As you can see, technical SEO is essential for improving your website’s performance, and knowing what to do can help you rank higher! In this blog, you’ll learn what to include in your technical SEO checklist to make your regular audit more effective and successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Website Crawling and Indexing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The purpose of technical SEO is to improve the crawling and indexing process with Robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and canonical tags. Here\u2019s what you need to know about them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ensure Proper Use of Robots.txt<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which pages or sections of your website are worthy of crawling<\/a>. Properly using this file can also help search engines ignore irrelevant pages and avoid blocking important pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n XML Sitemap<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Your XML sitemap acts as a guide or roadmap so search engines can understand your website’s structure and know the important content of your web pages. Hence, you must learn how to generate and submit a sitemap:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Canonical Tags<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The canonical tags help search engines identify the primary web pages to avoid duplicate content. Implementing proper canonicalization for content-heavy sites is recommended to improve rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sample Tag: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https:\/\/www.example.com\/preferred-url\/” \/><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Cleverise, 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. This will affect your retention rate, traffic acquisition, and possible conversion rate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hence, it’s good to include site speed optimization<\/a> in your technical SEO checklist. Here’s how:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Improve Page Load Time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As you do your technical SEO audit, consider using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to measure site speed. This will give you enough information to determine whether your website is loading fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonetheless, you still need to know the techniques that can reduce the load time, including image compression, enabling browser caching, reducing server response time, and minimizing JavaScript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Minimize HTTP Requests<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Every component (images, scripts, stylesheets) of your web page needs an HTTP request that slows the loading speed. This is because HTTP requests take time to establish a connection and transfer data, reducing the loading speed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, here’s what you can do to minimize HTTP requests:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Optimize for Core Web Vitals<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Optimize Google’s Core Web Vitals that measure user experience on critical metrics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Modern people across all demographics use mobile phones to browse the internet. That’s why it’s your responsibility to make your website mobile-friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to test your site’s usability on different devices. After all, Google uses mobile-first indexing, a process that uses the mobile version of your website to crawl and rank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Responsive Design<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To Improve your mobile website, you can utilize Responsive Design. A responsive design allows your website to adapt to different screen sizes, allowing different elements (text, images, buttons) to adjust and improve your user experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Google indeed favors secure websites and will rank them higher! This shows why you must include HTTPS and site security in your technical SEO checklist.<\/p>\n\n\n HTTPS vs. HTTP: <\/strong>HTTP is the standard protocol for transferring data over the web, but it does not encrypt data, making it vulnerable to interception and attacks. On the other hand, HTTPS uses Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is secure and protected from eavesdropping and tampering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s why you should have an SSL (digital certificate) that prevents hacking and secures your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Improving URL structure is part of your technical SEO because it helps search engines pinpoint essential pages. Therefore, you must learn how to create an effective URL for better SEO performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clean and Descriptive URLs<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When creating your URL through your CMS, make sure to have clean and descriptive URLs that include your keywords. Short URLs with no unnecessary parameters are better because they’re readable and SEO-friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consistent and Hierarchical Structure<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You can organize your URL using categories and subcategories for your web page. You can also implement a breadcrumbs strategy to improve site navigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aside from the content itself, there are also technical aspects of your on-page SEO. Improving these elements can also elevate your website performance. Here are the things you need to consider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Structured Data (Schema Markup)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Schema Markup<\/a> helps search engines understand your content better. It is a unique code or language used for search engine understanding that also understands the structure of your data. A well-structured data can result in snippets on Google, making you appear higher in the results.<\/p>\n\n\n Proper Use of Meta Tags (Title, Description, Alt Tags)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As part of your technical SEO audit, check the proper usage of meta tags, which help search engines understand the structure of your content. Ensure that your image includes a title, meta description, and alt tags.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hence, it’s essential to learn proper on-page SEO strategies<\/a> to utilize these elements to improve your website performance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s frustrating to click on a link and be redirected to a blank or error page! This will frustrate your online users and affect their decision to purchase or subscribe to your business. For this reason, include fixing broken links<\/a> and 404 pages in your technical SEO checklist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Identify and Fix Broken Links<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n +Although fixing broken links is part of your link building, this could also be on the technical aspect because you need to use tools. You can use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush to identify external and internal broken links that can turn into opportunities. After identifying the links, you can come up with more relevant links that can improve your link juice<\/a> acquisition and domain authority<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Optimize Custom 404 Pages<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Optimizing custom 404 pages can be an excellent opportunity to improve user experience. Since 404 pages no longer exist on your webpage, you can add instructions like “Sorry, this page does not exist” and guide users back to important sections of your site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After all, optimizing custom 404 pages can improve user experience, reduce bounce rates, increase conversion, enhance SEO, and help you monitor broken links<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Redirection management can help manage link equity, which can help maintain a good authority score. So, when doing a technical SEO audit, include 301 and 302 redirects to improve website performance. A 301 redirect is used when a URL has permanently moved to a new location. Implementing 301 redirects can benefit technical SEO by preserving link equity, avoiding broken links, and consolidating duplicate content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All you need to know is how to implement them properly, using server configurations to ensure redirects are processed efficiently and accurately. You can also use CMS plugins to manage 301 redirects without HTML coding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Avoid 302 Redirects Unless Necessary<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect used when content has been temporarily moved and will return to its original location. While beneficial in specific cases, 302 redirects can harm SEO if misused. You only need to know when to use 302 redirects, such as temporary testing, A\/B Testing or temporary positions, and geolocation or language redirects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Technical SEO can also help manage your crawl budget<\/a> to prioritize essential pages! Here’s how:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crawl Budget Management<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Your website’s crawl budget will determine how many pages a search engine can crawl on your site. It matters because you must crawl and index your essential pages to appear on search results. To solve this, prioritize essential pages and prevent indexing low-quality or irrelevant pages to properly utilize your crawl budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pagination and Infinite Scroll<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pagination and infinite scroll are techniques that display large amounts of website content<\/a> and improve user experience. Although these large amounts of content can use up all the crawl budget, you need to know the best practices for handling pagination content (page 1, page 2, page 3 on you. website). Infinite scroll means loading more content as users scroll down your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both pagination and infinite scroll offer unique ways to present large amounts of content, but they must be implemented correctly to ensure SEO performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See below how infinite scroll works with a load more button:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Log file analysis<\/a> is a helpful step in technical SEO because it helps you analyze how search engine bots crawl your website. It can give you insights on how to improve your crawl budget by using tools and identifying errors to devise solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In log file analysis, here\u2019s what you can do:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monitor Crawl Activity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You can use tools like Screaming Frog Log File Analysis and Splunk to monitor crawl activity. In doing so, you can optimize crawl budget, detect crawl errors, and understand bot behavior. You can also know files that capture key details such as IP address, user-agent, HTTP status code, URLs accessed, and time and date for each request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Identify Crawl Errors and Fix Them<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Identifying crawl errors (404 pages, 5xx server errors, redirect loops and chains, 302 redirects) can also help you fix them before it affects your website performance. You can fix these errors by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In technical SEO, you should also fix duplicate content issues so they won\u2019t affect your website performance. Here\u2019s how you can do it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n To detect duplicate content, you can use tools like Copyscape, Siteliner, and Google Search Console to determine what you need to do. After this, you can resolve such issues by using canonical tags, no-index, and 301 redirects to prevent more errors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you do your technical SEO, it\u2019s also better to know the source of duplicate content: URL variations, sessions IDs, content syndication<\/a>) to know how you can prevent these duplications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Businesses also cater to international clients or audiences, so it\u2019s essential to include international SEO considerations in your technical SEO checklist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hreflang tags are HTML attributes that help search engines understand different web page versions’ language and geographical targeting. This ensures that users in different regions are served the appropriate language version or localized content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Properly implementing these tags can avoid confusion and help search engines understand your content for better user experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another step you should remember is the image optimization for your technical SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To put it simply, a large file size can lead to slower loading speed because it affects your website’s technical configuration. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to use image compression techniques (lossy vs. lossless) to improve image formats for better SEO performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of this, you also need to include alt tags for your images so search engines can better understand your web contents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Internal Linking<\/a> can also enhance your technical SEO because internal links improve link equity distribution and fasten the crawling process within the website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this reason, learning internal linking strategies like contextual links, pillar pages, and anchor text optimization is essential for better SEO performance. Also, remember to determine relevant and similar content to know where to put your internal links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nowadays, Amazon\u2019s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple\u2019s Siri use voice search to speed up internet searches. As a result, SEO specialists also use voice search optimization<\/a> to improve a website\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To have an effective voice search, you can use long-tail keywords to have more specific phrases when people search for a certain product or service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Complete Your Technical SEO Checklist!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Technical SEO is an essential aspect of your website performance, so ensure a regular website audit<\/a> that can help you stay up-to-date with SEO best practices! Improving technical SEO will lead<\/a> to better user experience and digital performance!<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, feel free to use this article as a guide for your technical SEO checklist to boost your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In case you missed it!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The competition is high in the digital landscape! And if you want to take the number 1 spot in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":9335,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technical-seo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
2. Site Speed Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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![\"Core](\"https:\/\/linkpublishers.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Core-Web-Vitals-for-Technical-SEO.jpg\")
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3. Mobile-Friendliness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
4. HTTPS and Site Security<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"SSL](\"https:\/\/linkpublishers.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/SSL-Certificate-to-improve-Technical-SEO.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n5. URL Structure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
6. On-Page SEO Technical Aspects<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Sample](\"https:\/\/linkpublishers.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Sample-of-Snippet-Result-on-Google.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n7. Broken Links and 404 Pages.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
8. Redirection Management<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
9. Optimizing for Crawlers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
10. Log File Analysis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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11. Duplicate Content Issues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
12. International SEO Considerations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
13. Image Optimization (Compression and Alt Tags)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
14. Internal Linking<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
15. Voice Search Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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