If you own a business website, you may be aware of some of the aspects of search engine optimization. However, when you hear a word like "technical SEO," you may feel as though you are out of your league.
It is essential to understand that there is so much more to search engine optimization other than backlinks, keywords and content length. In fact, without the proper technical SEO efforts, your content may never see it to the top of the search engine rankings.
This article is designed to show you some of the subtler aspects of technical SEO and a few tips that you can put into action today that will help your website rank well.
One of the first things we need to cover is understanding precisely what technical SEO actually is. It is not as difficult to understand as you might expect. The technical aspect includes ensuring that a web site loads quickly, is mobile friendly, and has optimized images. Also, the site should have an SSL certificate, proper site structure, and can be crawled and indexed quickly and correctly. Basically, consider it almost everything outside of the physical content on the site.
Now that you have a better understanding of what technical SEO is, you can put that into action on your own site. Don't worry, we are going to take small steps, and nothing you can do here is going to break your site!
Let's get started with one of the most critical and most straightforward steps. You need to ensure that your website is mobile friendly and responsive. This is an absolute must, and if it is not, you are losing a whole lot of search traffic.
Websites that are not mobile friendly are getting penalized by the search engines. This happened in 2015 with one of the many updates to the Google search algorithm. Considering a vast number of people use a wide variety of mobile devices to search, you want to make sure your website is visible to all of them.
If you are unsure if your website has been optimized for the onslaught of mobile devices in the market, there are some easy ways to check. One of the best is to go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, which will show you if you meet their standards. If not, you can have your team make the necessary upgrades or do them yourself.
There is no question that internet users have an alarmingly short attention span. It is getting harder to keep internet users engaged, they want instant gratification. If you have a website that loads slow, you are going to have a higher than average bounce rate. This is from all of the individuals who are hitting the back button on their browser because the page is loading slower than it should.
Google and other search engines have begun to penalize pages that load slow and have high bounce rates. There are actually a few easy fixes for this problem. However, you need to understand why your page is loading so slow. This can be done with a number of online tools including PageSpeed Insights from Google as well as GTmetrix.
Find out what is causing your page to load slowly and have it fixed as soon as possible.
Finally, one of the easiest and quickest fixes for your technical SEO issues to ensure that you have an SSL certificate for your website. In the past, this was not really a needed component to anything other than e-commerce websites. However, Google now considers SSL certificates a ranking factor. While they will not take you from page three to the top spot, they will help.
These can easily be purchased from GoDaddy, Namecheap, and various web hosting providers. It is an effective and inexpensive way to help give your website a small edge above the competition.
The vast majority of business owners skip over technical SEO in favor of producing more content and worrying about off-page SEO. However, several small tweaks to the technical aspects of your site could be the difference in several places on the ranking page. Take some time today and analyze your website for areas that could be tweaked with some simple improvements.