Technical SEO Tips to Improve Your Website
Not so long ago I shared 7 SEO tips to rocket your website, and now I’m back with a few more technical details.
Unfortunately, the importance of SEO is often forgotten when building a website and it is frequently left after the initial set up. But we’re all about consistency here, so we’ll continue to share the latest SEO updates, trends and tips to keep your site ranking and performing well.
So let’s dive in.
Let’s start with a quick debriefing, what is technical SEO?
According to Moz, “Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.”
As Moz has quite rightly said, technical SEO covers a whole world of things. But what can you get started on today to improve your website?
First, let’s look at the importance of being mobile-friendly. Now I’m not talking about your relationship with your iPhone, but instead how your website appears for mobile users. Having a responsive design means that your site will respond to the device size, whether you’re viewing a website on a mobile phone, tablet or desktop. This saves users having to double-tap or zooming in to view your content and navigate around your site.
Many WordPress themes will be styled in such a way that they’ll know how to respond on different devices. Unsure if your website looks good on mobile? You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to find out.
Use a flat site structure
Your site structure is how all of the pages on your website are organised. If you’ve visited a website lately where you’ve had to do 25 clicks to get to where you want - well, you want the opposite of that. Keep your site’s pages within a few links of one another, making it easy for users to navigate. This also makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl your content.
Be consistent with your URLs
A consistent URL structure helps users to understand where they are on your website. There’s no need to overthink the structure or the words you use in the URLs themselves, as long as they follow a logical structure and are relevant to the page. This is especially important if you’re running a blog, as Google loves a good category to give extra context to your content.
Use canonical URLs
When you have pages with similar content, canonical URLs are perfect. Let’s say you run an online clothing shop with products that come in multiple colours. Multiple page variations can results in multiple URLs - not good. This can be super confusing for search engines… Unless you use a canonical tag! This will let Google know which is the “main” page, with the others being variations.
Alright, enough about URLs…Let’s talk about page speed.
According to SEOClarity, “Page speed is defined as the length of time it takes to display all the content on a specific page or the length of time it takes for a browser to receive a web server’s first byte…”
So if we think about all the elements on a website, such as HTML code, CSS elements, JavaScript… The list goes on… That’s a lot to slow down, right?
Page speed can directly impact your site’s rankings, keeping valuable users on your website and therefore improving your bounce rate. But how do you give it a boost?
Cache
Lazy Loading
Minifying CSS
If you’re using a shed load of high quality images, the chances are your website is going to run a little slower. If you’re a photographer, you’ll of course need your work to look awesome - but a CSS trick such as Lazy Loading can save you valuable time.
Validate your XML Sitemaps
Run your sitemap through the Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator to keep an eye on broken and redirecting links.
Are you ready to get technical?
Although there are so many elements that bring together your entire technical SEO strategy, if you start off on the right foot it makes things a hell of a lot easier.
If you’re struggling with your technical SEO, drop us a message and we’ll be happy to help.
Did you find this article helpful? Drop a comment below - and let us know how you got on with the tips above.