If you’re familiar with SEO and trying to implement it to improve your business, there are several technical aspects you must take into consideration to get the most out of your efforts. Follow along for a crash course in why these technical aspects of SEO are important and how they can benefit your business.
- Google isn’t concerned with the structure of your sitemap- Often times, when you compare two websites’ sitemaps, you will find differences in syntax. This is nothing to be concerned of because Google is only looking at the facts!
- Infinite Scroll pages might be hurting your SEO performance- Crawlers cannot read all of an infinite scroll page. For best SEO practice, create a paginated series of pages that make up your infinite scroll page.
- Google typically crawls your homepage before others- This is important to note if you have a series of pages you want to rank for. Try to get your main keywords in your page title and meta description of your homepage!
- You can check how Google sees your mobile page- Use Google Console’s mobile usability report to check how your mobile site looks to Google, especially as they transition to a mobile-first index.
- Page Speed is important!– For both SEO and user experience, try to keep your page load time to 2-3 seconds.
- You can opt out of translations- As you’ve probably noticed, Google offers translations for pages written in a language other than the one you’re browsing in. Turn this option off if you want to avoid misunderstandings in your foreign language content.
- HTTPS is growing- More websites are switching over to more secure, https, websites. Currently, over half of the websites on page one results are secure.
- Robots.txt files are sensitive- Be sure your robots.txt file is named in all lower case letters and that the file is in your main directory.
- Noarchive doesn’t mean lower rankings- If you add a noarchive tag, Google will not show a cached version of the page in search results but it will still rank the uncached version in the same place.
- Internal vs. External Links- Though it is good for your SEO to include both types of links, the way Google scores internal and external links differs for obvious reasons.