Optimizing your website for SEO consists of three main strategies. These are known as off-page SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO.
Many SEO professionals consider technical SEO a part of on-page SEO but it’s all about structuring your site so webmasters find it easy to crawl. Here are six things you can do to fix technical SEO on your site:
1. Install a Sitemap
To direct search engines towards the pages that should be crawled on your site, install a sitemap which is a file kept in the site’s backend listing all the pages a visitor can access.
You can check if a sitemap has already been installed by adding “sitemap_index.xml” at the end of your page’s link.
Here’s what the MediaOne sitemap looks like:
Image Source: No attribution required
It looks neat and arranged because it’s generated by the SEO plugin Yoast. Some sitemaps like the one from Forbes aren’t as structured.
Image Source: No attribution required
When you start a new website, one very common problem you might face is indexing issues, you can fix this by creating a sitemap and submitting to Google.
To submit the sitemap, you must be logged into Search Console. Then click the sitemap option by the left bar.
Image Source: No attribution required
If you host images or videos on your website(and you shouldn’t do this without a very good server so you don’t slow your site), you also need a sitemap but this won’t be necessary if you’re hosting videos on YouTube.
2. Get a Clear Link Structure
The first thing you should do before fixing the link structure on your site is analyzing the existing links and you can do this easily with Ubersuggest.
Enter your website into the search bar and head to the Backlinks section.
Image Source: No attribution required
The key metrics you should be looking at are your total backlinks, the number of referring domains, follow and nofollow links.
These metrics give you an idea of the kind of link structure you have on your site and they’ll highlight how well you’ve been following the SEO best practices.
At various points on your website, you will either link to other pages on your own website (internal links) or you will link to other websites that are relevant to your content or message (external links). The external links give Google an idea of the kind of link neighbourhood you’re involved in.
Link to the high-authority sites in your industry to fix this.
Your internal link provides an opportunity for you to create a silo-structure to your links, so link from the in-depth posts on your site to shorter posts on the same topic or other pages with a related topic.
Your headline tags, alt tag, meta tag, and URL/permalink tag provide ways for you to describe what happens on your page from the backend.
There are six headline tags you can use on your website. They range in hierarchy from H1 (heading 1) right down to H6 (heading 6). For example, H1 is your title tag. It’s what people see on Google so make sure it has your primary keyword which should be as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
Your alt tag is used to describe your images so make sure it includes a keyword you’re trying to rank for.
Your meta tag is the little description of your page that you see below your title.
Image Source: No attribution required
It should include your primary keyword (that appears bold in the example) and a call-to-action that makes people want to click to know more.
Finally, your permalink tag should include your keyword yet remain so descriptive that people have an idea of what that page discussed without clicking.
Image Source: No attribution required
4. Monitor Search Engine Spider Activity on your Website
A very good way to understand how your site is structured is looking at how Google crawls your site. If it’s seamless, you’re fine, but if you keep getting crawl errors, there’s a problem.
Check for crawl errors by looking at the crawl stats in your Search Console.
Image Source: No attribution required
If the number of pages crawled per day is always low (you can check this by comparing with the number of pages indexed on your site), you know you have a problem.
Google assigns every website what is called a “crawl budget”. This is the amount of pages Google allocates its resources to crawl each day. The higher the number of crawl errors, the quicker you’ll exhaust your crawl budget.
Server errors can cause crawl errors, and you can check this by using a function called “Fetch as Google” in your Search Console.
404 errors appear when you link to a page that’s no longer live, so you should continuously scan your site for broken links.
5. Secure Your Site
The first thing you should do on your site is getting an SSL certificate. Google is getting very serious about that and sites without one display a pop-up to intending visitors.
Image Source: No attribution required
Many SEO professionals speculate that Google may consider it a ranking factor.
If you’re on WordPress, you should consider installing a defense/security plugin.
There are several attempts made daily to hack your site and there are plugins that come with ad-embedded viruses. A website security plugin help you handle all these attempts to corrupt your website.
6. Install Plugins Only When Necessary
There are many things a plugin can do on your website but you should confirm if it’s something a few lines of code can handle.
If you can’t handle code yourself, you should consider hiring an SEO team to get it done.
Here are some plugins you’ll always need on your site so don’t feel bad if you have one of these installed.
#1. A Contact Form
Except it’s a personal or anonymous hobby blog where you just publish your thoughts and don’t care about feedback from visitors, you’ll need a contact form so people can reach you.
#2. A Backup/Restoration Plugin
Sometimes you can mess with code on your site and accidentally break something. There are plugins available that will easily restore the previous version of your website so you can get everything back.
Also, if your site gets hacked, a backup plugin protects you from losing all your hard work.
#3. An SEO Plugin
Most of the things discussed in this post like your tags and sitemap file can be handled if you have a plugin for SEO installed on your site. They help take care of the on-page and technical SEO side of things.
#4. An Optimization Plugin
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Image and Video files can take up a lot of space on your server. An optimization plugin helps you reduce the sizes of these heavy files.
Conclusion
There’s a lot involved in technical search engine optimization and you can use the tips in this post to get started with yours. Get in touch us today for the best SEO services in Singapore. Our team will work tirelessly to ensure that you get the best results online.
