Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively
Use SSL : Secure Sockets Layer – SSL – is a security technology which creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can spot a site using SSL fairly easily: the website URL starts with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’
Ensure Your Site is Mobile friendly : A ‘responsive’ website design adjusts itself automatically so that it can be navigated and read easily on any device.
Google is clear about the fact that having a responsive site is considered a very significant ranking signal by its algorithms. And, with the introduction of Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing content, a responsive website is now more important than ever.
So it makes sense to ensure that your website is fully responsive and will display in the best format possible for mobile, tablet or desktop users.
Speed your site Up:Search engines prefer sites that load quickly: page speed is considered an important ranking signal.
There are several ways you can speed up your site:
- Use fast hosting. (Advanced servers allow to what you need to do with your website)
- Use a fast DNS (‘domain name system’) provider
- Minimise ‘HTTP requests’ – keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum
- Use one CSS stylesheet
- Ensure your image files are as small as possible
- Compress your web pages
- Minify your site’s code – rid of any unnecessary spaces, line breaks or indentation in your HTML, CSS and Javascript
- Fix duplicate content issue
- Preventing your CMS publishing multiple versions of a page or post
- Using the canonical link element to let search engines know where the ‘main’ version of your content resides.
Create an XML site map:An XML sitemap is a file that helps search engines to understand your website whilst crawling it – you can think of it as being like a ‘search roadmap’ of sorts, telling search engines exactly where each page is.
It also contains useful information about each page on your site, including
- when a page was last modified;
- what priority it has on your site;
- how frequently it is updated.
Consider enabling AMP :AMP is a Google-backed project which aims to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices through the use of special code known as AMP HTML.
AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly on mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code down to the bare bones, leaving text, images and video intact but disabling scripts, comments and forms.
Add structured data markup to your website.
Structured data markup is code which you add to your website to help search engines better understand the content on it. This data can help search engines index your site more effectively and provide more relevant results.
Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
When you are ready to launch your website, you should submit its XML sitemap to both Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools so that they can crawl your new site and start to display results from it in search results.
These services also allow you to keep an eye on the general performance of your site from a search engine prospective – other things you can do with the tools include:
- testing your site’s mobile usability
- accessing search analytics
- viewing backlinks to your site
- disavowing spammy links