Do you want your site to rank better, net more conversions, and get better traffic? Technical SEO is one of the most fundamental aspects of SEO, and if your site has unresolved technical SEO issues, you’ll struggle to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).
However, it’s vital that you spend some time optimizing the technical SEO of your website. Below you’ll find checklists of some technical SEO implement, but before we do that let explain what exactly is technical SEO.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing, indexing, crawling, and rendering your website to achieve higher search rankings. It’s part of on-page SEO, which concentrates on improving your website elements to get higher rankings, but it’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about creating exposure for a website through various channels.
What Are The Technical SEO Checklists To Implement?
1. Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
SSL is a security protocol that generates an encrypted link between a browser and a web server. Back in 2014, Google confirmed that SSL is now a ranking factor. So if you’ve been thinking of getting an SSL certificate for your website, now is the time to upgrade, not just for enhanced security, but also for SEO. Any website that the URL starts with ‘HTTPS://’ rather than ‘HTTP://’ is using SSL.
2. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
Your website must be mobile-friendly to improve search engine rankings and technical SEO. Google is transparent that having a responsive site is considered an important ranking signal by its algorithms. And the introduction of Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing content makes a responsive website more important than ever. So make sure your website is fully responsive and will display in the best format for mobile, tablet, or desktop users.
3. Speed your site load time
Another essential technical SEO metric to check is your site load time. If your website doesn’t load under 2 seconds on desktop and 3 seconds on mobile, users are more likely to leave your site. Google will penalize your website if your site is slow and takes a long time to respond. Site speed can also affect other key metrics that search engines use for ranking, such as bounce rate and time on page. Increasing site speed is very important. You can do that in different ways. The most common is compressing images, clearing browser caching, and utilizing CDNs.
4. Eliminate duplicate content issues
Duplicate content can affect the rate of your website traffic because it means two or more pages have identical or nearly identical content. Therefore, it’s essential to make sure your pages are unique. You can do this by removing some of the duplicate pages or by editing the content on your pages. You can also use Screaming Frog, Copyscape, SEMrush, or Site Bulb to identify duplication.
Conclusion
This post is just a beginners guide to technical SEO, but in reality, there are lots more to explore about technical SEO. You can contact San Diego SEO consultant if you want to go into detail about these tactics of technical SEO.