Technical SEO Made Simple : The 2020 Guide
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to facilitate its crawling, indexing and interpretation by search engines. Technical SEO goal is to optimize the infrastructure of a website and has nothing to do with its content. It is structured and systematically follows a set checklist of pass/or fail criteria
Technical SEO Checklist (8 easy Steps)
Use SSL
What is SSL?
SSL Stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” It is a secure protocol developed for sending information securely over the Internet. When installed on your server, your website can be accessed using https and not http which indicates that any information transferred between your website and server is encrypted. Any website on the Internet should have an SSL installed.
How to use SSL
It is now easier than ever to use HTTPS on your website. Most hosting companies offer either free SSL, including one-click SSL options (i.e. SiteGround, WPEngine) or paid SSL and will implement the certificates for you (i.e. GoDaddy).
Ensure your site is responsive
A responsive website design, also called mobile-friendly design, adjusts itself automatically to the size of the screen of your device.
Google has announced with its “mobile first” message that this is a major element in its ranking factors.
So, it is critical that you design for mobile first but do not forget the desktop version as conversions still happen over 50% on desktops. You will just have to do both to hook your potential customer on mobile and convert them on desktop.
Site Speed
Since the user experience and satisfaction is at the Core of Search Engines preoccupation, needless to say the Site speed is key.
It is no wonder when you check out the impact of loading times on bounce rates:
Source : Google/SOASTA research 2017
As a matter of facts there are numerous tools out there that calculate the impact of an additional second of loading time on your conversion rate. You can try Think with Google amongst others.
How to Increase your Speed
But for your information, here are some of the most common things your developer and IT guy will work on to increase your site speed :
- Use faster hosting. Sounds strange but not all hosts are equal and simply changing to a better performing one can help out significantly. It will more likely be more expensive than the one you have though, but it is a question of ROI.
- Use a fast DNS (‘domain name system’) provider
- Compress your image files using tools like shortpixel.com for example.
- Compress your web pages
- Optimize and minify your CSS and JS Files
- Remove duplicates in your content.
- Minimize the use of plugins
- Use a caching plugin to serve cached pages to users
- Avoid adding too many scripts in the <head> of your website
Create an XML sitemap
What is an XML sitemap?
These tools are free to install and use and will regularly update the sitemap automatically so you do not have to manually do anything each time you modify your website
Enable AMP
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP was developed by Google and Twitter to create better, faster experiences on the mobile web. Its framework allows you to build lightweight experiences for mobile by simplifying the HTML and stripping your content and code down to the minimum, disabling scripts, comments and forms but leaving text, images and video intact.
The use of AMP remains controversial still as many cases have demonstrated that sites could run faster without AMP.
Nonetheless in most cases it seems to help and since it is a Google creation, it sometimes highlights AMP pages in prominent carousels in search results – giving you an important search bump.
Add Structured data to your website
What is Structured Data?
Since search engines favor higher CTR sites, you will receive preferential treatment from them which will increase your traffic even further.
Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools from Google and Microsoft respectively that allow you to submit your website to their search engines for indexing.
You do so by providing your website XML Sitemap we covered above so that they can crawl your new site and start to display results from it in search results.
These services have also additional functions that are useful to look into such as: testing your site’s mobile usability, search analytics, viewing the backlinks to your site, etc…
Use the right tools
Alternatively Brian Dean published a very exhaustive list of SEO tools worth reviewing if you have the time.
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About Gilles Argivier
He is an International marketing expert and visionary entrepreneur.
For over 20 years, he has been entrusted by world class organizations as a driver of top and bottom line growth through transformational business development, brand’s sustainable strategy, product innovation and powerful online customer centric experiences
He owns and operates his marketing consultancy firm out of the US.
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