A complete step-by-step guide towards optimizing your website for the search engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not just about optimizing your website for achieving a higher ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
It’s all about making your website a platform for the audience where he/she gets all the answers to the questions without any hassle (a better user experience).
In simple language,
Your website will rank among the top results in the search engine if and only if it’s well-optimized as per the search engine guidelines.
Also, providing the audience with a seamless and enhanced user experience.
Well, there are various factors that search engines look for in a website before placing it in the SERPs.
But the following are the two major points that are of the highest priority in the search engine ranking funnel.
- Relevancy of the content
- The user experience of your website
Your website may have very compelling content for the audience.
But without a seamless user experience, your efforts to appear in the top SERPs will be in vain.
The user experience of your website can only be improved or enhanced with the help of technical SEO.
So, in this article “Technical SEO 2020 and beyond”,
We will be covering everything associated with the technical aspect of SEO that will boost your website’s search engine ranking seamingly without any hassle.
Let us list down the topics for technical SEO that we will be learning through the guide:
- What is the definition of technical SEO?
- Importance of technical SEO
- Technical SEO website audit checklist
- What are the tools used for technical SEO?
So without any further ado, let’s start with the effective technical SEO guide.
What is the definition of technical SEO?
Technical SEO can be considered as a kind of on-page SEO.
The optimization involved in the process of technical SEO concentrates on enhancing or improving the user experience of the audience.
It’s just like the on-page SEO but optimization is through the technical aspect.
Importance of technical SEO
Technical SEO helps to keep the health of your website intact which is one of the important traits that search engines look for in any website for ranking them in SERPs.
Technical SEO is the base foundation of any website.
A quality content, providing relevancy will not alone climb you up the ladder of SERPs.
You definitely need more than that.
To be precise, Access to all the relevant content along with a smooth user experience is the ultimate hack for your website to rank in the top SERPs.
The websites that you see in the top results of the search engines take care of both the on-page SEO and technical SEO factors.
Technical SEO website audit checklist
Search engines want their user’s to have an awesome and seamless user experience while they use their platform.
It includes every crucial factor right from the relevancy of the website to the smooth user experience for the audience.
Talking about the user experience that are various factors that we will be covering in the “Technical SEO website audit checklist” and they are as follows:
- Mobile-optimized website
The number of internet users around the world is increasing tremendously day-by-day.
Most of the internet users form this group operates through the mobile.
Thus mobile-friendliness of your website is the first thing under the technical SEO that you must pay heed to, for enhancing or improving your website’s ranking in the SERPs.
In India alone, there are about 500 million internet users.
Out of which 80% of the users are online through mobile devices.
Although these data must have made the importance of mobile-friendliness quite clear
But let’s point out the benefits to get a deeper hold on the technical SEO aspect for your website
- Easy access to the website for your customers
Mobile-friendliness is one of the notorious traits of the technical SEO checklist.
This makes it easy for the customers to access your website even on smaller devices mobile.
Thus this makes your website an on-the-go platform.
As far as the above data is concerned, more than half of the users on the internet will be viewing the website from the mobile device.
This makes it even more important for your website to be mobile-friendly.
Also, building trust for your brand along the way.
- Keeps you ahead in the competition
It’s always better to stay updated with the latest modern trends sooner than your competitors.
Making your website optimized for the search engine not only helps you to rank among the top SERPs
but also makes you more competitive and surely does keep you ahead of your competitors.
Let see it this way,
If your website is not mobile-friendly and your competitor’s website is, then you stand no chance of survival in the competition.
The audience will always prefer the website that is mobile-friendly over the one which is not.
- Wider audience reach
When you have a mobile-friendly website your audience user-experience elevates to newer dimensions.
Thus the chances of your website getting shared around social media or any other platform also elevate.
- Hassle-free contact
The most important and necessary feature of a mobile-friendly website is that audiences can easily contact write through their devices with one or two clicks.
Unlike desktops or laptops where it’s not possible.
This also makes your customers reach you instantly just like that.
These were a few of the benefits of a mobile-friendly website that can help you boost your business.
At present the number one search engine platforms around the world are Google.
Google places mobile-friendly websites in the top hierarchy among the bunch of websites in the ranking process.
You can view Google’s guidelines on a mobile-friendly website and upgrade the user experience for your audience as well just like the many top ranking websites out there.
- Fast loading speed
When we talk about the SEO technical audit checklist,
the speed of the website (loading speed) would be the next important highlight that pops up in the list which can help you rank in the top SERPs.
Well, no one likes to be kept waiting for too long, let it be a meeting, a product or service outcome, or anything in general.
People tend to get irritated if they have to wait for too long and then move onto another website.
This even creates a negative impression of your brand in front of your audience.
Moreover, the website’s loading speed is the most important driving factor when it comes to increasing the CTR (Click Through Rate).
Well, it’s quite obvious that no one would want to wait in front of a website that continuously shows a loading sign.
Well, there is no exact time frame mentioned as such that your website must load in.
But there are certain tools that can be used for identifying your website speed which will soon be covered in the upcoming topics.
- A complete website map (XML)
We know that technical SEO helps us to optimize the user experience of the audience by optimizing various technical aspects.
But implementing a technical SEO is not just about optimizing the user experience of your audience.
It also includes the responsibility of making the crawling and indexing jobs of the search engine crawlers or bots very simple.
One of the many technical SEO practices includes making a sitemap for your website.
Sitemaps are basically a map to your entire website.
The job of the sitemap is to provide a route to the search engine crawlers for easily crawling through the website.
This lets the search engine crawlers job to index your webpages faster in their database.
Thus when the user inputs the keyword in the search engine box related to your niche your website pops up in the top SERPs.
- SSL for the website
SSL i.e secure socket layer is a security authentication that indicates to the user about the genuineness of your website.
Basically this is a security protocol that is necessary for every website.
A website without an SSL is prone to many vulnerabilities which makes it unfit for the users to use.
Thus the search engines won’t allow such websites to appear in the SERPs.
Following are the benefits of the SSL that makes it so crucial for every website:
- Confidential data remains safe and intact
- Authentication for your identity
- Gains the trust of your audience
- Better search engine ranking in the SERPs
- Meets the PCI and DSS standard
- Audit for Robot.txt files
Robot.txt files inform the web crawlers about the pages that you don’t want to be crawled.
It is very necessary as without this step the pages with confidential codes and crucial data will be indexed and will be available in the SERPs.
Thus these were the most prominent techniques falling under “technical SEO 2020 and beyond”.
Now, let’s proceed further with the technical SEO tools that will ease out the process.
What are the tools used for technical SEO?
Well, what better tool other than form the world’s number one search engine Google.
Just copy the URL of the website you wanna run the test for mobile-friendliness
Then paste it in the given space and click on the “Test URL”.
This is yet another profound tool by Google.
The process is similar to that of google’s mobile-friendliness checking tool.
Copy the URL of the website you wanna check the website speed of.
Then paste it in the given space and click on the “ANALYZE”
These are the tools that is very much necessary when the term “technical SEO” is tossed.
Both the tools help your website with all the necessary and required information in the SEO journey.
This is another useful tool that provides overall information on your website.
This is an awesome tool that helps you in identifying any errors in your structured data.
Similar process as the mobile-friendliness tool and speed tester tool.
Copy the URL and paste it in the space given and click on “Run Test”
Gtmatrix provides you details such as page score, size, loading time, etc which is another prominent tool like Google’s tools.
This tool will provide the data on domain rating, URL rating, number of backlinks, and referring domains.
This gives you information about the impact of the changes in the Google algorithm.
So, this was a complete technical SEO program for optimizing your website to rank among the top SERPs.
We hope you benefit from all the key traits mentioned in this article “Technical SEO 2020 and beyond”.
We would recommend you take help from the technical SEO expert such as Butterflythemes, if you are not having the right knowledge in the technicality aspect because it will affect your website in a negative manner.
Have any questions or suggestions for us?
Feel free to ping us at support@butterflythemes.com or call us on 9930447774.