Everybody knows that content is King and backlinks are important for improving your website’s rankings in Google. However, what often goes overlooked is all of the technical tasks that go on in the back-end of your website; the unsung heroes of SEO if you like.
In this article, we’re going to share 8 technical SEO tasks that every business owner should know about and get on top of immediately.
Contents
1. Website security
You might assume that your website’s security has very little to do with your SEO but you’d be wrong. A sound, technically optimised website must be secure. This means securing your SSL certificate and implementing HTTPS.
2. Page load speed
53% of all mobile users will abandon your website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. And your conversions will drop even further for every additional second it takes to load.
Giddy up!
Google considers page load speed to be a very important ranking factor as slow websites mean a less than optimal experience.
3. Crawlability
Before Google can effectively rank your website, first it needs to successfully crawl and index your pages. The best way to help them achieve this as quickly as possible is to have a solid and intuitive internal linking structure.
Internal linking is a ranking factor, but more importantly: it helps your users navigate your website with greater ease.
4. No duplicate content
If you have duplicate content on your website (whether you know it or not) it could be confusing Google and hindering your potential.
Particularly if you have a multitude of product pages, you must ensure that the content within is unique, otherwise you will likely end up with all those pages being given less visibility as a result.
5. No (or few) dead links
When your users click on a link, expecting to end up on your website and encounter a non-existent page it will be terribly frustrating. Not only that, but it doesn’t paint a very good first impression.
You must endeavour to reduce the 404 error pages by redirecting the URL of deleted pages and/or removing links as necessary.
6. XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of all the pages and posts within your website; a roadmap of sorts. Get this right and you will ensure that Google never misses any content on your website. You can utilise various categories, sub-categories, and tags to organise your content, including your intuitive internal linking structure as mentioned above.
7. Hreflang tags
If you have an international website with multiple languages, you must give Google a hand so they can figure out which countries and languages you wish to target, primarily.
Hreflang tags help you in this regard as they can be used to define which countries and languages each page within your website has been designed to accommodate (e.g., SEO in Singapore).
8. Structured data
Structured data can be used to help Google better identify who you are and what you do. It also gives you an opportunity to provide Google with as much depth and detail about each individual product on your website as well – which means a greater chance at rich results in a Google SERP (search engine results page).
This is where Schema Markup comes in handy!
Final thoughts
As you can see there are many technical aspects to SEO, each of which is very important. Yes, you need a solid content creation game and a link-building strategy to boot, but without a well-optimised website, you’ll struggle to get anywhere on Google!
