Technical SEO

Technical SEO is one of the most important factors that you need to manage on your website. If search engines cannot find, crawl and index your website’s content, it won’t be able to rank your website on Google. At Business Growth Digital Marketing, we focus on getting the technical aspects right on your website so that your website will have the best chance of being found and ranked on Google.

What are some of the technical SEO factors that need to be managed?

HTML Semantic mark-up

Titles

The titles that are used on a web page will help the search engines determine what the web page is about. It will also display in the organic search results when people type in a keyword. Titles need to be optimised to maximise the web page relevance to the target keyword.

Meta Description

This is the snippet that appears within the head tag of the website and is also displayed in the organic search results. The description and keyword relevance can help improve the site’s organic search ranking.

Heading tags

Heading tags help the search relevancy of the web page. It’s important to structure the tags correctly so that the search engines understand the context of the content that appears on the web page. This typically involves formatting the content with heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc)

Anchor text tags

Anchor text tags refers to hyperlinks. The use of these URLs and keyword links bind the web together and help search engines understand the quality and relevance of a web page. It’s important that the tags are implemented correctly with the right attributes. There are some cases where these tags are implemented with JavaScript instead of the correct HTML code.

URL structure

This refers to how the URLs on the website are published.

  • Are the URLs that are being created static or dynamic URLs?
  • Are the URLs using a naming convention that utilises keywords or numbers?
  • Is there a folder or category structure for the URLs that makes it easy for users and search engines to navigate through the website?

Crawlability and accessibility

XML sitemaps

This involves creating and optimising an XML file that contains the URL paths for search engines to crawl.

Robots text file

This file will tell the search engines which URL paths it is allowed to crawl.

Google Search Console Optimisation

This will allow the webmaster or SEO to monitor the technical performance of the site and also set any crawling parameters or additional technical optimisations through the console.

Mobile-First Optimisation

Google has been pushing for websites that are mobile friendly. You need to optimise the mobile-friendliness of your website so that the site can appear for mobile results.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Configuration

This involves optimising the web pages so that they can be displayed quickly for mobile search queries.

Mobile rendering (mobile responsive)

All sites should now be mobile responsive. If not, this will affect your site’s SEO performance and it needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

Advanced technical SEO

Server Log Analysis

If your site has been running for a while, a server log analysis will allow you to see the navigation path that Googlebot and other search engine bots take on your website. You can see if they are finding the correct URLs or if they are navigating URLs on the site that they shouldn’t be accessing. You will also gain insight into the loading success, failure or redirections of the URLs.

Optimising the crawl budget

For larger websites, the search engine crawlers will only visit a certain number of web pages before they leave the website. If you notice that they leave the site before crawling and indexing certain pages, you may need to optimise the crawling/navigation path for the search engine spiders.

Schema optimisation

Schema markup will help the search engines better understand the content and information on the web pages. For example, the information may provide additional context in relation to geography or information, products and more.