As many of us know, SEO is a vast field that covers hundreds of elements. These elements each contain various levels of importance when it comes to organic rankings on Google.
The importance of keyword density, unique page copy and having a strong authority is well known. However, there are a number of technical elements that are less known. Our top 5 technical SEO tips will provide useful insight to boost your SEO campaign going forward.
Case Sensitivity is Important:
It is great that you have a Google Sitemap file, which has also been submitted through your Search Console account. If the URLs fail to match up perfectly to your live webpages though, you will be suffering an SEO nightmare. For example, your ‘About Us’ page might contain the ‘www.mysite.com/about-us‘ URL but, if your sitemap contains the following URL – ‘www.mysite.com/About-Us‘ then Google will see this as a broken link, which can hinder your organic progress.
Ensure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly:
In 2022, mobile phones generated 66% of all website traffic. If your website is not yet mobile friendly, it is essential that you upgrade as soon as possible. When it comes to indexing webpages for ranking, Google uses mobile-first indexing. This makes it more important than ever that your site is compatible on mobile devices.
You can check if your website is suitable for mobile usage via Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Additional data can also be found within the “Mobile Usability” section in Google Search Console.
Use HTTPS:
Google takes security extremely seriously, which is why tend to show a stronger preference for HTTPS. HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP and helps protect sensitive user information like passwords and credit card details from being compromised. If your website is not already secure, you can do this by installing an SSL certificate. This will authenticate the identity of your website and will establish a secure connection when users are accessing it.
Once you have moved your website over to HTTPs, it is vital that you add 301 redirects from the old HTTP version of your pages to the new HTTPS location. This will automatically redirect any users entering the HTTP version to the new secure version.
301 Redirects:
Thinking of having a new website or upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS? If so, it is vital that any URLs that are being updated/removed from your old site have 301 redirects placed upon them. This will ensure that the online history and organic rankings that the page has achieved will be retained.
We’ve lost track at the number of times that webmasters have updated their site and failed to use 301 redirects. This has led to organic decreases being suffered on the search engines. It also means that any backlinks that they had previously gained into their old pages were no longer offering any value due to those pages/URLs no longer existing.
In short, placing a 301 redirect on an old URL will inform the search engines that the page still exists but it has been moved to a new location. So, for example, if your ‘Products’ page moved from ‘www.mysite.com/Products’ to ‘www.mysite.com/BuyProducts’, the 301 redirects will tell Google that the page is still live but has simply moved to a different URL. If anyone tries to visit the old URL then they are immediately redirected into the new page. This will help retain your organic rankings, retain visitors and, in general, enable your website to continue to run effectively.
Page Speed is Important:
We have all attempted to visit a website only to become frustrated with how slowly the page takes to load. Subsequently, we go elsewhere instead. It is clear that having a fast loading website is essential to help achieve online success. Not just in terms of organic ranking but only by offering a superior user-experience.
Ideally, you want your webpages to be loading around 2-4 seconds, and you can check your current desktop and mobile speeds by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool. You can also use the website speed test by Pingdom Tools, which provides additional information on your chosen page’s load speed.
So, that concludes our top 5 technical SEO tips. Of course, we could go on but, as there are literally hundreds of different SEO related elements that Google analyses then we would be here all day if we covered them all.
