Technical SEO is the practice of improving a website’s technical capabilities to boost the ranking of its pages. Essentially, technical optimization involves speeding up the website, making it easier to crawl, and finally, making a website more comprehensible to search engines. All this impacts the incoming organic traffic. After all, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic searches.
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Regardless of the industry your brand is in, the principles of technical SEO hold great importance. So, to help you put your best technical SEO foot forward, here is our curated technical SEO checklist 2023. Following this will help your website rank on the top pages of Google.
Importance of Technical SEO for Website Optimization
It is true that search engines are getting better at crawling, indexing, and comprehending websites. However, they still need little assistance to do that, without which, they have a hard time figuring out what a website is all about.
By improving the technical aspects of a website, you can enable search engines to quickly understand your website, and even obtain higher rankings. After all, every search engine wants to present its users with the best and most relevant results for their specific search queries, and technical SEO is the surefire way to ensure your website fulfills the requirements.
All of the elements that make your website more intuitive, fast, easy to use, and user-friendly are included in technical SEO. Without incorporating technical SEO elements, you may have a website that loads slowly or doesn’t route customers to the information they are looking for.
The Technical SEO Checklist every Website Should Follow
Technical SEO involves everything needed to ensure that your website has all the technical elements that search engines prefer. This includes a quick loading time, a responsive design, and a secured network.
Below we will look at the factors that serve as a checklist to make sure your technical SEO is up to the mark.
1. Website Structure
Website structure refers to the hierarchy of web pages on your website and how each page is connected. This structure is very important as it impacts both user experience as well as search engine rankings.
A good website structure makes sure that search engines can easily find and index all important pages. It also spreads authority throughout the web pages via internal links. Remember that internal linking is an additional highly efficient method for enhancing website navigation and SEO; for a comprehensive guide, visit here.
Imagine yourself entering someone’s house for the first time. You wouldn’t know where the bedroom or the kitchen is. However, you know from context that there must be a bed in the bedroom and a cooktop in the kitchen. Now, imagine you walk into the kitchen and find a bed next to the cooktop. Won’t it leave you confused and wondering if the place you just entered is a bedroom or a kitchen?
Well, this is quite similar to search engines coming across a disorganized website. If the website structure does not make sense, Google will not understand the purpose of its web pages. Consequently, it will not rank the website web pages in the search results.
So, make sure to follow a good website structure with a proper internal linking strategy. Here are a few tips for ensuring a well-structured website:
- Strategically using internal linking
- Create a flat website architecture
- Have an easy-to-follow navigation menu
- Use HTML and XML sitemaps
Below is an example of a good and bad website structure.
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2. On-page Optimization
On-page optimization refers to the analysis and improvement of several on-page aspects of a website including:
• Content of the page: The content of every webpage is what makes it worthy of a high search result position. Therefore, it is important to create good content. And from an SEO perspective, good content fulfills two traits:
- it supplies demand and
- is highly linkable.
• Title tags: The title tag is what appears within the search engine results, right below the URL. These title tags must be on-brand, highly attention-grabbing, and well-optimized for keywords.
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• Headings: Just like title tags, headings must be compelling, creative, and front-loaded with keywords. All H1s, H2s, and H3s must be well-optimized to draw the attention of the target audience.
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• Internal links with optimized anchor text: Internal links are high-impact elements for effective on-page optimization. They enable link equity to seamlessly flow throughout the site and optimized anchor text helps to boost conversion metrics too.
• Image alt text: Alt text describes the content of graphic images. Optimizing this text is important for visually impaired users. Using descriptive alt text also helps to boost search rankings.
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3. Technical Optimization
Next on the list of the technical SEO checklist 2023 is technical optimization, which plays a pivotal role. There are three key technical components of a website that can be optimized:
• Server speed: Website load times play a pivotal role in a page’s ranking. Search engines use it to evaluate web pages for ranking purposes. Therefore, speeding up the server response times is critical for technical optimization.
• Source code: Source code optimization involves eradicating superfluous functions and code sections to make it easier for search engine bots to index the website. The process results in improved website performance.
• IP addresses: Every web project must have a unique IP address. This sends signals to the search engine that every website is unique and distinctive.
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4. Site Speed
Site speed is a crucial aspect of the technical SEO checklist every website should follow. If your website architecture and build does not favor a swift user experience, your SEO results will be substandard. Users don’t have the patience to deal with slow-loading websites, slow page speeds, unresponsive pages, or anything that takes time.
Even a single second’s delay in page load can drastically impact page traffic and views, resulting in a drop in conversions.
So, make sure your website is optimized for optimal speed. Otherwise, it can increase the probability of a visitor bounce rate (visitors leaving right away) by 32%.
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Moving on, here are some easy ways to speed up your web pages:
• Compress and optimize your images
• Reduce the number of web redirects
• Cache your web pages
• Enable browser caching
• Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
• Eliminate unnecessary plugins
5. Mobile Responsiveness
Statistics reveal that over 60% of users across the globe are using their smartphones and other mobile devices to surf the internet. Therefore, it is no surprise that Google has prioritized mobile responsiveness. So, as a part of your technical SEO checklist template, make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices.
Essentially, a responsive website means that it seamlessly adjusts to any screen size. As a result, it looks great on every smartphone, tablet, and desktop.
There are several tools that you can use to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. For instance, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool is one. This tool helps you to determine whether or not your website matches Google’s criteria for a mobile-optimized website.
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6. Indexation and Crawlability
The crawl budget is the amount of time and resources that search engines are willing to spend on your site. However, several factors can negatively impact the crawl budget. For instance, the most common ones include low-value-add URLs, on-site duplicate content, and infinite spaces.
The crawl budget isn’t infinite, so make sure to prioritize the most important website pages for crawling. Regularly monitor the Index Coverage report as well as Crawl Stats in the Google Search Console. This will help to identify and eliminate all crawling issues.
As search engine bots crawl your website, they start to index pages based on their topic and relevance to the topic. Once indexed, your web page becomes eligible to rank on the search engine results.
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Here are a few tips to help you improve your website crawlability and indexation:
• Unblock search bots from access pages using Google’s robots.txt tester
• Create an XML sitemap and submit it to the appropriate webmaster tools
• Remove or canonicalize duplicate pages
• Avoid unnecessary or outdated content from your website.
• Verify all redirects are set up properly
• Fix HTTP errors
Conclusion
Technical SEO is not going to magically get your website to the top of Google’s SERPs. However, ignoring it will certainly guarantee that it never happens. Remember, not paying heed to technical SEO can result in a slow and buggy website that will be flagged and punished by search engines. Therefore, it is crucial to take technical SEO seriously.
The aforementioned technical SEO checklist template will help you reinforce your website’s technical elements. It will help you launch a fast, responsive, and secure website that ensures optimal user experience.
Author’s Bio: Shweta is a growth marketing specialist who is working with 2xSaS. She creates content that converts website visitors into paying customers for SaaS companies. In her free time, she likes driving around the city & hanging out with her friends.