The three pillars of search engine optimization are on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. Out of the three, technical SEO is most often overlooked, probably because it’s the hardest to master. But even if you’re not completely comfortable working with technical SEO, it’s still something that deserves your attention. Speed, security and crawlability all have a huge impact on how your site performs and ranks in the search engines.
Below are five steps that will help you check the health of your technical SEO.
1. Allow the search engines to crawl your site.
There’s no use in writing great content if the search engines can’t crawl your site and index your pages. Start by checking your robots.txt file, which tells the search engines what part of your site they should crawl and should not crawl. You can edit and test your robots.txt file in the Google Search Console.
2. Make sure your pages are being indexed.
Next, make sure your pages are being indexed. You can find this information in a Google Search Console coverage report that shows valid pages, excluded pages, errors and indexed pages with warnings. When you see what pages are not being indexed, you can fix the issues and get these pages properly ranked.
3. Ensure mobile friendliness.
Google uses the mobile version of your website for ranking and indexing. Therefore, your mobile site should be the best it can be. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to see how responsive and easy your mobile site is to use. Google will let you know if there are issues that need to be fixed to make your site more responsive.
4. Assess your site’s speed.
Page speed is a ranking factor that you can’t ignore. People aren’t going to wait around for your pages to load, so it’s imperative that they can load in a few seconds or less. There are many site speed tools you can use, though most people like the ease of Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool lets you know how fast your pages are loading and what improvements can be made.
5. Remove duplicate content.
Duplicate content is not a friend to SEO. While there is no penalty for it, Google doesn’t like when websites have the same information. They don’t offer much value, and you’ll always be competing with the other sites for a spot in the search rankings. Check for duplicate content on your site and refresh it with new, original content.
These are the basics of technical SEO, but they give you a good starting point for what you should be looking at. Magna Technology is well-versed in technical SEO and we can assist with any of these issues. Contact us today and learn more about having a technical audit done on your site.
