Best Tips To Improve Technical SEO of Your Website

Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of a site so that search engines crawl, index and rank it better.

This is different from traditional SEO which is mainly focused on building links and creating relevant content.

Technical SEO basics:

• Robot.txt
• Canonization
• Protocols.
• Redirect codes
• Website speed

You should take care of all these steps during the website development process.

Robot.txt

This is a text document that instructs robots of search engines how to crawl pages on a website. Also, this file will contain the pages that we don’t want to be displayed on our website.

The robots.txt format is very simple. Each line can have a directive followed by a value, separated by a colon. Common directives include the following:

• User Agent: This directive specifies to which crawler this instruction applies. Multiple lines may contain different directives.
• Disallow: This directive specifies the parts of a website that should be crawled but not by the specified crawler. You specify the directory or file that should be blocked.
• Allow: This directive allows access to certain directories and files that would otherwise be blocked by other rules.
• Sitemap: This directive specifies where the sitemap XML is located on the website. A sitemap contains all pages and important content on a website to make it easier for search engines to index the site.

 

Canonization

Canonicalization is a term used to describe the techniques and practices that are used to ensure a website only has one version or preferred version.

Also, this helps to avoid duplicate content and to make sure that search engines index content and rank it correctly.

You must follow this practice for your website because search engines will view duplicate content negatively. This can confuse and have an impact on search results.

Follow the below recommendations to address these issues:

• Use self-referencing canonical tag: Canonical tags are used to indicate the page on which the tag appears is the preferred version.
• Canonicalize the homepage of your website: Home page canonicalization means that only one URL is accessible to represent the homepage and that any other variations or versions start redirecting to or pointing at the canonical URL.
• Check your canonical tag: You need to review your tags when you: make structural changes to your site, implement new sections, update your content, experience indexing problems, or detect duplicate content on search results.

 

Protocols

A protocol is an established set of guidelines or rules that are used to optimize and improve the performance of a site in search engines.

These protocols are best practices used by SEO specialists to increase a website’s visibility and rank in search results.

 

Redirect codes

This is a method of redirecting users and search engines to a URL other than the one they originally requested. The most common redirect codes include:

• 301- Permanently moved: Used to indicate that a page is permanently relocated. By implementing a 301 redirect you tell search engines and web browsers that your original page is no longer available and the new one has replaced it permanently.
• 302 Temporarily moved: Used to indicate that a page is temporarily being relocated. Also, this indicates that the redirection is temporary and that it is expected that the original webpage will return to its original position in the future.

 

Website speed

The loading speed of a web page is an important factor to consider.

The size of images is very important. If it’s larger than the ones that are used on the internet, then we will use more bandwidth for nothing.

Google Page Speed Insights is a great tool to help you quickly analyze the loading speed of a website, both on desktops and mobile devices. Let’s not forget that mobile device optimization is now more important than ever.

Contact us if you need assistance with your website optimization. We will be happy to assist you.