Technical SEO is everything you do to make it easier for search engines to find your website. Technical issues can prevent your site from ranking and getting organic traffic.
Fix Crawl Errors:
Crawl errors are those preventing Google from viewing your content. You can find them using the Coverage report in Google Search Console.
Fix all the errors you find in this report and monitor Search Console to fix new issues as they come up.
Fix Broken Links:
Broken links on your site send a bad signal to Google.
A site with a lot of broken backlinks is probably not up-to-date and unlikely to provide a valuable answer to searchers.
You should try to avoid having broken links on your site. To find broken links, you can use Screaming Frog or ahrefs.
Switch to HTTPS:
In an effort to make the web “safer” for users, Google has made a push for more websites to use HTTPS.
So you might see a small ranking boost by switching from HTTP to HTTPS.
ProTip: if you’re starting a new site, you should use HTTPS right away and save yourself the trouble of switching later on.
Make Sure Your Site Doesn’t Have Duplicate Content:
Duplicate content issues happen when two or more URLs on your site are identical or very similar.
This can dilute the SEO value of your content among several URLs.
Use 301 redirects, canonical tags or use Google Search Console to fix any duplicate content that might be indexing and penalizing your site.
Fix Any Missing or Duplicate Meta Tags:
Missing or duplicate meta tags (title and meta description) can hurt your site. Screaming Frog is my favourite tool to find these:
Once you’ve identified the URLs with issues, just head over to Yoast (if you’re using WordPress) and fix them.
Fix Bad Redirects:
There are 2 common issues with redirects:
Common issue #1: 302s that should be 301s
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and passes almost all SEO value from the old page to the new one. This is a good redirect.
A 302 is a temporary redirect. It’s used for site maintenance or time-specific promotions. The SEO value of the redirected page is not passed to the new destination.
Use Screaming Frog to crawl your site and find 302 redirects:
Replace (almost all) 302 redirects with 301 redirects.
Common issue #2: redirect chains
The more redirects Google has to go through to find a URL, the less value is passed from the original URL.
A redirect chain might look like:
Instead of having to pass through the website . com/page-2, it’s better to just do this in one step:
1. website. com/page-1 redirects to www.yourwebsite . com/page-3
Use Screaming Frog’s redirect chain report to find these:
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly:
As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches.
Plus, Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile (not the desktop) version of your site to crawl and index it.
They are basically saying: “if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank highly on Google”. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check your site:
If you’re using a CMS, use or switch to a responsive theme.
Speed Up Your Site:
Search engines value sites that provide a good user experience and the speed of your site is a huge factor.
A slow loading site will increase your bounce rate, as visitors lose patience and leave. Many tools offer speed tests along with suggestions on how to make your site faster.
ProTip: It’s super easy to get caught up in trying to fix all of these speed issues and getting a perfect score. DON’T do this—in general, try to fix the ones you can easily fix in a day or less, and then move on.
Create an XML Sitemap and Submit it to Google Search Console:
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all the pages that you want to be indexed.
You can use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap to Google:
Plus, if you’re using Yoast SEO, the plugin will take care of your sitemap and update it automatically.
If you’re not using Yoast, you can crawl your site with Screaming Frog and use it to generate a sitemap.
Create a robots.txt File:
Together with your XML sitemap, a robots.txt file will establish what activities crawlers are permitted to perform in relation to each page on your site.
Including one in the top-level directory allows you to control the way that a search engine crawls and indexes your site.
For example, you can block Google from crawling your WordPress login URL:
These directions can be specified for different types of crawlers, allowing you to establish different protocols for different search engines.
Fix Crawl Errors:
Crawl errors are those preventing Google from viewing your content. You can find them using the Coverage report in Google Search Console.
Fix Broken Links:
Broken links on your site send a bad signal to Google.
A site with a lot of broken backlinks is probably not up-to-date and unlikely to provide a valuable answer to searchers.
You should try to avoid having broken links on your site. To find broken links, you can use Screaming Frog or ahrefs.
Switch to HTTPS:
In an effort to make the web “safer” for users, Google has made a push for more websites to use HTTPS.
So you might see a small ranking boost by switching from HTTP to HTTPS.
ProTip: if you’re starting a new site, you should use HTTPS right away and save yourself the trouble of switching later on.
Make Sure Your Site Doesn’t Have Duplicate Content:
Duplicate content issues happen when two or more URLs on your site are identical or very similar.
This can dilute the SEO value of your content among several URLs.
Use 301 redirects, canonical tags or use Google Search Console to fix any duplicate content that might be indexing and penalizing your site.
Fix Any Missing or Duplicate Meta Tags:
Missing or duplicate meta tags (title and meta description) can hurt your site. Screaming Frog is my favourite tool to find these:
Fix Bad Redirects:
There are 2 common issues with redirects:
Common issue #1: 302s that should be 301s
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and passes almost all SEO value from the old page to the new one. This is a good redirect.
A 302 is a temporary redirect. It’s used for site maintenance or time-specific promotions. The SEO value of the redirected page is not passed to the new destination.
Use Screaming Frog to crawl your site and find 302 redirects:
Replace (almost all) 302 redirects with 301 redirects.
Common issue #2: redirect chains
The more redirects Google has to go through to find a URL, the less value is passed from the original URL.
A redirect chain might look like:
- website . com/page-1 redirects to the website . com/page-2
- website . com/page-2 redirects to the website . com/page-3
Instead of having to pass through the website . com/page-2, it’s better to just do this in one step:
1. website. com/page-1 redirects to www.yourwebsite . com/page-3
Use Screaming Frog’s redirect chain report to find these:
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly:
As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches.
Plus, Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile (not the desktop) version of your site to crawl and index it.
They are basically saying: “if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank highly on Google”. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check your site:
If you’re using a CMS, use or switch to a responsive theme.
Speed Up Your Site:
Search engines value sites that provide a good user experience and the speed of your site is a huge factor.
A slow loading site will increase your bounce rate, as visitors lose patience and leave. Many tools offer speed tests along with suggestions on how to make your site faster.
ProTip: It’s super easy to get caught up in trying to fix all of these speed issues and getting a perfect score. DON’T do this—in general, try to fix the ones you can easily fix in a day or less, and then move on.
Create an XML Sitemap and Submit it to Google Search Console:
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all the pages that you want to be indexed.
You can use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap to Google:
Plus, if you’re using Yoast SEO, the plugin will take care of your sitemap and update it automatically.
If you’re not using Yoast, you can crawl your site with Screaming Frog and use it to generate a sitemap.
Create a robots.txt File:
Together with your XML sitemap, a robots.txt file will establish what activities crawlers are permitted to perform in relation to each page on your site.
Including one in the top-level directory allows you to control the way that a search engine crawls and indexes your site.
For example, you can block Google from crawling your WordPress login URL:
These directions can be specified for different types of crawlers, allowing you to establish different protocols for different search engines.
Comments
Post a Comment