are a few ways to check your website can be crawled and indexed:
- Check that you are not blocking search engines from crawling your webpage.
- Check that you do not have orphan pages.
- Check that your webpage is available in sitemap.xml. This would enable search engines to discover the webpage.
- Check that your webpage does not have a no-index tag.
- Mobile-friendly Website – Creating a mobile-friendly website is essential when your site displays on a small device. It gets displayed as a small version of your website. Your website should be optimized to mobile as well to rank better. So, have a check that your website is mobile-friendly. In Google, you can check whether your website is mobile-friendly using the options Google’s Mobile-friendly Test.
- Find Any Broken Links And Fix It – Keeping broken links is not a good sign, affecting SEO rank. Broken links have the following harm on your website:
- Create a bad user experience
- Diminish your SEO efforts
To avoid broken links, ensure that you keep checking for them regularly on your entire website. Many tools exist to find broken links like Google Analytics, Xenu, etc.
- Secure Your Websites Using HTTPS – HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a protocol for internet communication. It ensures data integrity and security. All online users want a safe experience when they are online. HTTPS protects the user’s connection. Hence, ensure that your website is secured through HTTPS.
- Check The Loading Speed Of Your Website – This is an essential technical SEO checklist. The ideal load time for a website is two to four seconds. But, after every two seconds, the bounce rates would be higher. So, ensure that your site loads faster. You can even check the load time using the following tools:
- Page Speed Insights
- Google Page Speed Online
- Site Performance tool from site-perf.com
- Website optimization from websiteoptimisation.com, etc
- Ensure That Only One Version Of A Web Page Is Available On Website – When the same page is repeated, it ends up in duplicate content. When there is duplicate content on your website, and when the search engine encounters it, there is confusion about which version of the page is ranked and indexed. Finally, the search engine would pick one and send it. There are many ways to avoid duplicate content. Few ideas are listed below:
- Make use of a canonical tag to recommend Google the preferred page.
- Make use of 301 redirects. This is used to redirect web pages to the preferred page version.
- Ensure that you make use of only a www or non-www version. Not to make use of both. When both are used, it duplicates the entire website.
- Mixed case URLs are duplicate content, so make use of lower-case URLs.
- Preferred Domain – When you set your website, the preferred domain should be clear. This informs the search engines about your domain. For example, a site can be accessed either using www or not before your website address. For instance, if your domain is abc.com, you can access it using http://www.abc.com or http://abc.com. Users would find it easy, but search engines take it as two different websites. Hence, indexing issues and duplicate issues might occur, thereby losing rank. To avoid this, set the preferred domain and inform search engines the same.
- Optimize URL Structure – Yet another technical SEO checklist is URL structure optimization. It indicates the URL format. For the best SEO, the following URL structure would be useful:
- Make use of the lower-case characters for your URL.
- Make use of the symbol ‘-‘ if there is more than one word in the URL.
- Make the name short.
- Do not use unwanted characters.
- Include target keywords in your URL
- Structure Of Website And Its Navigation – A website structure is an essential factor. Uses tend to stay longer on a website to get what they want. Hence website owners should ensure smooth navigation and website structure to enhance their SEO.
- Implement Structured Data Mark-up – Using structured data on your web pages is gaining more importance and is used by Google. It is a code in your web pages that the search engine crawlers can see and know the content context. In short, it describes the data in a language that the search engines understand. This is important to technical SEO as you need to define code on your website to place it right. This data is added once for your website and helps your website be listed on the search engine rank.
- Canonical URL – This URL tells Google what page version to consider when your website is indexed. This is a technical solution for any duplicate content. It also helps search engines to point to the original version. To detect canonical URL, it is visible in the webpage source when you search for rel=’canonical’. This element is visible only to the search engine and not reflected by the users.
- Optimize 404 Page – When the URL entered is not available, a 404-page error is displayed. The page would have been deleted, wrongly typed, or the URL changed. A check should be done to optimize a 404-page.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is an essential part of website optimization. The checklist mentioned above would be useful for your website to get a better search rank.
