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Technical SEO 101: How to properly do technical SEO on your website

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Blake Davies
Technical SEO 101: How to properly do technical SEO on your website

In order to increase the visibility of your website, you need to work on the SEO. There are two aspects to SEO. First, you have off-site SEO, which consists of link building, content marketing, influencer outreach and more. Second, you have the on-site SEO, the so-called technical SEO, due to the fact that it requires a no small amount of technical prowess in order to optimize the domain in question. Both of these methods affect some of the most important metrics used by Google algorithms to determine one’s Google rank and position in SERPs. Here are some basics of technical SEO that you need to master in order to see better results.

Start with the SSL

The term SSL stands for secure sockets layer and it’s a security protocol that guarantees the security of your domain as a whole. Generally speaking, it is what makes Google describe you as secure or not secure. Keep in mind that this is key when it comes to the audience retention rate. A person, upon entering your domain, might notice a “not secure” tag and abandon the domain immediately. An increased abandonment rate is one of the key factors when it comes to improving your site’s SEO rank, which is why you might want to start with acquiring it.

Submit a sitemap to search console

The thing you need to understand when doing technical SEO on your website is the fact that you have two different types of audiences. First, you have your regular, human, audience and second, you have the Google bots. One of the best things you can do is write your content in a way that can be easily understood by the search engine. One method in doing so is for you to submit an XML sitemap to the search console. This way, pages on your website will be indexed much sooner. Once you’ve created the map, what you should do is add it to the robots.txt.

Make it crawlable

Previously, we’ve mentioned Google bots are a major part of your audience. These bots are also referred to as crawlers, due to the nature of their interaction with your website. It is, for this very reason, in your best interest to make the site as crawlable as possible. For starters, you should configure your robots.txt file, seeing as how it’s primary function is to restrict crawlers from accessing certain parts of your domain. Other than this, you really need to start working on your meta tags. 

Speaking of these configurations, there are four different options to choose from. There’s the noindex-nofollow, the noindex-follow, index-nofollow and index-follow. According to this, it’s decided whether the page can show on Google and whether the links can be crawled. This, nonetheless, is a task that may require a tad more technical prowess, which is why it would be a good idea to find local experts to collaborate with. For a company based in Queensland, finding SEO Brisbane experts would definitely be the best possible course of action.

Increase the speed

Loading time is incredibly important when it comes to the impression that your website makes on its visitors. Why? Well, first of all, a lot of people would just abandon the site if it fails to load within the first several seconds. Two seconds (or less) is ideal loading time, while some studies show that about 25 per cent of all visitors leave if the website fails to load within four seconds. Even after the page loads, it still needs to be responsive in order to provide a seamless user experience. Great user experience increases the duration of visit, a number of pages visited and the visitor return rate. All of these metrics are used when your site’s SEO rank is determined.

Image optimization

One of the things you need to keep in mind is the importance of properly optimizing your images. First of all, you need to resize them before you upload them. Second, picking the right format makes all the difference. What you need to go for is the JPEG, seeing as how it’s smaller than PNG, even though PNG is usually of a higher quality for texts or illustrations. Either way, these are the two optimal formats and you might want to choose amongst them based on the situation.

Eliminate broken pages and links

The last thing that may drive your site into the ground are broken links. This is troublesome due to the fact that it requires a continuous effort. No one would deliberately link to a dead page, however, pages go dead over the course of time and if you’re negligible, Google will figure this out long before you do. The simplest way to handle this issue is to automate the process by investing in a specialized platform. Once a dead link is found, you might want to fix the issue and update your sitemap (something that we’ve already discussed).

In conclusion

At the end of the day, you need to understand that this optimization really doesn’t take that much time but it does make a world of a difference when it comes to your online reputation and the effectiveness of your online presence. While some of these are tasks that you could easily handle on your own, there are also those that you might want to outsource to experts. Either way, fighting for your place in the digital environment should definitely be a top priority

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Blake Davies
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