Technical SEO: 10 Tips for Improving Site Rankings

Intro

Technical SEO involves improving all the technical aspects of your website to meet the requirements of today's search engines and achieve high search rankings. These elements often include rendering, indexing, and crawling. Traditional SEO deals with optimizing your content with relevant keywords, link building, and generating traffic, but technical SEO, however, focuses on optimizing your site's technical aspects.

This means you’re helping search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to easily find and index your website. In this way, search crawlers would be able to understand the structure of your site far better.

Technical SEO aims to provide an excellent user experience to improve click-through rates and reduce bounce rates while ensuring your site is secure to safeguard your site's visitors' personal information.

Now that we've outlined the basics of Technical SEO, it's time to take action.

1. Use HTTPS & an SSL certificate:

SSL Secure Sockets Layer is the security protocol that encrypts an internet connection to safeguard data shared between two systems. To make encryption possible, you need an SSL certificate.

SSL gives your site an HTTPS identifier, which ensures no one can intercept the data traveling between your browser and the website. Without it, Google will show a 'Not Secure' warning when someone visits your site, which I'm sure we can both agree on, doesn't give off the best look, and they'll likely just hit the back button.

“I have implemented several strategies to improve site performance. One of my favorite, and often under-utilised tactic, is using HTTP headers to canonicalize one URL to another. This is particularly powerful for websites that have PDFs that get a lot of backlinks (for example, a research paper).

HTTP headers can be used to canonicalize one document to another in SEO by utilizing the rel=canonical attribute in the HTTP header. This attribute specifies the preferred version of a web page when multiple versions exist, such as with duplicate content or similar pages. By including a rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header of the non-preferred page, you can instruct search engines to index and rank the preferred version, consolidating link equity and avoiding potential penalties for duplicate content.

My preferred method of doing this is by creating an HTML version of the PDF, or finding a very closely related page that has a lot of the same information, and passing the link equity from the PDF to my preferred page via the HTTP header.

I once implemented this on a website that had links to a bunch of PDFs - and this resulted in a +20% increase in organic traffic, as the link equity passing through the site was much better utilised.” Blake Smith (Digital Marketing Consultant @ Blake Smith SEO Consulting)

If many visitors leave your site as a result, the search engine crawlers will notice a high bounce rate, which will, in turn, affect your rankings. Additionally, Google now uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. To use HTTPS, you'll need to install an SSL certificate. We recommend getting one from reputable sites such as Cloudflare, GoGetSSL, and InstantSSL. Some hosting sites even offer free SSL certificates for domains hosted with them.

2. Mobile-Friendly Site:

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

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Over 50% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices, so if your site is not mobile-friendly or, in other words, not optimized for mobile devices, your rankings will be adversely affected.

“I think optimizing for mobile nowadays is not an option anymore, it's a necessity. We've seen significant improvements in our site's visibility on Google simply by focusing on making our mobile site faster. Google Lighthouse has been an invaluable tool for helping us prioritize text loading before heavier elements like images or videos.

Simply doing this has improved our website's load times drastically, which directly contributed to better rankings on Google. We've seen some of our articles climb to the first page of search results!” – Precious Abacan (Digital Marketing Manager, Softlist.io)

You can always check if your site is mobile-friendly by using the Google search console’s mobile-friendly test tool. If it's not, try some of these suggestions to make it mobile-friendly:

• Choose a responsive web design.
• Use button sizes large enough for mobile.
• Turn off autocorrect for forms.
• Use large but standard fonts.
• Use a Viewport meta tag.

3. Speed Up Your Site:

No one likes a slow site, including Google. Online, you’d agree most of us aren’t patient. To retain visitors and maintain traffic, your site’s speed is important. Some PBN hosting providers, for example, focus on optimizing their servers for speed. Fast-loading websites are generally favored by search engines and contribute to better rankings. You can test your site’s speed using free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools, and WebPageTest.

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Some additional tips for enhancing your website’s speed include:

• Enable file compression to reduce HTML, JavaScript, and CSS file size
• Reduce redirects
• Use browser caching so the browser won't have to reload the entire page every time a visitor comes back
• Optimize your images to ensure they're not larger than required
• Use CDNs or content distribution networks like Cloudflare to distribute the load of delivering content.

4. Get rid of broken links and site errors:

You've probably seen a 404 message when browsing the web. When it’s shown on your site, it means you have a dead or broken link present. Web crawlers can detect even the most hidden broken links because they follow every link on your site.

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Having broken or dead links means there will be challenges when indexing your website pages since the crawlers can't organize them. To fix this, perform a regular technical audit using an SEO audit tool such as Ranktracker, SEMrush or Screaming Frog. These tools will look for broken links, errors, and other issues with your website so you can fix them.

5. Use Canonical URLs to fix Duplicate Content Issues:

Duplicate content refers to several web pages with the same content. Such pages may be the cause of some crawling issues affecting your rankings, and can even get your site removed from Google Index.

The best way to handle this issue is by having well-optimized titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, and valuable links for every piece of unique content you have. However, when duplicate content is unavoidable, use Canonical URLs. Canonical URLs guide search engines on the right web page to consider when indexing.

To set up Canonical URLs, use the Canonical tag. If you're using WordPress, install the Yoast SEO plugin; it adds self-referencing Canonical Tags automatically, and you can set custom Canonicals in the advanced section.

6. Create an XML Sitemap:

A sitemap makes it easy for Google to find your site and crawl the pages on it. It acts as a roadmap – showing Google around your website and the important pages – even when your internal linking isn’t perfect.

You can create XML sitemaps using free and premium Yoast SEO plugin versions. If your site has few URLs, you can create sitemaps manually and submit them to Google through the Google Search console.

It might be time to review and ensure that your XML sitemaps accurately represent your website if you have been using one for some time.

7. Perform a backlink audit:

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While backlinks are essential for SEO, broken links, and links from manipulative and spam sites can lead to harsh penalties. Unfortunately, you have no control over who can link to you, which is why you should carry out a regular backlink audit. This process entails a thorough evaluation of your website to make sure no questionable site is linking to you.

One thing you should avoid is using automated backlink programs – such as spammy sites involved in black hat SEO tactics – which would put your website at risk of being penalized. If you find these spam links connected to your site, contact the website and tell them to remove them. And if you don't hear from them, you can proceed to disavow the links. Doing this will make them 'no-follow links' – meaning they will not affect Google's opinion of your site and won't be considered when ranking it.

Additionally, link only to authority sites in your niche that are reputable and have high domain authority.

And yes, you can use Rankracker to run a backlink audit.

8. Optimize Internal Links:

Internal links are an essential SEO aspect because they connect the different pages on your website. The most useful internal links are those between pages related to a general concept. For example, if your blog post is about SEO, link it with other articles on the same topic. Examples are "How to perform an SEO audit” and, "How to create an SEO checklist".

“Prezly has a massive backlog of articles from over the last decade, and while many of them are excellent, some aren't SEO-optimized. We are doing internal audits to identify articles that may have cannibalized each other and turning them into more comprehensive guides instead of smaller, less optimized articles.

This is great for our readers because they get all the necessary information on one page. It's also better for SEO because we have fewer articles that rank higher instead of a lot of smaller articles that don't rank nearly as well.

One example is our recently published mega-guide on PR contact management. We took several smaller articles and weaved them together to make this comprehensive guide on all things media list management.” – Katelynn Sortino (Content Marketer @ Prezly)

Optimizing internal links can drive more traffic to your website, but avoid creating links that have no relevance to the content. Doing this would only waste your site's link value and adversely affect your site's rankings. Ensure all the links are working and the anchor texts describe the linked content as much as possible.

Also, avoid orphan pages on your website i.e., pages without any other pages linking to them.

9. Add structured data to your website (a.k.a. Schema markup)

Structured data (also called Schema markup) represents how data is organized. It's a code used by search engines to crawl, organize, and display your content. For instance, a page with SEO tools, their advantages, disadvantages, and prices, is structured.

You can find the standardized markup used by search engines such as Google and Bing on Schema.org. Adding structured data doesn't directly improve your rankings. Instead, Schema provides rich snippets for some pages that are significant in search engine results pages and can thus improve CTR.

More traffic to your site sends good signals to Google, which in turn improves your rankings. Here's how to add structured data to your site:

1. Create a Google Search Console Account

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The tool is free and will help monitor your site's performance and give you details about technical issues. Not only can it help you fix crawling issues, but it can also monitor rankings and submit pages and sitemaps to Google. This free tool gives you an inside look at how Google sees your website.

2. Select your Preferred Domain

Identifying your preferred domain makes it clear to the search engines the variation of the domain you'd like to use throughout the life of your website. For instance, a visitor can access a specific website domain using 'www' or without it. This is different for search engine robots because they may consider these as two separate entities. As a result, your website may face duplicate and indexing issues. This is why you must identify and set your preferred domain and let the search engines know.

10. Create and update the Robots.txt File

The Robots.txt file is a file on your website that gives directions and instructions to the search engines on which pages they should crawl and those they shouldn't. These instructions help search engines to know exactly what pages to add to their index. So in other words, it keeps a file off Google. The file is often used to prevent Google from crawling similar or unimportant pages on your site.

However, you should not use it to hide pages from search results. If other pages point to the pages you've hidden, Google can still crawl them without visiting them. Instead, use a password to protect them or use ‘no index’ to block search indexing. Controlling the indexing of pages on your site prevents nonessential pages from being indexed, thus improving your overall SEO.

Conclusion

Technical SEO might seem complicated for new website owners, but as long as you implement the tips listed above, your site will see a boost in rankings and added traffic.

The majority of successful companies already know about SEO, and they hire technical specialists who can handle their technical issues. So take it slowly and be one of the companies that will stand above the rest, by making sure your site's Technical SEO is optimized to the max.