Learn how these technical SEO tips can improve your search engine rankings to beat the competition.
This article of technical SEO Tips is far from complete, but we have to start somewhere. This is a great list of best SEO for beginners who are learning SEO while at the same time haven’t documented their SEO friendly standard operating procedures yet. In case you already have a more advanced SEO knowledge, you might want to scan this list if there is any you should define technically or add technical SEO best practices to your procedures.
Take a tour of the following technical SEO tips so you can customize what SEO best practices that suit your needs, or clients, and take the first Search Engine Optimization SEO step off from the starting line.
1. Images have Alt-text?
Ensure that all images utilize the alt text attributes and keep it to 125 characters maximum. The alt-text attribute specifies an alternate text or alternative information for an image if it cannot be displayed, or for any reason the user cannot view it. The Alt-text is also called “alt tags” and “alt descriptions,” which appears in place of an image on a webpage when it fails to load on a user screen. It eases up screen-reading tools to describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engine crawlers to better rank your website.
2. Minimize JS, cookies, CSS, and images
Google may not index your website when it is new and doesn’t have any inbound links yet. So, please create an account on Google webmaster tools and register your website to indicate Google to your sitemap.xml for them to crawl your URLs. And minimize the use of javascript (JS), cookies, CSS, and images to make your site as usable as possible.
After minimizing the use of web technologies for Google indexing. Please take note that not all search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Ask, AOL, DuckduckGo, Yandex and Baidu, user browsers, web services, and screen-reading devices treat JS, cookies, CSS, and images the way Google does. Better keep things on your site as simple as possible for maximum SEO optimization effectiveness.
3. Analyze anchor text
Check those internal anchors on your website are analyzed, and being used in a consistent and optimized way. The anchor text is the visible character and words that hyperlinks display when a link is created to another document, content element, or location on the web. It appears as a blue underlined text, but you can change your website link colors and styles through your HTML or CSS coding for better analysis.
Analyze anchor text using Google Webmaster Tools to check whether it uses descriptive text and provides a basic idea about the page that the anchor text links. You can get started with Google Search Console (GSC) SEO Starter Guide or explore other online SEO tools like Ahrefs.
4. Does the currency reflects the target country
Make sure there are no currency problems on the site spanning many regions or languages. Any currency-related issues can significantly affect your website reach, so is its traffic. Check that currency between foreign markets on the website reflects the target country as it influences site performance to users and search engine result pages or SERP.
Like the value of goods or services, the demand level of a currency determines the product value proposition. Currency affects supply and demand factors in foreign exchange and future expectations for the target currency. Take a look at currency indicators on your websites, such as inflation & interest rates, country currency strength, trade terms & duties, and political performance.
5. Check for network and scripting errors
Correct any issues learned with your web browser’s development tools. Use Google Chrome Developer Tools to check for network and scripting errors. Get started with this Google Chrome Developer Tools’ hands-on tutorial on “Inspect Network Activity of the most commonly-used Development Tools related to your web page’s scripting errors and network activity.
6. Check for overuse of site-wide links
Check whether your website is overusing the global navigation feature. Visitors would expect user-friendly horizontal navigation across the top or vertical navigation down the left side of their browser. Putting your navigation in a standard place makes your site easier to use and leads to a lower bounce rate, more pages per visit, and higher conversions.
Make sure that the graphical user interface of your global navigation is reserved for buttons, links, dropdown menus, tabs, search bars, or any other design element providing ease of movement from one set of content to another. Your site-wide links offer your readers with easy navigation on how it works and can speed up their search within and with the linked web resources.
7. Avoid stale pages
To avoid your website becoming stale, update your web pages at least quarterly. Improve or revamp the “About Me” page as this is one of the most essential pages of your website that you should keep fresh. Add new photos or graphics to the portfolio, link back to your content on other pages of your website, and write short blog posts with high-quality content regularly.
Maintaining a content calendar is an excellent start to periodically update your website with new keyword data, repurposed older content bringing it to an updated version, a simple website redesign or web design optimization, and upgrading its website functionality.
8. Check for pages that need exclusion
Check what pages of your website that the robots.txt file needs to exclude. Your robots.txt file should indicate that the search engine crawlers or user agents (software) can or cannot crawl pages on your website, specifying crawl instructions to “disallow” or “allow” the behavior of one or all crawlers or user agents. Once these crawlers were able to index your website pages, it will label any duplicate or alternate pages with “Excluded” in the crawling report. When web crawlers can index your canonical page, they will mark that page as duplicate or alternate. Such indexing results will provide an SEO advantage for your website, check for Google Index Coverage Report.
9. Is the website missing GA code on some pages?
Ensure that you can identify the tracking ID of your website. Most often, websites sometimes break without their owners being aware. The key is to ensure that error pages must have Google Analytics tracking code so you can monitor them accurately. These error pages may include missing, improper or incorrect information like phone number, payment or credit card details, etc. Are any web pages on the website missing their Google Analytics (GA) monitoring code? Try checking your entire site for missing GA or Google AdWords code with a GA Checker.
10. Check for blocking by X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header.
The robots meta tag lets you use a granular, page-specific method of setting how a specific page should be indexed and served to the user’s search results. The X-Robots-Tag serves as an element of the HTTP header response for a given URL. A “robots meta tag” can contain an X-Robots-Tag. Any directive or blocking instruction in use by a robots meta tag can also specify this blocking directive as an X-Robots-Tag. You can check the details on how to use X-Robots-Tag in Google Developers Tool.
11. Catalog target search modifiers (best, how-to, etc.)
List down and document a set of the search modifiers that the site is using. It is easy to remember most search operators or modifiers. These search modifiers are short commands that stick in mind. When you understand and know how to use them effectively altogether becomes your advantage, especially in responding to a navigational query or search query. You can type or enter into a website, the site’s name instead of typing or entering its URL into a browser’s navigation bar, or using a bookmark if available.
Learn more of these search modifiers, try the use of Google Advanced Searching.
12. Checked for pagination problems
You need to check if there are issues with pagination that can lead to having problems with search engines trying to crawl your website. Any pagination problems can cause crawling issues for search engines, which in turn, go along with the problems of a large number of URLs. If you have a considerable amount of web pages with paginated content, it’s unlikely that Google will crawl all your pages and, therefore may not index all the pages you want it to.
13. Proper URL Canonicalization used?
Ensure that the redirects, navigation, external links, sitemaps, and feeds are aligned with the canonical URL. The canonical version of your website will help Google to choose and crawl that URL, and all other URLs that you specified. So, it is suitable for your website to indicate that Google should spend time crawling the updated and relevant pages on your site. It is better to verify at the stage environment and implement the canonicalization, including rewrites and redirects from all other protocols. Find and index the canonical version or URL of every page of your website using the URL Inspection tool on Google Search Console. The tool will help you check for proper URL canonicalization, and whether a page has a canonical tag to prevent it from appearing on multiple URLs. You may not expe