SEO is important for driving traffic to a website. Both technical SEO and non-technical SEO are essential for a comprehensive SEO strategy. While non-technical SEO focuses on creating valuable content and delivering a positive user experience, technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and understand a website. A combination of both is necessary to achieve optimal search engine visibility and rankings. In this blog post, we’ll define technical SEO and talk about ten common technical SEO issues that you should be on the lookout for. By understanding and addressing these issues, you can help ensure that your website is ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the aspects of SEO that focus on the technical aspects of a website. This includes things like site architecture, sitemaps, robots.txt files, redirects, and other behind-the-scenes factors. In order for your website to rank well in SERPs, it’s important that these technical aspects are configured correctly.
10 Technical SEO Issues to Watch Out for
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Site Speed
Site speed is one of the most important ranking factors for SEO. If your website takes too long to load, you will likely see a decrease in traffic and conversions. There are a few ways to improve your site speed, such as optimising images, minifying code, and using a content delivery network (CDN).
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Mobile-friendliness
Another important ranking factor is mobile-friendliness. More and more people are using their smartphones to access the internet. Google knows this and they have made it a priority to rank websites that are mobile-friendly higher in the search results. There are a few ways to make your website more mobile-friendly, such as using responsive design, keeping design simple, optimising images, adding click to call CTAs and even optimising for local search.
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Indexation
Indexation is the process of adding pages from your website to Google’s index so they can appear in the search results. If your pages are not indexed, they will not rank. Improve indexation by improving your page interlinking and submitting an XML sitemap to each search engine. Also be sure to use canonical tags.
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Duplicate content
Duplicate content can occur when there is more than one version of a page on your website (e.g., www vs non-www). This can cause problems with indexation and can also lead to penalties from Google. The best way to avoid duplicate content is to use canonical tags or redirects.
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SSL/HTTPS
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a protocol that encrypts data between two computers. HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) is the secure version of HTTP, which is the standard protocol for communication on the web. Google has said that HTTPS is a ranking factor, so it’s important to make sure your website is using this protocol if you want to rank higher in the search results. The way to do this is to install an SSL certificate on your server.
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Site Architecture
One of the most important aspects of technical SEO is site architecture. This refers to the structure of your website and how well it is organised. A well-organised website is easy for both users and search engine crawlers to navigate, which can help improve your SERP ranking.
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Sitemaps
Sitemaps are XML files that list all of the pages on your website. They help search engine crawlers index your site so that your pages can appear in search results. If you don’t have a sitemap, or if your sitemap isn’t up-to-date, it can negatively impact your ranking in SERPs.
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Txt Files
Robots.txt files tell search engine crawlers which pages on your website they should and shouldn’t index. If these files aren’t properly configured, it can result in low-quality pages being indexed in SERPs, which can drag down the ranking of your entire site.
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Redirects
Redirects are used to send users (and search engines) from one URL to another. For example, if you’ve changed the URL of a page on your website, you would use a redirect to send users from the old URL to the new one. If not done properly, redirects can result in errors which can hurt your SERP ranking.
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Canonicalisation
Canonicalization is the process of choosing the main, or canonical, URL for a piece of content. This means that Google displays one URL as the most important and representative when there are multiple pages with similar or identical content. By doing this, Google avoids displaying duplicate versions of the same content in its search results.
Technical SEO plays an important role in determining how well your website ranks in SERPS. By addressing these issues, you can improve your website’s ranking and get more traffic and conversions.
If you’re like most business owners, you know that SEO is important, but you don’t have the time to learn about it or do it yourself. That’s where our team of experts comes in. Contact us today if you’d like to see how we can help you improve your online presence.