Before even thinking about keywords and content, you need to work on your technical SEO.
Any problems with technical SEO can literally destroy your efforts, that’s why it is important to get your technical SEO right before proceeding to the next steps.
In short, with technical SEO you help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.
Domain configuration
In the SEO world, a domain with www in front is not the same as a domain with no www in front.
Google considers these to be two different websites:
https://www.example.com (with www) https://example.com (with no www)
Having two websites with exactly the same content is not a good thing for SEO, and through technical SEO, you can ‘tell’ Google which domain version you prefer to use.
Which pages to include in the search engine’s index
By default, search engine crawlers will try to index all pages that are publicly available on the Internet.
Sometimes this is not what you want for various reasons. For example, you may have pages that are for your employees only or pages that you want only Facebook visitors to see.
You can control which parts of your website you want search engines to index through a file called robots.txt. This file resides in the root folder of your website
and provides crawlers with instructions as to which files/directories of a website they can access.
Website structure and navigation
Site structure is very important for SEO. Websites need to have a hierarchical structure that is simple to navigate both by crawlers and users.
If you are starting a website now, you should spend some time thinking of how your website will be structured.
A common mistake made by many designers is to concentrate on the appearance of a website, without thinking about structure and navigation.
When crawlers discover a website, they start the indexing process from the homepage, and then they follow all links from there.
This means that you need to make sure that any page of your website is accessible in less than 3 clicks, by following links from the homepage.
URL structure
Besides choosing a good domain name and designing a site structure that is easy to use, you should also optimize your URLs.
The URLs, also known as slugs or permalinks, should accurately describe what the page is all about.
For example, consider these two URLs:
- https://example.com/343/bg/page.html
- https://example.com/what-is-seo
The first is an example of a bad URL, while the second is an example of an SEO- friendly URL.
Notice how easy is to understand what the second URL is all about. Users and search engines have a big clue as to what to expect from that page before even looking at the actual content.
The page is not found (404 error)
Sometimes when you click a link you end up seeing an empty page or a page with some technical terms you don’t understand. This is not a good experience for users or for crawlers.
There are ways to control how your website will behave in such situations. Instead of showing users an empty 404 page, you can give them options on how to find what they are looking for.
Page speed
Google likes fast websites and decided to reward them by giving them a small ranking boost.
Your job as an SEO is to make sure that your website loads as fast as possible. This means you need to check your server infrastructure and a lot of other things that are related to site speed.
Website security
Besides speed, Google (and users) like secure websites. Installing an SSL to make your website HTTPS is no longer optional.
Mobile-friendliness
More than 60% of searches are now performed on mobile devices. This means that your website has to be mobile-friendly and offer a great experience to users on
mobile.
Google is taking mobile very seriously and that’s why they created a mobile-first index that is used to better serve mobile searches.
Part of your technical SEO review is to test your website on different mobile devices and ensure that it loads fast and is easy to use.
Multilingual websites
When you have a website that is available in more than one language, there is a special SEO configuration for that.
When you have a post that is too big and broken down into a number of pages, there is also a way to deal with that so that Google can understand that it’s the same post but broken down into multiple parts.
