If you’re running a website, it’s important to ensure you’re doing everything possible to optimize it for search engines. This means ensuring that your site is technically sound and following all the best practices for SEO. If you need assistance with your SEO, PPVW is the right choice. They always put the client first, and their team of expert SEO consultants can help you improve your website’s performance in search. And this blog post will walk you through the basics of technical SEO and show you how to do it the right way.
Make Sure Important Pages Are Crawlable
The first step in any technical SEO audit is to check that all of the most important pages on your website are crawlable by search engine bots. If you find any pages that are not crawlable, you’ll need to fix the errors causing this. Once you’ve done that, you can submit those pages to Google using the Fetch as Google tool in Search Console.
Avoid Long Redirect Chains
Redirect chains happen whenever there are many redirects between the starting URL and the destination. This can happen when a page is moved, and the URL is changed, but another change is made later, and the URL is changed again. Each time this happens, it creates an additional redirect. Long redirect chains can hurt your website. Each redirect adds additional time to the load time, and if there are too many redirects in a chain, it can slow things down.
Fix Broken Pages and Links
The first step in any technical SEO audit is identifying and fixing broken pages and links. This can be done using various tools, including Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Xenu’s Link Sleuth.
Clean Up Your Sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the pages on your website. It’s like a table of contents for your website that helps search engines index your pages. Once you have your sitemap, the next step is to go through and check that all the pages listed are pages that you want search engines to index. This includes removing any duplicate pages, thin content pages, and pages that are only accessible via search (known as “orphan pages”).
Disallow Pages With No SEO Value
The first step in your technical SEO audit is to add a “disallow” directive in your robots.txt file for any pages that don’t have SEO value. This includes things like your privacy policy, terms and conditions, contact us page, etc. Any pages that are not essential for getting indexed by Google should be disallowed.
Maintain Internal Linking Efficiency
Internal linking is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO, yet it’s often overlooked. Internal linking helps search engines understand your website structure and find new pages. It also helps distribute link equity (ranking power) throughout your website.
So there you have it – our top tips for technical SEO. While this is just a cursory overview, it should give you an idea of the things to consider when optimizing your website. Have you tried any of these techniques? What results did you see?