Technical SEO checklists

Technical SEO is the technical optimization of your website for search engines. The content on your website has to appear on search results in Google. For this to happen, Google has to recognize and review the content. Hence, your website is in desperate need of technical SEO to appear and rank on Google pages.

Importance of technical SEO

Every website needs technical SEO to attract website traffic and rank. But is it indeed necessary? Absolutely yes. Your website content goes through a Google check. It is crawled, indexed, and rendered to be in the SERPs.

Google crawls or scrolls through your website content and pages to check it along with other websites. Then it indexes or notes down the content in search engines to appear there. Lastly, Google ensures that your target audience can engage and interact with your content and website.

So, your website demands technical SEO to increase traffic and rank on Google.

Technical SEO Checklist

1. Mobile Optimized Website

Remember that most of your website’s target audience is mobile phone users. Your website must be mobile-friendly to drive traffic and rank high on Google. It must be optimized and readily available on mobile phones. The content should be similar for every device and load within a few seconds.

Test your website with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to see whether it is mobile optimized. Now, your website can easily rank on Google.

2. No broken links

Links help Google crawl, index, and rank web pages and your website on the SERPs. The internal and external links should be of good quality to work fine. A broken link is a 404 Error Page that interrupts user experience, decreasing website rank and traffic. Remove or fix these links through a web developer for smooth website function.

3. Faster loading

A big chunk of your website rankability depends on how fast your web pages load. Thus, guarantee a proper server under which the site loads, avoid including large pictures on your pages or stuffing them with lots of content. Ensure fewer redirects to prevent a redirect loop. There must be no duplicate content pages because it increases the loading time.
Use Google Page Speed Insights to improve loading time hence your rank.

4. Safe with HTTPs

Your website secures a Google rank with HTTPS, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It protects your web data from being leaked. Google checks whether your website is safe to upload and view. The lock sign before your URL is verified as secure by Google.
To lock your website with HTTPS, add SSL so that the site transfers from HTTP to HTTPS.

5. Do Away with Errors

Google crawls through your website to rank it. If it cannot crawl without errors on your page, it will not rank on the SERPs. Your website has to be error-free. Use the correct XML Sitemap, structure your website well, enable and optimize the robots.txt file for easy crawling on web pages.

Technical SEO tools

1. Google Search Console

This free tool checks if Google can recognize, store and verify your website content. It helps you see how your content appears or ranks on the SERPs and improve if required. It identifies link-related errors.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

This free Google tool is for testing technical SEO. It spots 404 errors, pages that your website audience cannot see. This keeps your Robot.txt file in check to stop the search engines from blocking main web pages. It ensures that your site functions well to rank better on Google.

3. Screaming Frog

Their free version of the SEO Spider tool helps improve technical SEO. It discovers broken links, missing page titles, and duplicate content. Your webpages are indexed fast with XML sitemaps, fixing URL and canonical errors.

4. SEOmator

It is the ultimate tool for a technical SEO review. This helps identify crawler errors, broken links, redirected chains, and missing structured data. It checks the webpage loading speed, website content quality, and optimization.
It can also test if the website is mobile-friendly plus rank it higher. This audit tool is available for several languages and users.

FAQs

1. Are Technical and On-Page SEO similar?

Ans: No, they are not. On-Page SEO is your website content; while Technical SEO helps your website rank easily. 

2. What is a technical SEO audit?

Ans: A technical SEO audit is to check and fix issues that keep your website from ranking higher. 

3. What is the best technical SEO strategy?

Ans: The best technical SEO strategy is to ensure using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a smooth functioning website that can rank well. 

4. How to avoid duplicate content?

Ans: Update and check your website content, technical SEO, SEO, and social media to keep ranking on Google.