Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the term that often comes to mind when talking about websites. Search engines employ specifically crafted algorithms to assess a website’s quality and determine its ranking.

Among the various facets of SEO, technical SEO plays a pivotal role in establishing the foundation for these algorithms. In straightforward terms, this involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website and server functionalities. This optimization aids search engines in efficiently crawling and indexing your site. Are you curious about what the technical SEO checklist involves? Let’s find out in this blog.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is used to enhance a website’s infrastructure for more effective crawling and indexing by search engine bots. This process entails auditing and optimizing technical aspects to enhance a website’s chances of achieving a higher ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Proficiency in technical SEO is crucial for improving a website’s performance across search engines.

Key components of robust technical SEO include optimizing page load times, facilitating easier crawling for search engines, and furnishing ample information to search engine algorithms for accurate indexing. Categorized under On-Page SEO, this type of SEO primarily concentrates on enhancing various website elements to elevate its standing in the eyes of search engines.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Even if your website is created with the best content, a weak technical SEO can affect its ranking. Why? For search engine algorithms to crawl and index pages accurately, they need to locate them and comprehend the content.

In essence, technical SEO communicates your pages’ content to search engines. This encompasses details about content, internal and external links, metadata, image descriptions, and more. There are various Technical SEO Elements like mobile optimization, managing duplicate content, ensuring swift page loading, and many other factors.

Perfecting your website’s SEO technically is not mandatory for ranking, but optimization streamlines the process for search engines, resulting in higher placements on Search Engine Results Pages.

Why should you optimize your website technically?

Ensuring your website remains technically optimized is crucial for both search engines and visitors.

Search engines, especially Google, aim to deliver the best results for user search queries. Google’s bots meticulously crawl through your web pages, evaluating factors like page loading speed, content comprehension, structured data, and more. These technical considerations help search engines form an accurate understanding of your webpage.

Moreover, technical SEO significantly influences user experience. A fast, navigable, and user-friendly website captures and retains visitors’ attention. Additionally, a robust technical foundation for your website can vastly enhance the overall user experience.

Top 15 Technical SEO Checklists to Make SEO-Friendly Website

It is very common to feel overwhelmed by implementing various tasks on your website to optimize it. You can look at the following technical SEO checklist to improve your website’s user experience and boost its ranking in Google’s organic search results. Here’s a compilation of the top 15 technical SEO checklists you should incorporate to make your website more SEO-friendly:

• HTTPS Version – A secure website is everything

Historically, SSL was primarily employed by e-commerce websites for secure online transactions. However, in 2014, Google mandated that all websites incorporate SSL for higher organic search rankings on its SERPs, marking a significant shift. By 2018, Google began flagging non-compliant websites with a ‘not secure’ tag, emphasizing the importance of adopting HTTPS. To prevent the websites from getting flagged, website owners need to install an SSL certificate, establishing a secure and encrypted connection denoted by the ‘https://’ tag. This has become an important aspect of the technical SEO checklist.

• Mobile-Friendly Website

In 2018, Google made a significant shift by prioritizing mobile-first indexing for websites. This implies that the search engine evaluates web pages from the perspective of a mobile device, whether it is a smartphone or tablet, to measure responsiveness. In this technical SEO checklist, if you want to assess your website’s performance, then you need to analyze data from your Google Search Console. It is crucial to ensure that your mobile site mirrors the content of its desktop version. Additionally, optimizing your mobile website involves eliminating intrusive pop-ups, a vital step in enhancing user experience.

• Implement Structured Data Markup

Utilizing structured data markup is a valuable strategy to enhance how search engines interpret and comprehend your web page. Whether your content is a recipe, a book, or a how-to tutorial, structured data markup aids in clearer communication. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a user-friendly tool for setup, complemented by testing through the Structured Data Testing Tool. Begin by visiting schema.org to identify the appropriate schema for your website content and assign them to various URLs. This practice contributes to visually enhanced rich results on Google’s SERPs, capturing the attention of a broader audience.

• Website Speed Matters

While Google has long prioritized desktop site speed as a crucial ranking factor, the search engine elevated the significance of mobile site loading speed in 2018. A slow-loading site not only impacts rankings but can also result in a high bounce rate, as visitors may lose interest quickly. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool offers insights into your site’s performance in this aspect. To enhance site speed, consider tactics such as optimizing landing page redirects (temporary or permanent), implementing effective caching, selecting a speedy hosting and DNS provider, and utilizing tools like GZIP for page compression. Additionally, incorporating responsive images in vector formats contributes to a swifter user experience.

A crawl budget represents the frequency with which the Google bot visits your site within a specific timeframe for crawling and indexing purposes. As a site owner, it is crucial to maximize the utilization of each crawl cycle within your allocated budget. The use of a standard protocol known as robots.txt facilitates communication with search engine crawlers. Ensure a thorough review of your site’s robots.txt file to prevent unnecessary blocking of vital resources, particularly those related to JavaScript.

Blocking essential resources may lead to incomplete site crawling. It is also essential to eliminate orphan pages, which lack connections to other pages on your site. Maintain a shallow click depth by keeping pages within approximately three clicks from the homepage. Incorporate contextual links, interlinking to pages with related content, and utilize keywords in the anchor text of internal links, as these factors contribute to Google’s ranking considerations.

W3Era, popularly known as the best provider of SEO services, provides a free technical SEO tool “Robots.txt Generator” that helps generate the robots.txt file of your website.

• Optimizing XML sitemap

A well-optimized XML sitemap serves as a valuable resource, providing essential information about your site. It includes details such as recent changes to page content and the relative importance of each page within your site. Essentially, an XML sitemap acts as a guide for web crawlers, outlining the structure of your site and instructing them on how to navigate it efficiently.

You can create a sitemap generator with W3Era’s free SEO tool “XML Sitemap Generator”. While you can employ a sitemap generator to create one, it is equally crucial to submit your XML sitemap to the Google Search Console. This ensures proper crawling and indexing by Google. To enhance effectiveness, eliminate blocked URLs, unnecessary redirects, and pages with minimal SEO value, such as author bios and privacy policies. Address broken pages and avoid lengthy redirects. This is the way you can optimize your XML sitemap.

• Checking for AMP Validated Website

Verifying an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) validated website is a crucial Technical SEO checklist. AMP is a streamlined, simplified version of HTML designed to enhance the speed and performance of a mobile website. By disabling scripts, forms, comments, and similar elements, AMP focuses on delivering a faster, more efficient user experience. When implemented effectively, it has the potential to boost your CTR (click-through rate) and increase backlinks to your site.

Google features AMP pages prominently in key search result carousels, capturing heightened user attention and engagement. Ensuring your website adheres to AMP standards contributes to faster loading times on mobile devices, potentially boosting search visibility. This validation aligns with contemporary SEO best practices, prioritizing mobile responsiveness and user satisfaction. As search engines increasingly emphasize mobile-friendly content, having an AMP-validated website becomes an integral part of a comprehensive technical SEO checklist.

• Avoid 404 Pages

When a page is no longer available or if you have altered a URL, employing a 404 status code is the recommended approach. If you utilize platforms like WordPress for content publishing, make certain that your 404 page is optimized for search engines. Ensure its structure mirrors your site, offers users alternative pages to explore, and facilitates easy navigation back to their previous location. By doing so, you simplify the indexing and crawling process for web crawlers, promoting a smoother traversal of your site without unnecessary confusion.

• Canonicalization

Steering clear of duplicate content is vital for maintaining a healthy website. Employing canonical URLs communicates to Google the specific version of a web page to crawl and index. A simple addition of rel=”canonical” in your page code accomplishes this. It is advisable to designate a preferred canonical URL for all your site’s pages. Additionally, you can configure your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, to refrain from publishing multiple iterations of the same content, thus preventing duplication from the outset.

• Specify Your Preferred Domain

When users access your site, they might use variations like https://www.abc.com or https://abc.com, including or excluding the “www.” prefix. While this may seem inconsequential to users, it can lead to confusion for search engines, potentially causing indexing and page rank issues. To mitigate this, it is crucial to communicate your preference to Google. Whether you choose to include or omit “www.” does not impact SEO, but consistency is key. Once you decide, stick to it to avoid complications during site migration. Set your preferred domain in Google by registering with Google Webmaster Tools, validating all site versions, and configuring preferences under ‘Site Settings’.

• Enhance Navigation with Breadcrumb Menus

In the realm of technical SEO, breadcrumb menus play a vital role in optimizing your website’s architecture. Commonly referred to as a “breadcrumb trail”, this type of navigation provides users with a visual representation of their location on the site. Serving as an invaluable tool for improving user orientation, breadcrumbs display the website hierarchy and indicate the user’s current position.

The practicality of breadcrumbs becomes evident in reducing the number of steps a user needs to take when navigating back to the homepage, a specific section, or a higher-level page. Websites with diverse sections and a need for a logical structure, such as e-commerce sites, find breadcrumbs particularly beneficial for enhancing user experience.

• Optimizing JavaScript for Search Engines

In the realm of technical SEO fundamentals, the focus is on rendering JavaScript-heavy websites search-friendly. SEO agencies undertake this effort to enhance the visibility and ranking of these websites on search engines. Essential tools from Google, such as the Mobile-Friendly Test, URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console, and the Rich Results Test, play a crucial role in troubleshooting JavaScript SEO issues. The processing of JavaScript web apps unfolds in three key phases: crawling, rendering, and indexing.

• Pagination

Pagination is a process that involves dividing content across a series of pages, a crucial aspect of technical SEO. It serves to organize a list of products or articles into a more consumable format, commonly employed on websites such as news publishers, e-commerce platforms, blogs, and forums.

However, the use of pagination can lead to issues related to duplicate content. To mitigate such concerns and consolidate links and page rank to the main page, incorporating rel=“next” and rel=“prev” links is recommended. This practice informs search engines that subsequent pages are a continuation of the main page. Once identified in the code, Google recognizes the main page and utilizes it for indexing purposes.

• Avoiding Duplicate or Thin Content

One of the key elements in understanding technical SEO is addressing thin content, a factor visible through the ranking signals provided by Google. To mitigate instances of thin content, websites are advised to prioritize high-quality content created by experts rather than relying on mass-produced material.

Dealing with duplicate content involves removing it from the downloaded HTML before rendering. Employing app shell models and displaying less content and code in the HTML response can be effective strategies. Duplicate pages, resulting from the same visible code across multiple websites, may not immediately proceed to render. Over time, this concern should naturally resolve itself, although new websites might encounter challenges. In such cases, the implementation of self-referencing canonical link elements proves beneficial. These elements help prevent duplicate content issues by indicating the original page or the preferred page for ranking in search engines.

• Checking Your Site for Dead Links

Dead links (pages that have been deleted or moved) and broken links (non-responsive pages) can potentially harm your website’s SEO. There are two significant reasons for concern. First, Google crawlers invest time in these links without yielding substantial results. Second, users tend to visit and exit these links swiftly, leaving the search engine with a negative impression of the website. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct regular website audits, identify dead or broken links, and optimize the website accordingly. One of the simplest methods to identify these links is through Google Search Console.

• Hreflang for International Websites

Hreflang tags play a crucial role in defining the target country and language for a page, addressing potential issues related to duplicate content. When a site caters to multiple countries with the same spoken language, search engines require assistance in determining the intended audience. Hreflang tags help display the most relevant website for the searched area in the search results, enhancing the user experience.

Conclusion

In the realm of SEO, a well-executed technical foundation is indispensable. Technical SEO focuses on optimizing a website’s infrastructure for effective crawling and indexing by search engine bots. This entails auditing and enhancing technical elements to improve a website’s chances of achieving a higher ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Key aspects of robust technical SEO include optimizing page load times, facilitating easier crawling, and providing sufficient information to search engine algorithms for accurate indexing. At W3Era, we understand the pivotal role that technical SEO plays in shaping a website’s performance and visibility. Our dedicated team of experts excels in implementing comprehensive strategies to ensure your website aligns seamlessly with search engine algorithms.

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• Source: https://www.w3era.com/technical-seo-checklist/