Technical SEO techniques can help you optimize your site so that search engines can crawl, index, and rank it effectively. In this article, we'll walk through some of the most important technical SEO strategies and show you how to implement them on your own website.
Get a boost in crawling and indexing with XML sitemaps
• What is an XML sitemap?
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists the URLs of all of your web pages for search engines to crawl. It's similar in structure to HTML sitemaps but uses XML instead of HTML. The advantage of using an XML sitemap is that it promotes fresh content because it allows you to specify how often you want Googlebot or Bing bot (depending on which search engine you use) to check your site.
• How do I create one?
You can create an XML Sitemap using either a third-party service like Google Webmaster Tools or with software like Screaming Frog SEO Spider & Online Marketing Toolkit. If you go the third-party route, make sure that the tool has built-in support for adding newly published pages and updating existing ones so they'll get indexed quickly by search engines—Google recommends this feature when evaluating whether or not a tool is worth integrating into their suite of services.#ENDWRITE
Structure your site's architecture and information hierarchy with a logical URL structure
One of the most important things to keep in mind when creating a website is its URL structure, as it has a very direct impact on how easy your site is for users to navigate.
URLs should be descriptive, short and easy to remember. They should also accurately represent the content that they point to so that users don’t have difficulty finding what they are looking for.
There are several ways you can structure your site’s architecture and information hierarchy with a logical URL structure:
• The first step would be using a URL shortener such as bitly or Google's own goo.gl service, which will shorten long URLs into shorter ones without losing any information about where they lead/are located within your website (e.g., https://bitly/2D7Q0Bm).
• Another option available is using 301 redirects, which take advantage of search engines' ability to follow links between pages on different domains by pointing one page on one domain at another page on another domain (e.g., from https://example-com/old-page1 onto https://example-com/newer-version2)
Ensure your website's security by starting with HTTPS
The most basic (and important) step towards improving your website's security is to use HTTPS.
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP — the protocol used for transferring data on the web, and it's required for many modern features including:
• All Google products like Google Search, Gmail, etc.
• Chrome’s “Not Secure” warning (which includes any URL that starts with http://)
Optimize the performance of your site to ensure that users can access it quickly and easily.
• Use a Content Delivery Network to optimize your site's performance. A CDN is a network of servers strategically located around the world that can deliver your website's content faster and more reliably than if it were hosted on one server.
• Use caching plugins to improve page load speed and performance, especially when there are some dynamic elements on your website (like live data). These plugins will handle those elements outside of WordPress so they don't slow down the entire site when they update.
• Make sure that any images or videos you use in posts or pages are hosted on a CDN like Cloudflare instead of loading them from your server directly because this will reduce load times for visitors who visit multiple pages on your site at once.
• Minimize the number of external resources from third parties by embedding YouTube videos into posts rather than linking back to YouTube itself where there may be more ads displayed than actual content!
Use canonicalization to avoid duplicate content.
You should always use a canonical tag when you have multiple versions of the same page on your website. A 301 redirect is used to tell search engines that the PageRank that’s passing through one version of your site should be redirected to a different version of your site. The difference between using a 301 redirect and using a canonical tag is that while both accomplish the same result, they do so in very different ways:
301 Redirects pass PageRank from old URLs to new URLs (and are therefore more complicated).
Canonical tags tell search engines which URL is “the original” and which are duplicates (and are therefore easier).
Get in control of your HTML and CSS markup for better crawling and indexing
HTML is the language that tells search engines what your website is about. The HTML tags on your site are the building blocks of your content and tell search engines how to organize and present it.
HTML tags define the structure of web pages, as well as how they appear in search engine results.
Search engines use this information to determine how they should crawl and index a page, as well as how to rank it in their search results.
There are over 100 different HTML tags you can use on every page of your website, which means there are many elements that can affect how your pages are crawled and indexed by Googlebot. And while there's no one-size-fits-all rule for creating optimized content, certain best practices apply across all SEO campaigns.
You don't have to be a programmer, but you do need to know what a developer is talking about when they talk about technical SEO!
Being able to understand the basics of programming is helpful, but you don't need to be a coder in order to learn about technical SEO. If you want to get more involved with technical SEO, you can learn HTML and CSS. You can also read articles or blogs on technical SEO techniques and strategies.
If reading isn't your thing, there are plenty of online courses that teach the basics of coding!
Use these techniques to make your site more accessible to search engines
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that your site is accessible to search engines and that it's optimized as such. It's important for both developers and non-developers, because technical SEO can help you improve your website's performance whether or not you're a developer.
Technical SEO includes things like implementing a sitemap, making sure that pages are crawlable, reducing redirects (which tells Google how pages are connected), using hreflang tags for international variations of content, avoiding noindex attributes on specific pages/SEOs (and instead using canonicals), etc.
The key to technical SEO is knowing what steps you need to take so that search engines can easily understand what your site is about—and ultimately rank it when someone searches for terms related to your products or services.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that these techniques are not going to get you a top ranking in search results. They are designed to help you avoid being penalized by Google and other search engines, as well as to make your site easier for people to find.
Top comments (2)
Nothing more, great post for beginners.
Glad you like it, @gamerseo