Technical SEO is one of the most important parts of the website SEO process and is one of the things that an SEO expert must master.
Technical website SEO is the first step that an SEO expert must plan after accepting and starting a project. Although SEO experts have different checklists for the technical SEO of the site according to their level of expertise in technical matters, the site’s status, and the employer’s goal, they all agree on observing and implementing a series of basic principles.
In this article, I am going to mention 10 of the most important principles and rules of technical SEO of the site that every SEO specialist at any level should consider as part of their checklist and examine each case in a practical way.
Technical SEO determines a large part of the success of your project, because without the right infrastructure, the rest of the SEO strategies will lose their effectiveness.
The main goal of implementing technical SEO on the website is to prepare a site that can be easily understood and checked by search engine robots in the first stage, and also the user can meet his needs and not have any problems in using the various features of the site.
What to focus on for technical SEO:
Table of Contents
1) Site speed, the most important factor!
According to Google, site speed is one of the most important factors for ranking your website or content, along with being mobile friendly.
Why?
Because one of the goals of Google since its establishment has been to improve the user experience. In web browsing, we all want the content we want to be displayed to us quickly. This is exactly the moment when we don’t like to stare at our screen for 10 seconds to read an article.
According to Google, the ideal time to load your content should be under 3 seconds. So, without delay, try to analyze the speed of your site first and then fix the errors and problems with the help of the technical team.
Usually, site speed problems, especially in WordPress sites, are related to the site format, plugins, photos, image elements, css, etc.
To analyze the speed of your site, we recommend you to use GTmetrix and Google Insights. These two sites provide you with very good suggestions for improving site speed with site analysis.
2) Robots must understand!
Google uses robots called crawlers to view your website and the new content you have published.
Despite their high intelligence, these robots do not have a very high ability to navigate your site, so we have to show them the way by placing internal and (external) links.
For this, basic linking between site pages, placing related articles, showing popular pages with high page authority and finally shopping pages will also help Google crawlers to rotate between site pages. Also, this work can help to direct the audience to the target pages and improve the conversion rate.
Tip: In order to show and attract Google’s attention to the new content of the site, you must show the link of your new content or page to the crawlers using the search console tool.
In the coming weeks, we will also review the correct methods of internal linking under the same title.
3) Why is the robot.txt file important?
As mentioned, search engine bots play an important role in introducing a site to search engines like Google. A good webmaster and SEO expert should always monitor the changes of these robots and algorithms and optimize his site accordingly. One of the most important things that we as experts should be able to do is to allow or deny access to these robots to view different parts of the site.
How? Using the robot.txt file
By inserting specific commands in this file, you can tell the search robots which pages, files and sections of the site to monitor or pass through. If this file is not available on your site, Google crawlers can index all parts of your site, which is not interesting at all.
Note: This file must be located in the main root of your host.
4) 404 pages and duplicate content!
The 404 page that we are all familiar with is one of the most important pages from the user’s and Google’s point of view. You should design an optimized and beautiful 404 page and direct the user to other parts of the site.
To better explain the 404 pages, I will continue this issue with an example:
Suppose you have accepted the iPhone product online store project for SEO. One of your products is the iPhone 13, for which you have designed a separate sub-screen (different colors and memory). If this product is finished and the employer has (erroneously) deleted this page for any reason, the user will enter the 404 page by clicking on this product.
But if you can direct the user to your main pages or offer special offers for buying a mobile phone by designing a 404 page, you have been able to significantly solve this problem and keep the customer on your site.
Another way to solve this problem is to redirect users to other similar products and pages using 301 redirect.
Duplicate content
Another problem that usually happens in store sites is the issue of duplicate content.
I will explain this part with an example:
Suppose you are selling the same mobile phone that you met in your online store. 5 iPhone 13 phones with different colors and memories that have all the same features.
Sounding the alarm, duplicate content!
To solve this problem, you are recommended to use canonical tag or 301 redirect. So that you don’t have duplicate content on your site.
This issue, along with the drop in ranking that Google considers for these sites, can easily destroy a business!
Now what to do to improve the security of the site?
Using the ssl security protocol is what you (at least) should try to implement on your website. This protocol will display your website with https instead of http and will protect site and user information effectively.
It is interesting to know that this protocol was introduced by the queen of Google security Mrs. Parisa Tabriz. You can contact your hosting support to activate this protocol.
6) Take the site map seriously
The site map is another file that will help improve the performance of robots on your site.
A sitemap is a file in which all the links of your site are placed in an orderly manner, so that robots can easily crawl your site and index the content.
If your site uses the WordPress content management system, you can easily install the xml site map plugin to complete this part of your checklist.
7) Using schema
One of the things that can be said to have become popular among sites in the last one year is the topic of schema. The presence of schema in the template code will bring some very good things to your site:
- Schema makes the search engine get a better understanding of the structure and content of your site.
- Due to creating a distinction between sites with schema and sites without it, these sites generally have a higher click rate compared to competitors.
Schema has different types, among which we can mention rich snippet, rich result, rich cards, etc.
Note: To use the schema on your site, be careful that you must personalize it on different pages of your site.
8) Unify the address of different pages
Another thing you should do on the site is link integration. Although this does not have a very high impact on the SEO of your site (such as the number of h1, etc.), it helps Google’s crawlers to understand your site more easily.
I have some recommendations for this:
Pay attention to the length of your URL, URLs should not be too short or too long.
9) Site path or Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb is a small menu that is usually placed at the top of your site and tells the user what page he entered from, what pages he has seen in the past, and what page he is on now.
Breadcrumb presence on the site is very important; Because it shows the path to the user and if he wants to go back to the previous 3 pages, for example, he can easily do it with 1 click. Apart from that, it allows Google bots to easily perform their crawling and indexing process.
10) Existence of responsive structure!
Using responsive design, your site will be displayed to the user on any platform with the appropriate size. With this, the user no longer needs to zoom in or zoom out of your site.
You can use wptouch and siteOrigin plugins to make your WordPress site responsive. In addition, you can use the xrespond tool to find out whether your site is responsive or not.