The Technical SEO Specialist Guide: 12 Tips to Improve Site Ranking

Congratulations!
You too are trying to rank highly on the world wide web through SEO.
And guess what? You've arrived at the right place.
But how did we get here?
Well, this is something called Technical
SEO, a vital part of the whole SEO process.
Some site owners focus on traditional additional SEO,
such as keyword optimization, link building,
and user intent and forget the technical part of ranking a site.
That's the major. No, no.
And I'm here to tell you why.
Hey, guys, it's Cam here
from Neighbourhood where we help brands find, sell, and keep their people.
Traditional SEO is pretty important,
and we definitely recommend spending some time improving the technical SEO of your
site for better rankings and overall site health.
But, how do you do this?
Well, luckily for you,
we've compiled a detailed checklist together with the tools you need so you
can spend less time researching and more time kickin' back.
So let's lay down the foundation first.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a process of improving
all the elements on your page to ensure your website meets technical requirements
of present-day search engines to achieve high search rankings.
These elements include rendering, indexing, and crawling.
Traditional SEO deals with optimising your
content with relevant keywords, link building and generating traffic.
True to its name, Technical SEO focuses on optimising your site's technical aspects.
Okay, but what does that actually mean?
Well, it means search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing,
and other search engines can easily find and index your website.
It provides the search crawlers
with the correct information so they can understand your site structure.
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.
In short, a process to make sure people flock to your site.
Next, let's look at an SEO team. As a quick heads up,
you can't say you're an SEO specialist because you know the term 'keywords'.
I don't mean to start with you, but I'm not even an SEO professional
myself, though the technical SEO specialists on our
team are. You may have one or more team members with the following titles such as
Freelance SEO Specialist, SEO and Analytics Specialist,
or SEO Specialist and SEO Managers. Regardless of the title,
if they have about two to three years of experience in search engine
optimization, then you're likely in good hands.
Now that we've outlined the basics
of Technical SEO and we have assembled your team, it's time to take action.
Firstly, use HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate.
SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is the security protocol that encrypts
an Internet connection to safeguard data shared between two systems.
I know what you're thinking,
it isn't the sexiest piece of information
but to make encryption possible, you should get an SSL certificate.
SSL gives your site a HTTPS
identifier, which ensures that no one can
intercept the data that travels 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.
If more people leave your site, the search engine crawlers will know
a high bounce rate, which will 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 it from reputable
sites such as Cloudflare, GoGet, SSL and Instant SSL.
Secondly, make sure your site is mobile friendly.
Over 50% of global website traffic comes from your mobile devices,
so if your site is not mobile-friendly
or in other words, not optimised for mobile devices,
your rankings will go and unfortunately just drop.
You can always check if your site is mobile-friendly by using
the mobile-friendly test tool on Google search console.
If it's not, we definitely recommend looking for ways to make it mobile-friendly
by giving these suggestions a go: Choose a responsive web design.
Use button sizes large enough for mobile.
Ditch flash. Turn off autocorrect for forms. Use large but standard fonts.
Use a Viewport Meta tag. And look, if you aren't able to do this
solo Neighbourhood is always here to lend a hand.
Third, speed up your site.
No one enjoys a slow site, and Google bots aren't much different.
Let's agree that we aren't exactly
the type to patiently wait online, especially when there's literally
hundreds of other competitive sites to choose from.
To help retain your users and maintain traffic on your site,
make sure you improve your site speed
and test it using free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights,
GTM Metrics, Pingdom Tools, and Webpage Test.
Some useful tips for improving the speed of your website is to enable file
compression to reduce HTML, JavaScript and CSS file size.
Reduce redirects. Leverage browser caching so the browser won't have to reload
the entire page every time our visitor comes back.
Optimising your images to ensure they're
not larger than required or using CDNS or content distribution network
like Cloudflare that distributes the load off delivering content.
Fourth is getting rid of broken links in site errors.
At some point you would have come across the very unattractive Error 404 message.
The error message simply means that you
have a dead or broken link on your website.
Webcrawlers can detect even the most
hidden broken links because they follow every link present on your site.
Broken or dead links mean that there will be challenges
indexing your website pages since the crawlers can't actually organise them.
To fix this, perform a regular SEO
technical audit using an SEO audit tool such as SEMrush or Screaming Frog.
These tools will look for broken links,
errors, and other issues with your website so you can fix them up. Next,
use Canonical URLs to fix duplicate content issues.
Duplicate content refers to several web
pages that have the same content, yet slightly different titles.
This content on your site may be the cause
of some crawl budget issues that can affect your rankings,
and your site might even be removed from Google Index.
There's a pretty fine line between duplicate and similar content.
The best way to handle this issue is
by providing well optimised titles, meta descriptions,
H1 tags, and valuable links for every piece of unique content you have.
However, when that is unavoidable, use Canonical URLs. Canonical URLs
guide the search engines on the right web page to consider when indexing. To set up
Canonical URLs, use the Canonical tag,
but if you're using WordPress, install the Yoast SEO plugin.
It adds self-referencing Canonical Tags automatically,
but you'll have to set custom Canonicals in the advanced section.
Bit of a mouthful. Shopify also works the same for self-referencing tags.
Sixth on the list, we'd recommend creating an XML sitemap.
A sitemap makes it easy for Google to find your site and crawl the pages
as it acts as a roadmap showing Google around your website and the important
pages, even when your internal linking is anything but perfect
to get the lay of the land. You can create XML sitemaps using
the Yoast SEO plugin, both free and premium versions.
If your site has a few company URLs, you can create them manually.
Then, just submit it to Google through Google Search console.
If you have been using an XML sitemap
for the last couple of years, then it's definitely time to review
and make sure they represent your website correctly. At least once a month,
ask someone unfamiliar with your SEO
performance to search for things on your website.
This will help you identify any issues and fix them before it's too late.
Coming at seventh,
perform a backlink audit. While backlinks are essential for SEO,
broken links and those from spammy and manipulative sites can lead to sure
fire penalties and some pretty distasteful words thrown into the mix.
Additionally, we recommend you only link to authority sites
in your niche, which are reputable and with high domain authority.
Unfortunately though, you have no control over who can link
to you, and for this reason you should carry out a regular backlink audit.
This process involves thoroughly
evaluating your website to make sure no questionable site is linking to you.
One thing that you should avoid doing is using automated backlink programmes,
which could put your website at risk of being penalised,
such as spammy sites that are involved in black hat SEO tactics.
A bit like black magic
black hat tactics are a big no-no, and if you find these links connected
to such sites, contact the site and tell them to remove them ASAP.
If you're left on read though,
and you don't hear from them, you can proceed to disavow these links.
This will make them 'no-follow links'.
That means they will not affect Google's
opinion on your site and won't be considered when ranking it.
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delivered every week to your inbox. Number eight,
optimise internal links. Internal links are an essential SEO aspect because they
connect the different pages on your website
just like a dot-to-dot puzzle.
You should make sure there are no orphan
pages on your website, which are pages without any other pages linking to them.
The most useful internal links are those between pages that have a general concept.
For example,
if your article is about making an ice cream cake,
link it with other articles on the same topic. An example being,
"How to make chocolate ice cream cake" and, "How to make strawberry ice cream cake".
Optimising internal links can drive more
traffic to your website, but be careful not to overdo it.
Don't start creating links that have no relevance to the content.
This would only waste your site's link juice in search engines will perceive
it as a noisy web page, then affecting your site's rankings.
We'd also recommend ensuring all the links are working and the anchor texts are as
descriptive of the linked content as possible.
Next, add structured data to your website. Also known as Schema Markup,
structured data is basically the nuts and bolts to organise data.
It's a code used by search engines
to crawl, understand, organise, and display your content.
For instance, a recipe page with ingredients,
number of calories, temperature, and cooking time is structured.
You can find the standardised markup used
by major search engines such as Google and Bing on
Scheme.org.
Adding structured data doesn't directly improve your rankings.
Instead, Schema can give rich snippets to some
of your pages that are significant in the search engine results pages
and can therefore improve your CTR or click-through rate. More traffic to your
site sends good signals to Google, which can then improve your rankings.
Here's how to add structured data to your site:
create a Google search console account.
As a website owner,
it's your responsibility to follow through with the elements of search engine
optimization steps and not rely solely on professionals.
After all, this is your site right?
Register with Google Search Console.
The tool is free of charge and will help you monitor your sites performance
and give you details about how both sites perform.
Not only can it help you fix cooling
issues, but also monitor rankings and submit pages and sitemaps to Google.
This free tool gives you an inside look
at how Google sees your website, then, identify your preferred domain.
This should be clear from the beginning,
right from the time you're devising your website.
By identifying your preferred domain, you make it clear for the search engines
the variation of the domain you'd like to use through the life of your website.
For instance, a user can access a specific
website domain using the 'www' or without it.
This is different for the search engine
robots because they may consider these as two separate entities.
As a result, your website may face duplicate and indexing issues,
leading to a decrease in its rankings, which is why you must identify
and set your preferred domain and let the search engines know about your decision.
Finally, create and update the Robots text file.
The Robots.txt file is a file in your
website that gives the direction and instructions to the search engines
on which pages they should crawl and the ones that they shouldn't.
It looks like gibberish, but it is super powerful,
we promise. These instructions enable
the search engines to know exactly what pages to add into their index.
So in other words, it keeps a file off Google.
You should use the file to manage crawling
traffic to prevent your server from being overwhelmed by Google's crawlers requests
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.
Instead, protect them with a password or use no index to block search indexing.
By controlling the indexing of pages
on your site, you can prevent nonessential pages
from being indexed, thus improving your overall SEO.
So there you have it. Technical SEO might seem complicated
for new website owners, but that doesn't have to be the case.
As long as you implement the tips listed
above, your site will probably see a boost in rankings and a spike in traffic.
Most people concentrate on off and on-page SEO and forget
Technical SEO is also a significant factor
for ranking a website, and to be honest, we can't blame them.
It can be challenging for beginners.
Remember that most successful companies already know about SEO,
and they hire specialists who can handle their technical issues.
So take it slowly and be one of the companies that will stand above
the rest, making sure your site's Technical SEO is optimised to the max.
If you found this video helpful, feel free to share it with someone you
know who needs a hand with their SEO strategy.
You can also subscribe to our blog,
where you'll find a bunch more tools, tips, and templates to help help you find,
sell, and keep your people just like Neighbourhood does.
So that's it from me, happy marketing!