Welcome to the third post in our new blog series focusing on SEO for Start up businesses, today we are focusing on Technical SEO.
Technical SEO forms the backbone of your website's visibility and performance in search engine results. Here’s a detailed guide on key technical SEO practices to enhance your site's health and search ability:
1. Conducting a Technical SEO Audit
Performing a comprehensive technical SEO audit is crucial to identify issues impacting your site's performance. Audit tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console can help assess metadata, site structure, indexing, and more. This audit provides insights into areas needing improvement to boost SEO effectiveness.
2. Finding and Fixing Broken Links, Redirect Chains, etc.
Broken links and redirect chains can harm user experience and SEO. Use tools to scan for broken links and promptly redirect them to relevant pages. Ensure all internal and external links are functioning correctly to maintain site integrity and improve navigation.
3. Fixing Status Code Errors like 404 (Broken Page)
Addressing status code errors, such as 404 pages, ensures users and search engines don’t encounter dead ends. Customise 404 pages with helpful navigation links or redirects to keep visitors engaged and maintain SEO authority.
4. Improving Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Optimise page speed and core web vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Compress images, minify CSS/JS files, leverage browser caching, and use content delivery networks (CDNs) to enhance user experience and SEO rankings.
5. Ensuring Your Website is Indexable and Crawlable
Configure robots.txt to guide search engine crawlers on which pages to index or exclude. Use meta robots tags to control indexing instructions on individual pages and ensure important content is accessible for crawling.
6. Optimizing Your Robots.txt File
Fine-tune your robots.txt file to direct crawlers efficiently. Specify directories and files to exclude from indexing, ensuring sensitive information or duplicate content doesn’t dilute SEO efforts.
7. Creating and Optimising XML Sitemaps
Generate XML sitemaps to outline your site's structure and help search engines crawl and index content more effectively. Include priority levels and update frequencies for pages to prioritize crawling of important content.
8. Ensuring Your Site is Secure with SSL and HTTPS
Secure your website with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption and migrate to HTTPS. A secure connection builds trust with users and is a ranking factor for search engines, enhancing both security and SEO performance.
9. Ensuring Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
Optimise your site for mobile devices with responsive design principles. Ensure content is readable and navigable on smaller screens, enhancing user experience and meeting Google’s mobile-first indexing criteria.
10. Adding Schema Markup and Hreflang
Implement schema markup to enhance search engine understanding of your content. Use structured data to highlight key information like reviews, events, or FAQs. Implement hreflang tags for multilingual and international SEO to direct users to the correct language version of your site.
11. Finding and Fixing Duplicate Content Issues
Identify and resolve duplicate content across your site to avoid SEO penalties. Canonical tags, 301 redirects, or consolidating similar content can consolidate authority and ensure search engines prioritise the correct version of your pages.
12. Improving Site Structure for Search Engines and Users
Optimise site structure with intuitive navigation and URL hierarchy. Organise content into categories and subcategories, utilizing breadcrumbs and internal linking to enhance usability and guide search engines to prioritise and index important pages effectively.
Implementing these technical SEO practices ensures your website is optimised for search engines and provides a seamless user experience. Regularly monitor and update these elements to maintain visibility and ranking in search results, driving organic traffic and achieving long-term SEO success.
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