Guide to Technical SEO for Beginners

Technical SEO is described as any SEO work that is done aside from the content. It builds a strong foundation for your content to help it rank with relevant keywords and phrases. Technical SEO is focusing on how well search engine spiders can crawl your site and index your content.

YOU NEED A FAST SITE

Visitors will not wait long for your site to load. Back in 2010, Google announced that site speed will be one of their ranking factors for quality SEO services. This element started to affect rankings ever since. But not all site speed problems are of equal importance.

An Akamai study revealed that 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds or less. Around 40% of these will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

According to Zoompf, hundreds of factors can affect site speed. The most common are:

1. Unoptimized images
2. Content served without HTTP compression
3. Too many CSS image requests (not using sprites)
4. No caching information (expires header)

DIAGNOSE YOUR SPEED PROBLEMS

It’s not recommended to just guess your speed problems. There are ways and tools to diagnose them. Google offers its own Page Insight Tool, wherein you enter your site’s URL. It not only analyzes your site speed but also tells you what you should fix to improve it.

The Google tool is the simplest and a good place to start, but there are other tools you can use for free, such as Pingdom and GTmetrix.
You need to make sure your page loads under two seconds, and that your site has the least number of requests possible.

IMPORTANCE OF MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS

Mobile internet marketing may be the biggest change to technical SEO. In April 2015, the so-called ‘mobilegeddon’ update was released by Google
With this update, Google made it clear that mobile-friendly content has been made and will stay an important ranking factor.

The good news is sites can check their performance for mobile through Google’s very own mobile-friendly checker tool. You need to enter your URL, and the tool will show you exactly what Google thinks of your page, and how to improve it.

BUILD A STRONG SITE STRUCTURE

Google search spiders need help to discover new pages or updated pages. Get your pages indexed and ranked faster by maintaining a clear and simple site architecture.

If you are not sure about your technical SEO and notice that your bounce rate is increasing combined with session duration declining, you should review all the above or contact us. We will conduct a thorough SEO audit, which also includes the technical part, and assist you in adjusting your website to make it more than just SEO compliant.