Why Technical SEO Matters – Optimisation Tips for your Campaign
Unless you perfect the various components of technical SEO, you’re likely to struggle to enjoy high rankings with the major search engines.
So it’s vital that you take the time to optimise these aspects for your website. But the good news is that it’s something you can do periodically without vast technical knowledge.
Here, we look at some of the most important elements to check.
Indexation
Search engines need to be able to crawl and index your site easily to drive organic traffic. (For the avoidance of doubt, in technical terms crawling refers to the way search engine web crawlers (bots or spiders) visit and download a page and extract its links to find extra pages).
This is a big topic, and we can recommend further reading if you’d like to learn more.
Orphan pages
Again, if you’re unfamiliar with these, they’re website pages with no internal or external links, meaning search engine crawlers can’t access them. (In other words they are not linked to any ‘parent’ page).
With these, the lack of structural or semantic content means search engines are not able to evaluate them.
How to fix them will depend on a number of factors. But solutions range from de-indexing unnecessary or irrelevant pages to re-incorporating relevant ones into your website architecture.
Page speed
Essentially, this simply refers to how long it takes a website to load. Just a few seconds’ delay can increase ‘bounce’ rates by as much as nearly a third, and there can be a number of negative impacts, including on SEO.
There are tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights which can assess speed and suggest solutions.
Duplicate content
Search engines are always on the lookout for this, since it makes it harder for them to assess which page is more relevant to a particular search query. There are solutions available via 301 redirects, plus tools in Google Webmaster Central.
URL structure
Clearly, page URLs are hugely important to SEO. They need to be reader-friendly, clean and helpful to both humans and search engines. Keep them short and sweet and, where possible, include relevant keywords.
Mobile optimisation
Statista claims that around 50% of all global web traffic comes via mobile devices, so mobile optimisation is hugely important to search engines, and we’ve written about this previously. There are myriad tools to assess mobile-friendliness and propose solutions, including Google Search Console.
You need to be sure, for example, that fonts are legible on mobile pages, that everything fits on the page and that loading happens quickly enough.
XML Sitemaps
Put simply, an XML Sitemap just lists all the URLs linked with a particular site. You need to check your sitemap regularly so that the wrong URLs aren’t indexed and crawled. Equally, you don’t want key links to be omitted.
Canonical tags
These inform search engines that a particular URL is the ‘master’ page, and help minimise duplicate content. Use them correctly to avoid problems with duplication.
Keyword use
Keywords are critical to any SEO package and strategy worth its salt. Add them where you need them, including in intros, conclusions and, if you can, H1 and H2 headers. It’s also important that you use keywords naturally in your content, to avoid keyword stuffing.
There are various keyword research tools to get you started if this is new to you.
HTTP status codes
These are servers’ responses to browsers. If someone goes to a website, the server can respond with a code like 302, 301 or 404, each one signifying a different kind of error. There could be a redirect or, as with 404, it may mean the page can’t be found.
As you can imagine, these codes have a highly negative effect on SEO, so you need to recognise and fix them. Tools such as Google Search Console can provide solutions.
Get in touch
Front Page Advantage understands technical SEO in detail, having helped a wide range of clients with this for years. Get in touch today to learn more, whatever the size of your business and whatever sector you work in.