Essential Technical SEO Tips for Success in 2017
There has been a fair amount of debate and conjecture regarding technical SEO’s value with a lot many people declaring it to be dead. However, more than a few outstanding examples of successful tactics of technical SEO that have given a major boost to web traffic have conclusively demonstrated that it is far from dead. The reason why such a controversy has arisen over a normally staid subject may very well lie in the way technical SEO is defined. As long as technical SEO stands for website and server practices implemented so as to maximize the usability, as well as indexing and crawling by search engines, there should not be any problem.
Some ways of achieving success in technical SEO in the coming year include:
1. Check Indexing
The number of pages in your website that have been indexed by search engines can be checked by simply using an SEO crawler tool like Website Auditor. Ideally, the number of pages reported to be indexed should be the total number of pages in your site less the pages marked as not to be indexed. If the gap is disproportionate, you should conduct a review of all the pages that have not been indexed.
2. Ensure the Site Can Be Crawled
Even though you may be tempted to refer to robots.txt you should desist as it can be notoriously inaccurate. It is far better to use an SEO crawler tool to get information on all the pages that are blocked, irrespective of whether the instruction is noted in the robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag, Metatag, or noindex. You need to appreciate that Google now has the capability of rendering pages just like browsers so you need to ensure that all online resources can be crawled by its bots, otherwise content that is dynamically generated in your site will not be indexed. Sites using JavaScript or AJAX extensively need to employ a crawler that is competent in doing its job on these sorts of pages.
3. Optimize Crawl Budget
By using the Google Search Console you can get an idea of the crawl budget, which is nothing but the number of pages of a site that is possible to be crawled by the search engine in a specified period of time. Because the information made available on Google Search Console is limited, you need to look at server logs through any specialized tool. While there is no way of knowing how fast Google crawls sites, it is proven that the higher the number of backlinks, higher is the number of the visits of the search engine spider. What this means is that you should attempt to build backlinks on the pages that are more important to you. Other steps recommended by Internet marketing companies that can help increasing the crawl budget comprise removing duplicate pages, specify pages that need not be indexed, fix links that are broken and keeping your sitemap updated and ensuring that it is registered in the Google Search Console.
4. Perform Internal Link Audit
A site structure that is both logical and shallow promotes crawl ability and provides a great user experience. Good internal linking also helps to boost the rank of each page. To ensure that your links perform efficiently in enhancing the page rank confirm that the site structure is as shallow as possible and that it does not take more than three clicks to arrive at the important pages from the home page. Set right all the broken links because they not only irritate visitors but also negatively affect the page rank. Minimizing the number of redirects is also useful in promoting the ranking. Also be sure not to have any orphan pages that can be impossible to find by visitors as well as search engines as they are not connected with any other page.
5. Conduct a Sitemap Review
Sitemaps are vital because it is through them that the search engines get to know the structure of the site and thus are able to discover the site contents faster. You should verify that your XML sitemap is kept on being updated as and when news content is uploaded. The site map should also be kept neat, clean, and uncluttered without having any typical garbage items such as non-canonical pages, 4XX pages, pages that are blocked for indexing, redirected URLs, etc. The presence of these items makes crawling difficult by the search engines and they may end up ignoring your sitemap completely. Remember to limit the size of the sitemap to less than 50,000 URLs as this is the limit of Google. Keeping it as low as possible ensures that the most important pages are more frequently crawled.
6. Test Page Speed and Improve It
Google has made it amply clear that it is going to be very sensitive to the loading speed of the site pages, and it is going to factor it in when allocating a rank. This is all the more important in a context of a majority of users using mobile devices to search online. While it is quite effective, Google’s PageSpeed tool can be a little cumbersome because the page URL needs to be manually fed in for the speed check. Using WebSite Auditor that has Google’s PageSpeed tool integrated will be more convenient and faster. The test also provides recommendations for fixing problems, wherever found. A download link from where you can access a compressed version of the site images is also made available.
7. Ensure the Site Is Mobile-Friendly
News has already broken that Google will now give preference to indexing mobile versions of sites over the desktop version. The move itself was not unexpected considering that a vast majority of web searches are nowadays fired from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets by users on the go. The major implication of this move is that it will be the mobile version of your website that will determine its ranking. To ensure that you are up to speed you should conduct a mobile-friendliness test of your web pages with Google’s own tool, and ensure that you run exhaustive audits and tests of your mobile-optimized site with a customized user agent and settings in robots.txt in the SEO crawler being used. You also need to keep on monitoring your rank for the mobile site and keep in mind that your progress will also have an impact on the rankings of your desktop site as well.
Conclusion
As may be understood from the discussion above, technical SEO can do a lot of things for your site’s performance, especially in the light of the dynamic environment in which Google works.
About the Author
Evans Walsh is a senior SEO consultant with extensive experience in optimizing websites for maximum performance. He has earlier worked in a number of leading Internet marketing companies before setting up shop independently.