Technical SEO plays a vital role in your overall SEO strategy. It is more precise in nature and there are different solid metrics to measure it. Besides there are many tools that allow you to identify the gaps in your technical SEO while also providing you the deep actionable insights on how to repair it? In fact if you would carefully go through the upcoming Google update in May this year, you would notice that it deal with many aspects of technical SEO
In this blog we will talk about how to optimize the technical SEO of your site to increase engagement, visibility and clicks:
Core web vitals metrics to enhance user experience
As you are aware that this may Google will bring its page experience algorithm which will involve, among other factors, the core web vitals that include
FID or the time it takes for a visitor to interact with your page. Ideally it should be below 100 ms.
Largest contextual paint: It refers to the time it takes for the largest content on your page to be loaded in visitor’s browser. The recommended time is less than 2.3 seconds
CLS or cumulative layout shifts: This metrics applies to the visual steadiness of your element on a device screen and the recommended level is .1 seconds.
While the core web vitals may seem quite technically complex to measure, the Google Search console can provide you the accurate site metrics without any technical complications or manual efforts on your side. Just enter you URL and with just a few clicks you can get the details as well as insights and recommendations.
Here are a few ways to optimize core web vitals:
· Use Lazy-loading option for general images
· Optimized image formats to make them browser-friendly
· Enhance JavaScript performance
Identify crawl errors on your site
Crawl errors refers to the situation where the search engine couldn’t find a specific page on your website.
Google search console enables you to check the crawl errors but you would probably like to use more advanced tools for the purpose like screaming frog, seoClarity and Deep crawl. These tools take you to the page with the crawl error so that you can do the needful.
Here are a few ways to repair it:
Use 301 redirects for correctly implementing all redirects
Properly go through the specific error pages to determine where you would like to redirect them
Also search the instance of redirect loops where the same URL redirect to another URL for many times thus creating a kind of back and forth loop.
Check internal /outbound broken links and repair them
Link structure works as a navigation guide or both search engines and human visitors. If a user clicks a link which leads to a nonworking URL, it puts off the people and compels them to leave your site.
So, identify some of the issues that disturb the navigation experience of your audiences. A few such issue include
· 301/302 links redirecting to a different page
· Links leading to 4XX error page
· Unlinked pages
· Very deeply interlinking structure
You can either update the target URL or simply remove the link.
For that you would need to go for a thorough site audit to repair the broken links issue.
Delete thin or duplicate content
At all costs avoid copying the content from other websites as it not only results in negative SEO marking but also attract the Google penalties. Along with the some other factors that cause thin o duplicate content include multiple live versions of same sites, faceted navigation page replication
In case of two site versions, immediately do the needful so that Google should index only a single site version. Google doesn’t know that both version belong to the same site and in its perspective each different domain belongs to different website.
In a search engine’s perspective the following URLs represents different websites
· https://www.yoursite.com
· https://yoursite.com
· http://www.yoursite.com
· https://yoursite.com
A few tips
· 301 redirects set up primary URL version. If www.yoursite.com is you primary version then URLS like https://yoursite.com should redirect to that version.
· no-index/canonical tags Implementation on various duplicate pages
· preferred domain and parameter handling setting in Google Search Console
· Deleting duplicate content from different portions, posts and pages
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Make your site HTTPS for fully encrypt communication with buyer
The sites that lack security, also called HTTP sites is not only counted as a negative SEO metrics but also stop buyers from making purchase form your site as they are concerned about the safety of the data they will best haring like address, PAN card, social security number and credit card number. So you lose SEO points as well as buyers. On the other hand the HTTPS encrypts any data that users share with you like Pan Card and social security number. It helps in preventing data leaks and having.
Conclusion
Technical SEO plays a pivotal role in any SEO strategy. By working on technical SEO you make your site more appealing to the visitors by enhancing their experience. AT eh same time the right technical SEO strategies make it easier for the search engine bots to navigate through your website which helps in easy indexing and inclusion in relevant SERPs.