Whether you have landed a new job at a digital marketing company or are improving your website’s online visibility, learning the basics of technical search engine optimization (SEO) will benefit you and your company. Technical SEO is the fundamental practice that makes your website “crawlable” to search engine spiders. It deals with the speed, security, and overall structure of your website. Search engines will not recognize your website if you don’t pay attention to technical SEO. Implementing technical SEO tactics should begin at the back end of your website. Access the source code of your website so that you can work on your technical SEO. Below are several main tasks you should carry out for technical SEO:
Adding the Tags
These tags include meta tags, alt tags, canonical tags, and no-index tags. The first thing on your to-do list is adding all meta tags, which include the titles and descriptions, for your pages. These tags tell search engines what your web page is all about and what you offer to users. Adding alt tags to the source code of your website helps search engines identify your images. Spiders can’t read images: they rely on alt tags for information. Alt-text is a brief description of an image.
You should also add canonical tags and no-index tags so that search engines won’t penalize you if your website has duplicate content. According to Digital Authority Partners, if your website is an e-commerce site, duplicate content can be unavoidable because similar products will appear in multiple categories. Canonical tags signal crawlers that there is an original version of an item or piece of content. If you add a no-index tag to a page, search engines will not crawl that page.
Connecting the Pages Through Links
Everything is interconnected on the web. This is why links remain the number one priority of search engines when indexing a website. You can improve your SEO rankings through link building. You can improve your website’s interconnectivity by adding internal and external links to your pages. Internal links lead users to other pages inside your website, while external links lead users to other websites. If those websites link to your website, you receive backlinks.
Internal links ensure that users can access all your web pages through the links provided in the content. They make your website alive as they contribute to its overall health. On the other hand, external links are like highways that lead users to other websites. Your external links should point to high-authority websites. They can help boost your site’s reputation and credibility, especially if you get backlinks from them in return. Read more about 2022 SEO Concepts: The Relevance of Content Creation
You should create a link-worthy site in the first place so that popular websites will easily agree to or voluntarily link to your website. You can boost your online presence and credibility if these high-authority websites trust you. As a result, search engines such as Google will also recognize you and recommend your brand to users.
Fixing Content Issues
You should create only SEO-friendly content so that search engines can give you high SEO scores. But content issues sometimes arise, and they include duplicate content, thin content, and no content. These problems usually occur on eCommerce sites, where items appear in varying colors and sizes. You can correct this by categorizing all your items and assigning one style per page. Layout each page in a way that compresses the images, adding a drop-down menu for sizes and having a mini gallery for color options. This prevents having multiple URLs for similar content.
Furthermore, write unique content for each style. Do not simply lift ideas from online sources or settle for 200-word pieces of content. Feature the special attributes for each style. Some websites are intentionally writing about repetitive topics. If you are guilty of doing this unintentionally, you should check your website for duplicate content or plagiarism issues. Run your blog posts through Copyscape or other plagiarism checkers and correct the issues.
Testing the Responsiveness of Your Site
If you type a keyword in the search bar, you will notice that the top-ranking sites are usually responsive websites that have well-organized pages. This emphasizes the importance of providing a seamless user experience across different gadgets. The text and images of each page should fit the screens of a smartphone, a laptop, or any other device. You can check your site’s responsiveness via Google Search Console. The test result will tell you whether your site works smoothly on a smartphone or has a seamless appearance on a laptop.
If the test result shows that some of your pages do not fit perfectly on some gadget screens, then you have to call the attention of your web builder and have the issue fixed as soon as possible.
Delivering a smooth navigation flow for the web pages gives a superb user experience, and search engines love this. If you dedicate yourself to building an excellent website that meets the needs of the users, you are on the right track toward achieving the number one spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Final Words
Connecting to the world means a lot of relationship building. The same principle applies to your website. You need a lot of link-building and content optimization for your website to improve your online visibility. Technical SEO can help you carry out these tasks.
The more you apply key strategies for technical SEO, the more stable your website can be. Invest in learning much about SEO and implementing SEO techniques to improve your SEO rankings. This can mean a lot of dedicated time and effort, but it will be all worth it. Importantly, you don’t have to deal with the intricacies of technical SEO. Hire a dependable digital marketing agency, and it can do this job well for you.
