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 expect that all URLs on your website would be indexed, though.

14. Does the website properly use permalinks?

Check whether your website has set-up and uses permalinks properly. You can think of this part of the URL as a conversation between your site and a search, which means that the permalinks you use and the structure you decide have corresponding redirects to ensure fresh content is directed to the respective URL on your website.

15. Page names and image names

Ensure that all your website pages, document names, and image file names are keyword enrich. When it comes to image SEO, it is essential that when you use keywords to help your website pages rank on search engines, it would have an exact match with search queries. You need to create descriptive, keyword-rich file names that are crucial for page and image optimization. Search engines crawl the text on your webpage, but they also crawl your image file names. Double-check that page names have meta descriptions, tags, and images have proper captions, alt-text, tags, titles, and descriptions.

16. Check for mobile-friendliness

More people are searching for things from mobile devices than ever before. So your website needs to be mobile-friendly. Having a mobile-friendly website is a definite ranking signal that will help your SEO efforts.

You can check to see if your site is mobile friendly (in Google’s eyes) by using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

17. Check for bad link anchor text like “click here.”

Check your website for “Click here” anchors as these are considered bad. Over time, it becomes more descriptive about the goal of the hyperlink, which you need to be specific instead. An anchor text should be a specific clickable text in a hyperlink (that usually appears in an underlined blue color text) that matches or is relevant to the page you’re linking to. So, avoid being generic, i.e., click it here on your anchor text. Google search engines will index your website, and your anchor words will help crawlers to identify which of your webpages are running spam operations, are having bad links like “click here” and which are legitimate. These bad (i.e., click here) anchor words or links can tell your readers where they can find more information on your site, and what is on the other side of your anchor links. Worst is it can affect their search preference on your website and may cause them to bailout your competitors for more optimized content and relevant anchor links.

18. Check for redirect chains

Does your website utilize redirect chains? Do these chains take so long to get it to the other side of the redirect?

If either scenario happens to your website, better check your URL redirect accuracy, redirect status code, and internal redirect chains, or identify redirect loops. Use GSC’s Webmaster Tools to generate a report and map out chains of redirects to determine the number of hops along the way, how long it will take to identify the source, and if there is a loop. You can also check for redirect chains using https://redirectcheck.com.

19. Too many outbound dofollow links?

Ensure that your website has, in a way, not too many external dofollow links as these may diminish your webpage’s PageRank. We usually link to high-authority domains or websites with a typical length of high-quality content or articles that are 500 words or more with 3-5 outbound links. In some cases, there are around 7 or 8 outbound links or dofollow links that these high-quality content may have had. Thus, contributing to your off-page SEO optimization value, helping your website to cope with Google’s gradual increase of link building profile analysis to verify any site’s conveyance of online authority with other domains.

20. Check Certificate expiration dates

Put domain and certificate expiration dates within a business calendar and create alerts the month before these certificates expire. You can check these in Google Chrome by clicking the padlock icon in the address bar for whatever website you are on, click “Valid.” In the box that subsequently appears or pops up, under the “Certificate” prompt, click on “Valid,” then check for the expiration date. You can use SSL Shopper for a fast SSL/ TLS check, other information, and a quick diagnosis related to your SSL certificate installation.

21. The main content is above the fold

Ensure that the main content of your website pages is always “above the fold,” a terminology coined from the early days of publishing that refers to content on the front page of a newspaper or tabloid, particularly the upper portion, where it often shows the headlines or relevant story or photograph. In web development, this “above the fold” content refers to the portion of the web pages that loads first, becomes visible for browsing, and what the visitors first see without scrolling or clicking. The fold in on the website relates to the scrollbar.

22. Check for polluted data from forms

Check your website for polluted data from forms, and If people are trying to corrupt your data. Should this happen, then you are most likely a viable target for Negative SEO. Additionally, A negative SEO is the exact opposite of Search Engine Optimization. Where the former devastates your website, the latter optimizes it on the contrary. To prevent this, you need to install alerts in Google Search Console. Monitor your backlinks for low-quality, spammy links, and redirects and duplicate content using online SEO tools (for backlinking, disavowing links, etc.). Attend to the security needs of your website seriously by changing your passwords or improving your password protection frequently and ensure malware or spam protection. Also, never make enemies as this will result in data pollution or negative SEO. Check regularly for your site speed and server status, and avoid using black SEO.

23. Check for a video sitemap?

Check whether your website is using a video sitemap that is an extension to the standard sitemap. Ensure to follow video best practices to get the best results in Google Search Console Guidelines for Video Sitemaps. You can create and check Video Sitemap, or you can embed this within an existing sitemap at your convenience.  Adding video Video metadata to your existing sitemaps can create video metadata, which can be done manually, or you can choose the easier ways with a lot of online generators or creators of a video sitemap.

24. Is the website using a CMS

It is important to identify the earliest how content is being managed on your website, as this can impact your plan for optimization. You can detect a content management system or CMS through the source code of the website. For instance, the site is built on WordPress or Joomla, you will be able to find the CMS in the source code through its search option. Just type “Ctrl+U” then “Ctrl+F” and then search for the CMS that you think the website is built on. A CMS makes interaction with a website database user-friendly.

25. Is the website using wildcards in subdomains?

A possibility that black hats can invent subdomains that function with the existing website. In this case, you can create a wildcard DNS record to point out all existing and non-existing subdomains to a specific area. Sight, for instance, www.example.com would direct to *.example.com when a wildcard subdomain is enabled. The *.example.com is the wildcard subdomain. Check moz.com to learn more about the use of website wildcards in subdomains.

26. Check server headers.

Look into the server headers for every web page type on your website. Investigate server configuration errors and fine-tuning issues. The server headers are used to return a number of significant results and to check how a webpage responds to a request publicly. You can use online too