How to Leverage Technical SEO to Improve Your Rankings

Leveraging technical SEO can have a great impact on your search engine rankings. However, it is important to remember that effective SEO strategies go beyond quality content. In this regard, let’s have a look at some of the important tips to improve your site ranking with ease.

Tips to Use Technical SEO for Improving Your Site’s Ranking

Below are some vital tips to use technical seo. Don’t miss it if you really want to learn it in depth!

Use Canonical URLs to Avoid Plagiarism Issue

Duplicate contents in a site can have negative impact on search engine ranking. Your first priority is to identify these duplicate contents and delete them. However, in some cases your site automatically create duplicate contents.

For instance, if you have move on to https, but some URLs still have http, this can confuse google. Another example is having a same product with different colors. Now, you cannot write different contents for each product for each color. This can also create plagiarism issue as google treat each url as unique.

To fix this, you need canonical URLs. You can set canonical URL using rel-canonical tag to your URLs. You can also use Yoast SEO tool if you are a wordpress user.

Use XML Sitemap for Indexing Your Webpages

Sitemaps is an important technical SEO practise that allows Google to crawl and index your webpages. It tells google which pages are more important in your site.

XML sitemap is easy to create. You can create it manually by gathering you site’s URLs. Then code the URLs.

Sign into your Google’s Search Console and click “sitemaps”. Click on “add a new sitemap” and enter the urls including the code.

Click “submit”.

You a sitemap generator tool online to do easier. Wordpress users can use plugin like Yoast. All you have to do is put your website link and click ‘generate’. The app will automatically generate a xml sitemap file.

Tips for XML Sitemap

• Use dynamic XML sitemaps for site with over 50,000 URLs. It automatically updates the sitemap when you add or remove a URL.

• Don’t use pages that you have blocked in robots.txt.

• Put high-quality pages in top order.

Increase the Page Loading Speed

The loading speed of your site matters significantly in ranking. Even a second delay will make you bleed customers. As a result, your website will rank lower in search results despite of having good quality contents.

Check your site loading speed with tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Google PageSpeed Insights.

Check the Core Web Vitals Score of the site for desktop and mobile. If your site fails the test, it can have serious impact on your user experience. Consequently on your ranking.

The good part is these tools also gives you tips to optimize your site’s speed.

To Increase Your Site’s Speed, You Can Do The Following

• Enable browser caching. This allows you to store data temporary on visitor’s device. As a result, the page loads faster the next time they visit it.

• Optimize the site images. Use tools like TinyPNG to compress image files and make the site loads faster.

• Compress your website by enabling compression. This reduces HTML and CSS files, thereby, increasing site’s loading speed.

• Reduce server response time by keeping it under 200ms.

• Use content delivery system (CDN) like BunnyCDN or Cloudflare to increase site speed.

Use Site Audits to fix on-page SEO Issues

If your webpages are ranking higher consistently in SERP, you need to ensure to keep those pages error-free. That’s why you must do a weekly technical SEO audit and fix any existing on-page SEO issues. There are several tools like SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs, etc. that can help you with that.

These tools scan your website for errors, warnings and issues. They also provide recommendation to fix these errors to improve your site’s overall health.

Include Keywords in image Alt Text

Google’s algorithm is designed to parse your site based on textual format. Meaning, it cannot determine what’s in an image until you tells it. Generally, google uses metadata and image alt text to determine the intent of an image.

So using keywords in your alt text increase the chance of the image rank in google images and image packs. However, make sure you don’t stuff the alt text with keywords. One keyword with a little description will be suffice.

Add Internal Links to Your Content

An internal link is a page within your site linked to another page in the same site. Although they have comparatively lesser influence on SEO than external links, they still play a critical role in ranking. They allows search engines to understand the hierarchy of your site. It also helps in establishing a seo-friendly site architecture.

Linking your new blog post to a top-ranking page within your site can transfer link value as well. However, make sure both the links are contextual and have topical relevance to each other.

Make a Mobile-friendly Website

In 2015, Google made it clear that it prefer websites with a mobile-friendly and responsive design. Following that, several website still running on the web-only design were penalized. As of now, a mobile-friendly design significantly increases your chance of getting ranked in Google Search Engine Results Page.

You can check the mobile-friendliness of your site through the following tools −

• Google’s mobile friendly test

• GTMetric

• Hubspot’s Website Grader

These tools give you an in-depth insight about your site’s overall architecture. They also tells you what you can do to improve the mobile-friendliness of your site.

Some Bonus Technical SEO Tips

• Install SSL certificate aka HTTPS encryptions to enhanced security.

• Fix crawl errors in Google Search Console.

• Find and fix broken links to avoid bad impression about your site.

• Use Google AMP to make your site load faster on mobile devices.

• Use schema-org structured data to help search engine crawls better.

• Minimize 301 redirects

• Use subfolders over subdomains if possible

Conclusion

To sum up, pay attention to the usability of your website and ensure that you include relevant keywords in page titles, URLs, alt text, and descriptions. If you take the time to create an optimized website with the best possible user experience, your efforts will pay off in increased organic traffic and higher search engine rankings. Ultimately, technical SEO requires a strategic approach that complements your other marketing initiatives to help you reach maximum exposure online.