20+ Actionable Technical SEO tips
SEO plays an important part in making your website more visible and driving more traffic to it. It impacts your rankings in the Google SERPs. The more effective your SEO efforts the higher your website will be able to rank.
Optimising your website to enable the search engines to crawl and index it properly is called Technical SEO.
These are a few technical SEO tips:
1. Most of the traffic comes from mobile devices so you should make your website mobile friendly. Take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check the mobile-friendliness of your website. Use a responsive website design as it makes your website compatible with all the devices.
2. Most of the users expect the website to load within 3 seconds. Your website should load faster to offer a better user experience. Use GTMetrics, Pingdom and Google’s Page Speed Insights to check your website’s load and response times. You can reduce your file size, compress images, enable browser caching to improve your loading speed.
3. You should keep your website error free. You should fix broken links, missing pages and other site errors. There are many tools available like Website Auditor, Screaming Frog that help to identify and resolve site errors.
4. Internal links help the crawlers to discover your content, redirect users to related content on other pages in your website, help to develop an informational hierarchy of your website, help to clarify the focus of your content and keep visitors longer on your site. You should build internal links whenever you publish new content. You should use descriptive keywords as anchor text to describe the page you are linking to.
5. Use ALT text for all your images as Google cannot read images. When you add ALT text the visitors will see the text and not any error sign if the image fails to load. Use descriptive phrases for your images.
6. Make your website secure with a SSL certification. This helps to build trust with the audience and also makes customer information safe. A secure website pairs securely with the servers and the customer information cannot be hacked.
7. Use robots.txt file to tell Google which pages to index. Use ‘disallow’, ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ options to give clear instructions to the search engine.
8. XML Sitemap shows the search engines what is there on your website and how it is organised. Use Screaming Frog to build your XML Sitemap. For WordPress sites you can use Yoast SEO to create a XML Sitemap. Some of the platforms like Shopify create a XML Sitemap automatically. You should create an XML Sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console manually.
9. Write good Page Titles as they show up in Google. Write compelling page titles and include targeted keywords in them. Use unique title tags for every landing page on your website. If two pages have the same title tags then Google will not know which page to rank first.
10. Write interesting meta descriptions. Meta descriptions should be 155 characters long to avoid being truncated. Meta descriptions should have the focus keyword.
11. Use short page URLs in lowercase letters and use hyphens to separate the words. URLs with symbols and dates are not considered SEO friendly. The more readable your URLs are the better they will perform. Write descriptive URLs that will tell the people what the page is about. Use targeted keywords in the URLs.
12. If you have the same content on two or more pages then Google may penalise you. You should avoid duplicate content. Use SEO tools like Serpstat or SEMRush to identify duplicate content pages. If you cannot avoid duplicate content then use canonical URLs to point to the primary page.
13. Backlinks from websites with low domain authority can harm your site. Backlinks from spammy websites can incur a Google penalty. You should identify all harmful backlinks and contact their site owners to remove them. If it does not work then you can disavow them through Google.
14. It is important to use the focus keyword throughout the body copy and on-page titles. The H1 in the page or blog is the main title and it should have the focus keyword in it. It is important to use the focus keyword throughout the body copy. Using the focus keyword and variations consistently (where it makes sense) will help your page rank higher overtime.
15. Use breadcrumbs navigation to provide internal links to your categories and subpages on your website.
16. Optimise your site based on Core Web Vitals. The page experience Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Use tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights to measure these metrics.
17. Site structure is how your pages of your website are organised. Use a flat site structure to make it easy for search engines to crawl all your site pages. Site structure should be suitable for search engines as well as users.
18. Create HTML Sitemap to help the search engine spiders and robots to find the pages on your website. A site map helps to improve the visibility of the URLs.
19. For international websites use the HREFLANG attribute. It informs the search engine that the sections of your website are for different countries and languages.
20. Use Schema Markup to give visibility to your pages in SERP as rich snippets. It will also help the search engine to better understand your content. Schema Markup can be added to your HTML to boost your rankings.
21. If you have redesigned or migrated your website then you should redirect all the old URLs to the new URL. If it is not done then it will lead to broken links and this will lead to poor user experience. It will also lead to dip in ranking and traffic if URLs have been changed but redirection from old URL to new URLs not set.
22. Use Google Analytics to get complete data analysis of your users. You can track session time, bounce rate, traffic, behaviours, demographic, geographic, age, gender and location of your audience coming to your site.
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