Technical SEO.

Getting technical.

Your site needs to be technically optimised.

While keyword SEO has a strong focus on your page content, technical SEO works hard behind the scenes to ensure that your website can be efficiently crawled and indexed by search engines.

It can appear a little more elusive from the outset, but adhering to common areas of technical best practice is a solid foundation for any website.

Ensure you are using HTTPS.

HTTPS encryption has been a ranking factor for websites since 2014 and is now the standard across the internet.

If you’re still running on HTTP, we’d recommend making the change ASAP.

You can check if your site is running HTTPS by looking at the browser bar. If your site is displaying a small padlock next to the website address, you’re all good. If not, it’s time to contact your IT department!

Check for duplicate versions of your site in Google’s index.

It’s important to only allow search engines to index one version of your website, as they don’t look kindly upon duplicated content.

The most common choice is https://www.domain.com but your company might also use a number of similar addresses, such as:

• https://domain.com
• http://www.domain.com
• http://www.domain.co.uk
• https://domain.com

All of these alternative addresses should be a 301 redirect to the main site, rather than a copy of it. You can check this by entering the alternate addresses into the address bar and seeing if you are redirected.

Find and fix any crawl errors on your website.

Crawl errors occur when a search engine fails at reaching pages on your website.

The goal of the search engine is to be able to locate, read and index all the pages of your website, and if it can’t do that, crawl errors occur.

Both Google and Bing offer powerful search tools to allow you to identify and fix any crawl errors on your site. Be sure to take the time to rectify any errors that you uncover this way, as they all contribute to the good SEO health of your website.

Improve your site speed.

The days of dial-up are long gone and both users and search engines now demand fast, efficient websites.

Nobody is waiting around for a slow website anymore and Google has confirmed that page speed is becoming an increasingly important page ranking factor going forwards.

You’ll find slow-loading pages flagged in crawls by your auditing tools, and you can gain more specific information by utilising the Google PageSpeeds Insight tool.

Fix internal and outbound links.

Seeing the words ‘page not found’ can really grind our gears, and it turns out that Google and Bing feel the same way.

Broken links hamper a positive user experience and search engines reflect this in their rankings.

Your site audit will include a list of broken internal and outbound links.

You should fix these by either redirecting thyme to the right page or removing the link entirely.

Find and fix HTTP links on HTTPS pages.

HTTPS was initially adopted as an extra level of security for sensitive information online, such as passwords and financial transactions.

In the past ten years, it has been adopted as the standard for most websites, with Google flagging up any sites that don’t hold an SSL certificate as potentially unsafe.

Most sites have fallen in line and beefed up their security, but many have also failed to update their internal links to reflect the new HTTPS prefix. Even if there is a redirect in place, you should aim to get all of these links updated ASAP.

If it’s only a handful of links, these can be done manually within WordPress.

However, if you’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of broken links, we’d recommend updating page templates or running a search and replace on the database.

Make sure your website is optimised for mobile viewing.

More and more page views are coming via our mobile phones now, and Google responded to this shift by switching to mobile-first indexing on all sites in 2019.

Mobile-friendliness is set to be a key factor in Google’s page experience update and failing to provide a positive smartphone user experience could see your organic visibility taking a major hit.

Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool is a great first step to seeing how your site measures up on the small screen.

Use an SEO-friendly URL structure.

Using an SEO-friendly site structure allows search engines to more easily navigate your site and find out what it’s all about.

A few simple changes can make a real difference to your rankings.

For example, https://www.domain.com/hamster-cages is more likely to be flagged as the area of your website dealing with small animal abodes than https://www.domain.com/category.php?id=28.

Use hyphens in your URLs to separate words and avoid underscores.

It’s also advisable to keep your URLs as short as possible, as research suggests that shorter URLs tend to rank more favourably, but this is not always the case as long-tail URLs can help the search engines better understand your site structure.

Add structured data to your website.

Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.

For example, on a selling page, you’d find an item description, a price and shipping costs. Search engines use this data to make our browsing experience more seamless and enjoyable.

Structured data can help your website stand out in organic listings, and you’d be surprised to see what elements can be used.

Google’s structured data testing tool will let you know if your site is currently utilising any structured data.

Check the page depth of your site.

Your site should be structured to allow users to find the information that they’re looking for as easily as possible, preferably within just three clicks.

The deeper a page is, the less likely it is to be found by visitors or search engines.

If you find that key information on your website is more than three clicks deep, it’s time to reassess your site structure. You will find a list of pages that need more than three clicks to be reached in the issues section of your site audit report.

Check temporary 302 redirects.

A 302 redirect is used when a page or site has temporarily been moved.

This typically happens when you are updating or redesigning a webpage, or if you want to test out a new page without hurting the rankings from the original.

The key feature is that it is temporary, and any redirects that are to be permanent should be upgraded to 301s.

Find and fix redirect chains and loops.

A good redirect should go straight from page A to page B, without any unnecessary detours.

It shouldn’t take users via any unnecessary stops (a redirect chain) or subject them to an infuriating loop. Once highlighted, these should be quickly resolved.