We all are familiar with Search Engine Optimization, which is popularly known as SEO in short form. As an important part of digital marketing, SEO is the great technique of increasing visibility of any website in search engines like Google and others.
It helps you in increasing the online ranking of your website and ensures a better position SERPs to easily come in the eyes of visitors. In other words, SEO is crucial for increasing traffic to your website and helps your business in finding a lot of potential buyers to sell your products and services and generate higher revenue.
SEO consists of three different parts such as off-page SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. The actual purpose of doing off-page is to create links whereas on-page is all about optimizing the website content.
Now, you may be seeking to know about technical SEO? Well, we are going to discuss here the same thing. But, before doing this, you need to understand that all these three types of SEO are important for getting better outcomes.
What is Technical SEO?
When it comes to technical SEO, it’s all about improving user experience on your website. It keeps great importance, especially when it comes to the increasing conversion rate of your website. It focuses on structuring a good website that can encourage users to spend some time, drop reviews, feedback, etc.
Google always focuses on that website that loads fast, has a great structure, simple user interface, etc. for ranking. Apart from this, Google also notices how much time users spend, feedback, etc. on a particular website while ranking it. This is indeed a good thing when it comes to the increasing ranking of your website in search engines.
Important Technical SEO Checklist
Let’s discuss here the crucial technical SEO checklist that you need to take into account and also implement them while developing your website to make it SEO-driven.
XML Sitemap
While talking about technical SEO checklists, it’s good to start from an XML sitemap that includes various useful information on the website. The information is related to various latest changes on the website page’s content. An XML sitemap serves as a complete blueprint of the website and lets users explore much more about the same. It helps users know how to navigate and access the website.
You will be able to create an XML sitemap for your website with the use of a sitemap generator. Once you create it, you should never forget to submit it in Google Search Console. This is good to allow your Google to easily crawl your website and index your pages. All you need to do is to remove those of blocked URLs, broken pages, errors in code, etc.
Site Speed Matters
Google already made it clear that the loading speed of your website matters a lot when it comes to the ranking of your website, be it desktop speed or mobile site loading speed. The reason is that visitors don’t have enough time to wait for those websites that take higher time to load.
Visitors slowly start avoiding accessing those websites having slow loading speed. And this is the reason why these websites are known to have a higher bounce rate. Even if your website has a slow loading speed, you can improve it in various ways like arranging cache in place, compress pages, selection of landing page redirects, implementing quick DNS and hosting, etc.
Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)
When it comes to AMP, it is a special and also a great version of HTML that is mainly used for improving both the functionality and speed of the website. You can do it by deactivating comments, forms, etc. If implemented with perfection, AMP gives a fantastic result when it comes to the increasing conversion rate of any website.
Google uniquely treats AMP pages by displaying it in search result carousels, which is necessary for catching user attention. But, most of the website owners believe that AMP is a substitute for mobile compatibility, which is indeed not true.
Canonicalization
Duplicate website content is certainly not good for your website and tends to make an adverse impact on its conversion rate. So, implementing canonicalization is indeed a great option in this arena. All you need to do is to use a command like rel=” canonical” command in your website page code, which will help achieve it.
It’s advisable to specify your preferred canonical URL for every page of your website. Apart from this, you can also prevent your CMS from publishing a different version of the same kind of content when it comes to ensuring the absence of duplication in the first place.
Pagination
It’s another great aspect for technical SEO that you can implement to your website. The process of pagination involves a process in which content is divided across a series of multiple pages. The main purpose of using this aspect is to segregate a complete list of items into a consumable format.
You can implement pagination on different types of websites such as eCommerce, forums, blogs, etc. You will come across issues like duplicate content while implementing pagination, but you can tackle the issue by using a command like rel=” next” and rel=” prev” links. The main purpose of doing it is to inform search engines to indicate that the succeeding pages are the continuation of those of the main pages.
HTTPS Version
According to Google, websites need to adopt the technology if they are seeking to improve organic search marketing on its search pages. And this is the reason why it became the most crucial factor of Google ranking.
Meanwhile, in the year 2018, it then started displaying a not secure tag for those of websites that didn’t follow its necessity and also had ‘HTTP://’ tag in the main URLs. You can prevent the same by implementing an SSL certificate on your website. This is something that can create a fully encrypted and also highly secure connection between browsers and servers.
Mobile-friendly Website
Google already made it clear in the year 2018 that it will give preference to those of mobile-friendly websites for ranking. It indicates that search engines always look at several website pages from a mobile device and they can also make an assessment of its responsiveness.
Besides, you will also be able to see how you will be able to measure up in this category when it comes to taking a glimpse of Google Search Console data.
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Name Preferred Domain
While accessing websites, you will notice two types of domains such as https://xyz.com or https://www.xyz.com. It may sometimes be confusing for search engines too and also lead to indexing and also page rank issues. Therefore, you need to indicate the search engines about the version that you are seeking to prefer.
You need to consider the fact that there is indeed no benefit of making the selection of one over another. But, once you choose your preferred domain name, you need to stick to it. You can set the preferred domain name by registering with Google Webmaster Tools, validating multiple versions of your website, etc.
Implement Structured Data Markup
When it comes to structured data markup, it is quite helpful in search engines and then your website pages in a better way. All you need to do is to use Structured Data Markup Helper with the help of Google for setting it up. You can then leverage the Structured Data Testing Tool for testing.
Before doing it, you need to understand the importance of schema and also its importance for your website content. Doing the same will help you in getting the desired outcomes.
Avoid 404 Pages
If you delete any page or modify the URL of your website, you can implement 404 status codes. If you leverage the WordPress platform, it gives you complete surety that your website is optimized perfectly with search engine optimization. It helps you in making it quite simpler for a web crawler for crawling and indexing your website.
Breadcrumb Menus
When it comes to Breadcrumbs Menus, it is called the necessary part of the technical search engine optimization checklist. It is also famous for its breadcrumb trail. It is an important type of navigation that can easily disclose the actual location of users. It is an important type of website navigation that can easily enhance orientation awareness of those of visitors.
Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is another factor that can make a bad impact on the health of your website. To ignore those of duplicate content, websites need to be highly recommended to have top-quality content written by those of experts rather than using those of mass-produced content. All you need to do is to eliminate the downloaded HTML before you send it for the offering.
Technical SEO Check list
✔️ Test and check your website for errors
✔️ Structure your project
✔️ Setup and implementation of clean URLs
✔️ Configure https server
✔️ Optimize images
✔️ Optimize external outbound links
✔️ Optimize elements of SEO functionality
✔️ Optimize the code optimize the load speed of your website
✔️ Add microdata
✔️ Setup interlinking
✔️ Check your website for pop-ups
✔️ Optimize your website for mobile devices
✔️ Setup redirects
✔️ Set canonical pages
✔️ Set up the 404 error
✔️ Set up language switching elements
✔️ Block search indexing
✔️ Create a robots.txt file
✔️ Setup nesting configuration
✔️ Setup pagination
✔️ Add meta tags
✔️ Add headers (H1-h6)
✔️ Create and setup a sitemap.xml file
✔️ Analyze the website structure
✔️ Analyze the page index
✔️ Use google search Console
✔️ Additional aspects
✔️ Optimize the website subdomains
Conclusion
Apart from off-page and on-page, you should also have a full-proof strategy for technical SEO to make your entire online marketing strategy successful. Implementing the above factors gives you the desired outcomes by making your website able to generate higher traffic, increased sales, and ROI.
