Here’s something you should know about technical SEO (and why it’s important):

When you start learning about search engine optimization (SEO), you will learn there are three areas of SEO:

On-page SEO: Refers to aspects that relate to the content of your website

Off-page SEO: Includes anything to do with actions that happen outside of your website that may directly affect your search rankings. Such as links to your website, social sharing, etc.

Then you find technical SEO.

 

Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical components of your site and server that contribute to your performance and user experience. These performance and experience components are the two primary elements that affect how users and search engines experience your site.

 

Traditionally, technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for crawlability and indexability. 

Crawling is the ability of search engines to reach your pages and indexability is the search engine’s ability to examine those pages and add them to its own database or index. 

Today, technical SEO refers to virtually any technical process that can enhance search visibility. Including, among many others:

 

Site architecture

XML sitemaps

Site speed

Duplicate content

Security

User experience

 

9 Best Technical SEO Checklist Items

When people hear the term technical SEO they often think it is over their heads. However, it is not that complicated. Here is a technical SEO checklist that you can reference in order to improve your own technical SEO: 

 

1. Use the Correct SEO Tool 

One of the first SEO tips for writing an optimized author bio is to use the correct SEO tool..and for those of you that are on WordPress, 

 

2. Nail Your Page Experience 

One of the very first stops you want to make when trying to improve your technical SEO is to nail your page experience. This is important because page experience incorporates many of the other variety of technical SEO elements that you should be optimizing. 

 

What is page experience? 

 

As the name implies, page experience is a set of signals that Google uses in order to compute how users experience the page themselves when they interact with any pages of your website. The signals include: 

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google’s three metrics for determining user experience when loading a page. They are:

 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP measures a page’s load speed, and Google’s recommendation is for a page’s LCP to be within 2.5 seconds from the time a page begins to load.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP is a web performance metric that measures how responsive a web page is after a user interacts. A good INP should have a low score.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures a page’s visual stability when loading. A page that is heavily moving around will result in a high CLS. A good CLS should measure 0.1 or lower.

You can determine your website’s core vitals by going to google search console (GSC) under the enhancements section.

The other page experience signals are:

 

Mobile-friendliness

While you may think this is old news, you will be surprised how many websites are still behind on providing a mobile-first experience. Mobile devices currently have a 54.37% market share, so being mobile-friendly will improve ranking in search engines, since search engines will give a higher ranking to mobile-friendly websites over non-mobile-friendly sites.

Security With HTTPS

Security is undoubtedly an important aspect of how people perceive their interaction with your website. Knowing that your website is secure gives people permission to play and experiment with it (and stay longer). The screenshot below is an example of how the lock icon indicates security.

 

That’s why search engines (especially Google) measure HTTPS as a metric for page experience. 

 

What’s the difference between HTTP and HTTPS? 

 

While the difference is just three letters, and the ‘S’ stands for secure, HTTPS is encrypted, meaning it is more secure. With the uptick of cybercrime, search engines want to make sure they are sending their users to safe domains. 

 

Intrusive Interstitial Elements

Here is a second problem that came with websites becoming mobile-first. Unscrupulous webmasters and advertisers attempting to profit from limited real estate that mobile devices present by using full-screeen popups. An intrusive interstitial is any instance on a page that covers a majority of the content on any web page, making that content difficult to access.

 

Search engines do not value the intrusive interstitial element, as it gives a poor experience. Remember, search engines are concerned about user satisfaction, and they take this above all other factors. Anything that takes away from a good experience will negatively affect your SEO.

 

3. Examine Your Site for Crawl Errors

Search engines “crawl” your web pages to determine a website’s purpose. “Crawling” is simply following links from page to page. This is why implementing an internal linking strategy is so important – it conveys to search engines what your website is about and how your pages are hierarchy.

 

That’s also why it is soooo important to make sure you do not have any crawl errors on your website. A few common causes of crawl errors might include:

 

Broken links

It is inevitable to have broken links, as a website is always a work in progress. Always keep track of these and set up redirects.

 

For an article on how to find and fix broken links, you can check this one out.

 

Redirect Chains 

While redirects can be useful, unconsidered redirects can do more harm than good to your website. Sometimes, you can end up with redirect chains as a problem, which is where one redirect leads to another and then another and another etc. Redirect chains can cause serious crawl errors.

 

4. Develop an Effective Site Architecture

Site architecture is a general term that describes how pages on your site are organized, grouped, and linked together. An effective site architecture can help both users and search engines to appropriately locate content within your site. From a user’s perspective this ultimately leads to an increase in time on site which not only is an implicit indicator of satisfaction but also tells search engines that you offer a positive UX while providing valuable content. Several things can influence your site architecture, including:

 

Navigation menus

Categorization

URL structures

Breadcrumbs

Internal linking

Keep in mind that search engines depend on users having a positive UX. On websites, one of the main contributors to user-friendly experience is site architecture, so optimize whenever possible for SEO.

 

5. Optimize your robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells the search engines how to crawl your website and which pages to show in the search engine results. 

 

And there are indeed a lot of pages you do not want on search engines wasting time crawling. Think administrative pages, cart and checkout pages, log-in pages, resources such as pdfs… 

 

When you optimize your robots.txt file, you are ensuring that only your important pages can be crawled and indexed. When you have bigger sites, optimizing your robots.txt file is very useful because you can reduce server traffic. 

6. Build and Optimize an XML Sitemap

A XML sitemap is frequently a neglected aspect of an efficient technical SEO roadmap. That is, if done correctly it can be very effective.

 

An XML sitemap is nothing more than a map of your site — it helps search engines discover, crawl and index your content easier, which gets your pages indexed faster.

 

In addition to assisting with the crawling aspect of search engines, a sitemap provides important information, such as:

 

The relationship between the important pages on your site.

How frequently a page on your site is updated.

The last time it was updated.

Using a tool like AIOSEO – this is super-easy to create a sitemap. That’s one of the reasons it’s one of the best WordPress SEO plugins.

 

To create your sitemap, literally all you have to do is go to the plugin’s settings and press “Sitemaps”.

7. Develop Search Engine and User-Friendly URLs

Another factor to add to your technical SEO checklist is URL structure.

 

Google indicates your website URL structure should be as simple as possible. The URLs on your website should be user-friendly, as well as search engine-friendly.

 

Being user-friendly means that your content has been organized so the URLs are:

 

Logical

Readable

Meaningful to readers

URLs are not just meant to serve the purpose of helping search engines locate a page’s address. They should also show readers that the page they are clicking on will satisfy their search intent. Make sure to use words that are readable, and contain your keyword. Don’t take the URL’s WordPress automatically assigns you. These are unhelpful, and usually just contain ID numbers that do not represent anything.

 

8. Remove Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a virus that any website can quickly become infected with, especially if you own an ecommerce website that sells multiple similar products, you’ll need to be diligent with your product descriptions.

 

However, being an ecommerce store is not the only place duplicate content can be a problem. All websites face duplicate content struggles.

 

What Is Duplicate Content?

 

Duplicate content, as the name implies, is content that is somewhat the same but on different URLs. This could be on other sites or even other pages on your site. this could also mean the content, meta tags, 

 

And if you’re wondering, duplicate content is bad for SEO because search engines won’t know:

 

What version to index.

Do they assign link metrics to the one page or split them between the multiple versions.

What version they should rank for query results.

Search engines will never show duplicate content in their search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, it will be difficult to rank duplicate content, regardless of how good the content is. 

 

How do you resolve duplicate content?

 

For duplicate content on your site, one of the best ways to resolve the issue is a 301 redirect of all duplicate pages to the original page.

 

Another great way to handle duplicate content is to have a rel= canonical tag added to the URL you would like search engines to index. This rel= canonical tag tells search engines that the canonicalized URL is the original URL and should be indexed.

 

Lastly, you may consider removing the duplicate pages. If you are going to do this, please make sure you redirect the URLs to the page you will be keeping. 

 

9. Use Schema Markup

In order for search engines to better understand your website, it is important that your website is formatted in a way that bots can interpret easily. However, since humans and bots don’t actually speak the same language, it is a challenge to construct web pages that meet the needs of both parties.

 

Here is where schema markup comes in.

 

Schema markup or structured data is the language of search engines. It is a collection of standardized tags you can place on your website that will describe each of the various elements on your pages, in “robot speak.” 

 

By implementing schema markup, you are helping search engines better understand the content on your website. Improving user experience from search engines. Once schema markup is implemented, search engines can serve rich results to users on the SERP.

 

These rich results are often more engaging and carry more information about your web page, which translates to higher clickthroughs.

 

One more benefit of implementing schema markup is that it can help elevate your entity SEO profile.  In short, an entity is an identifiable and searchable object that has distinction enough to be searched by name.  This ultimately puts SEO, at a more context level than simple keyword.

 

Consider the simple example of a user entering “Paris” into a search engine.  Search engines do not know if that user is searching for the city or if they are searching for a person.  Entity SEO interprets the clusters of keywords into a context so that search engines can return relevant results.

 

What does this have to do with schema markup?

 

A lot!

 

Schema markup enables search engines to connect your brand with entities, which you can define in your niche, area of expertise, or industry.  This increases the chances of your brand showing for entity searches based on the entities that relate with your brand.  If we stick to our example of searching “Paris”, here are examples of some of the entities that Google recognizes. 

 

Technical SEO will help support entity SEO, schema markup is important.