You may be tempted to ignore this part of SEO altogether and skip it, but you should know that technical SEO plays a vital role in increasing website traffic. Sometimes your content is perfect and helpful, but search engines need help understanding it. As a result, this content is shown to only a few people. Search engines cannot understand your content well without considering technical SEO criteria.
Google and other search engines want the best results for user queries. Therefore, the bots of these search engines try to rank websites based on specific criteria. As we said, paying attention to improving technical SEO can help improve your ranking; the opposite is also true. If your website has serious technical issues, search engines may block your website from indexing altogether.
But technical SEO doesn't just help search engines. Websites should be fast, clean and easy to use to satisfy users. For this reason, it is necessary to pay attention to the basic principles of SEO to simplify search engines' work and satisfy users
Technical SEO checklist
Technical SEO is complicated, and you must pay attention to many details. In the rest of this article, you will read more about technical SEO details. But in general, the following eight points are the characteristics of technically optimized websites
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being fast
Page loading speed should be high. Users nowadays usually don't have much patience and don't want to wait long for a page to open. A 2016 study found that 53% of mobile website users abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. So if your pages load slowly, you're gaining a lot of traffic.
Ability to creep or crawl
Search engines use bots to crawl and retrieve information from websites. You can use many methods to improve this feature. For example, you can restrict the crawling of certain content or prevent crawled pages from appearing on search result pages or following page links. You can also help bots better understand the content of pages by using internal links
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No broken links
Opening pages that don't exist can annoy or annoy users. If there is a broken or missing link on your site, people will get a 404 error. This issue can have a terrible effect on the audience's user experience. In addition, search engines also prefer to avoid finding pages with this error.
Most websites have several broken links because they are constantly changing. But using different tools can fix these errors and reduce the number of broken links. For example, you can fix this problem by "Redirect" and transferring broken and old links with new pages
No copied content
Duplicate content, whether on your website or copied from other websites, confuses search engines. When faced with these pages, search engines do not know which page to rank higher. As a result, they may show pages with similar content lower than other pages.
Sometimes you may have duplicate content without knowing it. For example, the same content may be displayed with two different URLs due to technical problems. This content does not affect the audience's user experience, but search engines will notice it and penalize you. Fortunately, you can fix this problem by using canonical tags. Canonical tags represent the main page of content to search engines
being safe
Technically optimized websites should be secure. Paying attention to the website's security means respecting the users' privacy. You can do many things to secure your website, and using HTTPS is one of the most important steps you can take.
HTTPS ensures no one can access the data between the website and the browser. For example, if people log into their user accounts on your website, their user information will be saved. You must have an SSL certificate to run HTTPS on your website
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Having structured data
Structured data helps search engines better understand your content and business. Using this structured data, you can tell search engines what product or content you sell on your website. In addition, it is possible to provide details of content and products in this way.
Since this data has a specific format, when you provide the necessary information to the search engine, the search engines can easily find and understand it. This will make your content more visible and meet the requirements to be displayed as a "Rich Result
".
Having an XML sitemap
An XML Sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. This index shows the road map of your website to the search engines, and by using it, you can ensure that the search engines get all of your important content on the site. An XML sitemap typically includes your posts, pages, tags, and other posts in a categorized format, including the number of images and the last modified date for each page.
Ideally, websites should not need an XML sitemap. If a website has an efficient internal link structure that links all the content well, the bots will not need a sitemap anymore. But sites sometimes have a better structure, and having an XML sitemap can help them
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Using the hreflang tag on international websites
Search engines will need help understanding the destination country and language if your website operates in multiple countries with different languages. If you help search engines understand different languages and countries, website content will be displayed in the correct language for audiences in each geographic region.
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