Last Updated on August 10, 2024 by Nasir Hanif
In the intricate world of digital marketing, mastering the nuances of technical SEO is crucial for any business or practice aiming to enhance its online presence. Technical SEO, a fundamental component of search engine optimization, involves optimizing the infrastructure of a website to facilitate search engine crawling and indexing. A well-implemented technical SEO strategy ensures that your site is not just visible, but also efficiently interpretable by search engines, thus playing a pivotal role in your overall SEO performance.
However, technical SEO can often seem daunting due to its complex nature, encompassing aspects like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and secure connections. Neglecting these can lead to diminished search rankings and reduced online visibility. In this article, we’ll dive into straightforward, actionable strategies to tackle these technical challenges. By simplifying the complexities of technical SEO, we aim to equip you with effective tools to optimize your site’s structure, thereby boosting your business or practice’s search engine rankings and online effectiveness.
Table of Contents
How to do Technical SEO Simplified:
Purchase Expert SEO Site Tools
A critical step is leveraging expert SEO site tools. These tools demystify technical SEO, offering invaluable insights into your website’s performance and pinpointing areas for improvement. They serve as indispensable allies, guiding you through each stage of optimizing your site’s technical health. Let’s briefly examine three top-rated tools: Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz.
- Ahrefs: Renowned for its exceptional backlink analysis, Ahrefs also conducts comprehensive site audits to identify and suggest fixes for technical SEO issues. Its intuitive interface makes it ideal for both novices and experts aiming to boost their site’s SEO strength.
- SEMrush: SEMrush excels in keyword research and competitive analysis, providing detailed insights into how your site ranks for key terms and how to outperform competitors. Its strategic recommendations are crucial for enhancing your site’s SEO effectiveness.
- Moz: Famous for its domain authority metric, Moz offers comprehensive on-page optimization advice and robust link analysis tools. It’s particularly helpful for understanding and improving your site’s credibility and SEO performance.
These tools simplify technical SEO by offering step-by-step guidance, from identifying issues to implementing optimizations. With their help, the complex world of technical SEO becomes more navigable, ensuring your website adheres to best practices and improves its search engine rankings.
Preform Technical SEO Site Audit:
conducting a thorough site audit is a fundamental step in understanding and improving your website’s technical SEO. This process involves using a tool like Ahrefs, renowned for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive analysis capabilities. Here’s a simple guide on how to perform a site audit with Ahrefs:
- Start by copying the URL of your website.
- Navigate to Ahrefs and locate the ‘Site Audit’ feature in the header.
- Enter your website’s URL into the Site Audit tool and initiate the audit process.
Once the audit is complete, Ahrefs will present a detailed report outlining various technical SEO issues. This report helps you familiarize yourself with the problems affecting your site, offering clear directions on how to address them. Key issues to watch for include slow page speed, multiple H1 tags, structured data errors, duplicate content, oversized CSS files, lack of HTTPS security, and redirect chains. Ahrefs organizes these issues efficiently, displaying them under the “All Issues” section in the site audit, or in a summarized form in the “Overview” tab. This streamlined approach makes it straightforward to identify and prioritize fixes, guiding even beginners through the complexities of technical SEO optimization.
Learn How to 301 Redirect
Learning How to 301 Redirect is an essential skill for website management – setting up 301 redirects. This is particularly crucial if you’ve changed a URL on your website post-launch. Understanding how to implement a 301 redirect is vital to maintain your site’s SEO integrity and ensure a seamless user experience. Here’s a straightforward process to execute a 301 redirect:
- Log Onto Your Hosting Server: Access your hosting account on platforms like SiteGround or others.
- Backup Your Website: Preform a backup in the event that something happens to your website while preforming a redirect.
- Navigate to ‘Site’: Once logged in, find and click on the ‘Site’ option in the sidebar.
- Go to ‘File Manager’: In the ‘Site’ section, locate and select ‘File Manager’.
- Access ‘public_html’ Folder: Within ‘File Manager’, navigate to the ‘public_html’ folder.
- Edit ‘.htaccess’ File: Find and edit the ‘.htaccess’ file. This file is crucial for redirect settings.
- Enable ‘Rewrite Engine’: Ensure that ‘Rewrite Engine On’ is active. If not, enable it.
- Paste the Redirect Code: Below ‘Rewrite Engine On’, paste the appropriate redirect code.
- For general redirection, use:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.examplewebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://examplewebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This code redirects all outdated main page URLs to your current HTTPS one. Replace ‘examplewebsite.com’ with your website’s URL.
- To illustrate this with a real-life example from an actual website, consider this scenario from this website site:
Redirect 301 /local-dental-seo/ https://bestseofordentists.com/local-seo-for-dentists/
Here, any traffic going to ‘/local-dental-seo/’ (the old slug) will be redirected to the new page ‘https://bestseofordentists.com/local-seo-for-dentists/‘. This real-time example from ‘https://bestseofordentists.com‘ shows how specific page redirection works, ensuring users and search engines are guided to the correct and updated page URL.
This code is used when changing the slug of a page, like a blog or service page. Replace ‘old-page’ with the old slug and ‘new-page’ with the full current changed slug of the page. Note: in front of /new-page/, you paste your current url, so just copy and paste, whereas for /old-page/, we have Redirect 301 in front of it versus your website URL. These steps will effectively set up 301 redirects on your website, ensuring that any changes in URLs don’t disrupt the user experience or impact your SEO efforts negatively. Remember, correctly implemented redirects are key to maintaining link equity and search engine rankings when URLs change.
Create XML Site Map
Creating and submitting a sitemap is a fundamental step in technical SEO, crucial for ensuring that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your website. A sitemap is essentially a roadmap of your website, listing all important pages and content, making it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your site. This process is vital for improving your website’s SEO visibility and ensuring that all your content has the best chance of being ranked. Here’s a straightforward guide to creating and submitting your sitemap:
- Install Yoast SEO Plugin: First, download and activate the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress site. This plugin simplifies many SEO tasks, including sitemap creation.
- Access Yoast SEO Settings: Navigate to the Yoast SEO settings within your WordPress dashboard.
- View XML Sitemap: In Yoast SEO, click on the option to ‘View XML Sitemap’. Yoast will automatically generate a sitemap for your site.
- Copy Sitemap Links: The sitemap will likely be broken into multiple sections (posts, pages, etc.). Copy each sitemap link individually.
- Open Google Search Console: Go to Google Search Console, a free tool by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.
- Navigate to ‘Sitemaps’ Section: On the left-hand sidebar under ‘Indexing’, find and click on ‘Sitemaps’.
- Submit Each Sitemap Link: Paste each copied sitemap link into the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field and submit them one by one.
- Copy URL of Sitemap Page: Finally, copy the URL of the main sitemap page (found at the top search field of your XML sitemap page) and submit this URL in the same way.
By submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, you’re essentially inviting Google to crawl and index your website more effectively. This is essential for technical SEO as it ensures that search engines can easily find and understand all the content on your site, which is critical for achieving better search rankings and online visibility. Regularly updating and submitting your sitemap, especially after adding new content, keeps search engines up-to-date with your site, enhancing your SEO efforts.
Apart from this, if you are interested to know more about Decoding SEO then visit our Technology category
