Anyone with a website is at the mercy of search engines, especially Google which has over 90% of search traffic worldwide.
While you’ve probably heard how important keywords and backlinks are, there is another side to SEO and that’s technical SEO. You need to get a handle on this to give your site the best chance of ranking highly in the results.
What is technical SEO?
This aspect of SEO focuses on certain aspects of your website and servers which allow search engines to crawl your site in a more efficient way, and so improve your rankings.
The Google algorithm ranks websites with certain characteristics higher than others.
Technical SEO priorities
In order to meet the technical specifications of the search engines, these are the most important factors to get considered.
Apply an SSL
Security is an important consideration. You can tell if a website is secure if its URL begins with ‘https://’. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) applied to a website creates an encrypted connection between your server and browser. If you are an e-commerce site, alongside using a secure transaction processing system, you should also use SSL for the safety of your customers.
Installing an SSL certificate on your site is very easy and cost-effective.
Make your site responsive
Most people use smartphones and tablets to access websites. So having a site optimised for various screen sizes is absolutely vital from both an SEO and customer experience perspective.
Now that Google has adopted a ‘mobile first’ policy, then not having an optimised site will actively push you down the rankings.
Site speed
Websites that take an age to load are frustrating. Most people will navigate away, potentially costing you sales. Search engines also value speed when ranking. If yours is very slow to load, you might be working with an older, clunkier system that needs a complete redesign.
There are some remedial steps you can take to improve your site speed.
Remove duplicate content
Having the same content in different places on your site can make search engines think that you are trying to manipulate them. There are legitimate reasons to have duplicate content, but you should is a canonical reference link in order to let Google know where the original version of it sits.
Produce a sitemap
A map for your site will help search engines understand it while crawling. It tells you what each page is called, where it sits on your navigation priorities and when it was last modified.
There are a number of free plugins or sitemap generators you can use to create yours.
Key points
Great SEO takes time and consistency in order to really see a change in your search engine rankings. Technical SEO is something that you can do in-house in line with the latest changes to the algorithm, some of which can improve your SERPS very quickly.
