Guide to Technical SEO for Beginners

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

YOU NEED A FAST SITE

Visitors won’t wait for 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. It started to affect a small number of 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 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 just 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. What you need to make sure is your page loads under two seconds, and that it has the least number of requests.

IMPORTANCE OF MOBILE FRIENDLINESS

Mobile internet marketing may be the biggest recent changes to technical SEO. Just last April 2015, the ‘mobilegeddon’ update was released by Google. They also made it clear that mobile-friendly content has been made 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 just 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..