Technical SEO checklist: 7 essential tips to implement

Technical SEO - Scared by the term? Don’t be. Technical SEO is the same as normal SEO practices excluding the content part. Instead, technical SEO is about making sure that your website is compatible with the guidelines of all search engines and is ranked according to the keywords. Technical SEO is an important part of making it big in the digital world, which is evolving consistently. Given below are 7 check points to keep in mind for all your technical SEO practices. Take a look-

1) Index Check- The number of pages indexed on your website should be proportional to the total number of pages on your website minus the ones that you do not want to be indexed. If you find the difference huge, you need to check your indexing and your disallowed pages.

2) Crawlable Resources- Most of you use robot.txt to get information about the blocked pages of your website, but robot.txt is not as accurate as you think. Instead, a better option would be using SEO crawlers to find out what all pages of your website have been blocked. Apart from checking on the pages, it is also important to check if all your other resources like CSS, JavaScript, etc. are also crawlable. If in case your website is built on JavaScript, you will need to make sure to look for a crawler that can crawl the Java Script website and render it.

3) Crawl Optimize – Crawl budget is the number of pages of a website that the crawlers crawl during a given span of time. Crawl budgets are assigned on two bases to website-

a) The number of internal links to your page

b) Number of external links that are there on your website.

Optimizing your crawl budget is important to for technical SEO. Two ways to do that are-

a) Remove Duplicate Pages- If your website has duplicate pages; the crawlers will keep hitting them and just end up wasting your crawler optimization budget. To avoid this, check your site for any duplicate pages and remove as many as possible.

b) Do not index pages which have no SEO value- You may have pages on your website with no or less SEO value like privacy policies, terms and conditions, etc. These pages do not need crawler to crawl them. Thus wasting your crawl budget on them will just end up in vain. You need to ensure that Google does not crawl these pages.

4) Internal Link Audit- For your site to provide the users with a good user experience and have crawlability, it is important to have a well-structured site. A website which is well structured and internally well linked helps you achieving ranking power and manage pages more effectively. Here are some things to check when auditing internal links-

a) Click Depth- Make a shallow website with all your important pages not more than three clicks away.

b) Broken Links- Broken links confuse the visitors and also leads to a deteriorated rank in the SERPs. Crawlers can be used to find out what all broken links are present on your website, but to be 100% sure you need to also look into tags, HTTP headers, etc.

c) Redirected Links- Redirecting page may be what you need, but if a user automatically lands on the right page, then redirecting them to multiple other pages would just lead to negatively affect load time and crawl budget. Thu it becomes to manage your website redirection.

5) Sitemap Review- Sitemaps are important elements of your website just ask any digital marketing agency. They tell the search engines about your website and help them in finding it. You need to check if your site maps are-

  a)    **Fresh**- Update your sitemap every time some new content is added to your website.

  b)    **Clean**- Make sure that your website has no garbage content because such websites get ignored by the search engines.

   c)    **Well Sized**- Keep your sitemap short, so that Google finds it easy to crawl your important pages and does not end up wasting time on useless pages.

6) Page Speed- Test your page’s load time using Google’s Page Speed Insight tool a website which loads fast automatically has a good rank in the SERPs. If after checking your pages on Google they do not pass the test, Google also gives you tips about ways to fix the problems that you are facing.

7) Mobile Friendly- Google recently announced that the rank of a website will now be decided based on its performance on the mobile platform. So for your website to get a high rank on the result pages you need to make sure that it is supported well by the mobile platform.

The above checklist may not be a complete one but even if you put to use all the given 7 point, you can end up with a great technical SEO for your website. With all these tips at your disposal, you are now ready to make it great in the optimization world.