We no longer live in an age when the "Yellow Pages" were the go-to directory for finding businesses, professionals and so on. Search engines now do that job. So what is the secret to staying at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs)?
Investing your time and effort in first-class SEO.
SEO is what determines your position in the SERPs. It is one of the most powerful tools for making your brand (and your website) visible and accessible to online audiences. Although SEO in general is one of the fundamental aspects of digital marketing, today we will focus on technical SEO.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to optimising your website for crawling and indexing. In other words, technical SEO improves your website's content, design and code structure to help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index it, improving its visibility and ranking on the web.
The word "technical" is added before SEO because this particular aspect of SEO has little or nothing to do with a website's content: its main goal is to optimise the website's infrastructure.
Search engine algorithms keep changing (becoming more sophisticated with every update), so it is essential for marketers to adapt their SEO and technical SEO strategies to maintain and improve their search rankings. By creating and implementing a solid technical SEO strategy, you can both optimise the performance of your site or web page and improve the user experience for visitors browsing your site on multiple platforms. Ultimately, this improves your website's visibility and drives more organic traffic to your pages.
Wondering how to improve your technical SEO factors? Here are some technical SEO best practices you could use in your strategies:
Improve site speed
Users are very likely to abandon a website if it doesn't load in under 2 seconds on desktop and under 3 seconds on a mobile device.
So you need to work on reducing your site's load time: slow sites fail to rank effectively in the SERPs, which can never be good for business. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse your website's speed and find ways to improve it.
Eliminate 404 errors
If your website has 404 errors, it means you have linked to pages that don't exist.
In other words, your website has broken links that can hamper the user experience. Broken links and pages prevent search engines such as Google from crawling your site, harming your search rankings. Google Search Console is the perfect tool for this. It can monitor various aspects of your website, such as broken links, when it was last crawled, whether there are indexing errors, security issues and so on.
Optimise your URL structure
A fact about search engines is that complicated URLs don't work well for search rankings. This is because complex URLs confuse search engine crawlers, which as a result fail to index your site effectively. When it comes to URLs, these are some SEO best practices:
- Use lower-case characters.
- Keep URLs short and simple.
- Avoid unnecessary characters and words.
- Use "-" (hyphens) to separate words in the URL.
- Use target keywords in URLs (but don't stuff them with keywords).
Optimise your robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file located in your website's root directory. It tells search engines which pages of your site they may crawl and index. Robots.txt also prevents source files and images that shouldn't appear in the SERPs from being crawled and indexed. You can check your robots.txt to make sure there are no false blocks that could stop search engine crawlers from indexing your site. Google Search Console is an excellent tool for this.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Since a large volume of traffic is generated by mobile devices, you need to make sure your website is optimised for these devices too (or perhaps above all). If you load your site on mobile and find that some elements and text look out of proportion or don't load, your site is not optimised for mobile devices.
Add breadcrumb menus
Breadcrumb menus are a set of links located at the top or bottom of a page. They are included to let users navigate back to a previous page of a site. A breadcrumb menu serves two purposes. First, it lets users navigate a website easily without having to press the browser's back button; second, it gives search engines useful hints about the site's structure.
Google strongly recommends breadcrumb menus, so you should add them to your website.
Choose HTTPS
Good site architecture starts with choosing an appropriate, SEO-friendly hypertext transfer protocol, namely HTTPS.
HTTPS became extremely important when Google announced (on 6 August 2014) that HTTPS is one of the factors on its list of search ranking signals. HTTPS prevents intruders from tampering with the communication between websites and browsers. So choosing HTTPS for your website is a sure way to improve your search rankings.
Conclusions
These are not really tips; let's call them DUTIES that every web developer should respect in order to deliver a well-made site to their clients. At ESSE I Solutions we pay a lot of attention to technical SEO which, as we have seen, has become fundamental. You can have a site with stellar content, but without respecting these seven simple rules a website cannot be called well made – simply because finding it online becomes almost impossible.
Do you need a professional, custom, responsive and BEAUTIFUL website? Contact us for a free consultation.
Adapted from an article by Shane Barker written for the upGrad blog.
