Technical SEO: 7 Steps To Instantly Boost Your Site’s Ranking

[This article was originally published in August 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.]

Have you invested in on-page SEO and off-page SEO yet?

But, why isn’t your website ranking as well as it should?

Along my blogging journey, I make sure to learn SEO before making money blogging. I love reading and writing and the idea of making money from blogging is quite tempting!

Making money and being ranked #1 in Google is the dream of many bloggers. I do want both of them to work well for me. Thus, I need to execute how to do it and see the result.

Technical SEO problems can lead to ranking dips, negative engagement metrics, and crawl errors. I don’t want it to happen to my precious blog. Failing to address technical SEO problems can also lead your website to disappear from search engine results.

If you want to:

• learn more about the basics of technical SEO,
• create an action plan that won’t waste your time,
• and will help you improve your site’s ranking, read on!

What is Technical SEO?

As always, you need to know what technical SEO is.

Site speed, security, and mobile-friendly design are many ranking factors used by search engines. For instance, technical SEO is the umbrella term for activities that help search engine crawlers do their job, enabling them to index your site properly.

Search engines change their ranking algorithms all the time and technical SEO has to keep changing as well to keep up with search engines. The details may change, but the goal remains the same: to improve SERP rankings through website and server optimizations.

These activities, when done in on-page optimization of non-technical SEO, increase your website’s chances of being indexed, crawled, and ranked.

So, how is it different from the other two types of SEO?

• On-page SEO refers to everything on your site that improves search rankings; content formatting, keyword research, image SEO, internal linking, etc.
• Off-page SEO refers to high-quality links through guest blogging, media pitching, blog commenting, and other things that build external links back to your site.
• Technical SEO refers to anything and everything you do to improve rankings outside of content and links. For example, website and server optimizations.

Let’s make it simple. On-page and technical SEO is entirely within your control. While off-page SEO relies on third parties – getting sites to agree to link back to you.

Technical SEO Checklist

A technical website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about and it prevents confusion caused by, for instance, duplicate content.

Moreover, it doesn’t send visitors, nor search engines, into dead-end streets by non-working links. Here, I’ll shortly go into some important activities of a technically optimized website.

Finding and Fixing Site Errors

I have mentioned on my Twitter, one of my ways to improve Domain Authority (DA) is by performing link audits. Technical errors can mean crawlers don’t index your pages properly or in the worst case, don’t index your site at all. Geez. I’m sure you don’t want it to happen. Fixing the site error is an essential first step in any technical SEO activity. 

Performing technical SEO audits can be done with Ubersuggest. It identifies related errors and advises on common problem fixes. Once you click the issues, you get advice on how to fix the problems plus a list of all the site errors. Fix the errors methodically and rerun the audit to ensure that your fixes worked.

Choosing one or two days a week to perform site audits is best. I prefer to do it on the weekend when I’m focused on fixing and updating on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

Pro tips: If you already have so many posts on your blog, of course, you will feel overwhelmed if you want to work on your SEO. It takes time to fix and update all posts. So, I recommend fixing and updating your top-performance posts first. For example, my top performance post is blog traffic so I fix on-page and technical SEO more in that post.

Revise Site Architecture

For you who don’t know site architecture, it refers to how information or content is structured on your site. For example, how pages are organized into categories. Site architecture impacts how both users and search engine crawlers experience the site.

Sites with bad architecture are likely to have subdomains or subdirectories that have gotten unwieldy. A good and well-structured site will rank faster on results pages.

Make sure your site has an XML sitemap. It is a list of the most important pages, formatted to make sure search engines understand, find, and crawl them.

After that, organize your site’s URL into a logical flow, from domain-category-subcategory.

merryofaugust.com/blogging/seo

Last, optimize your URL structure for search. Always include primary keywords and keep the URL length to 60 characters. For example, this post’s title is Technical SEO: 7 Steps To Instantly Boost Your Site’s Ranking, but I don’t want to include everything in the URL structure (permalink). So, I change it like below:

meryofaugust.com/technical-seo-improve-blog/

Remove Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is content that appears on multiple pages on the same domain. Even though it’s not malicious and doesn’t get a Google penalty, it should still be fixed. That’s because if crawlers don’t know which one is the original, they won’t know which result to show in SERPs.

If this happens, your site could rank lower than it deserves to.

Ubersuggest site audit identifies on-site duplicate content. Some errors have a quick fix. For example, duplicate meta titles and descriptions just require you to rewrite or add the meta.

Site Security

Even though HTTP was a fast way to send data, it wasn’t secure. It’s better to use HTTPS, a system with an added protocol on top. This added protocol – SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) – encrypts data safely across the web.

According to Globalsign, 84% of users abandon a site if they notice it’s unsecured, so it’s good practice to secure users’ data. If you’re still running on non-secure HTTP, get your developers to change to HTTPS (secure) as soon as possible.

Improve Site Speed

Believe me, people will abandon a website if it takes longer than five seconds or more to load. I always experience this when I want to visit some blogs. Those bouncing users, like me, send negative signals to search engines about your site quality, which makes it harder to be ranked in Google.

Fixing a slow-loading site should be a priority in technical SEO activities. But, as Google confirmed back in 2010, slow loading doesn’t bode well just because of bouncing users, but page speed is also a direct ranking signal.

Ubsersuggest also shows your site speed result when you perform a site audit. It calculates how fast your site loads on both desktop and mobile.

Here are some tips to make your site faster:

• Compressing images: I’ve been using the ShortPixel image optimization plugin for WordPress and it made my website load faster.
• Cleaning up site code: minimize and combine HTML and CSS files, and eliminate unnecessary code such as line breaks.

Keeping page weight and page requests to a minimum is the best practice for site managers.

Mobile-Friendly Design

According to Statista, in the second quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 51.53 percent of global website traffic.

• Check your site on Google’s mobile-friendly checker tool to discover pages that don’t fully load on mobile. Drop your URL into the search box. You’ll not only get a quick answer on whether or not your website is mobile-friendly but also a screenshot of how the page looks on a mobile screen and a list of recommendations to make the mobile experience better.
• Make your website responsive by installing a responsive theme. Choose the one that’s best for your site, and that’s responsive, and install it. Double-check that your new theme looks great on all devices, and make sure you still follow the rest of the tips below to ensure everything else is up to par.
• Keep the font size legible and large. You don’t want your audience squinting to read the text or unable to discern the letters so I suggest using at least a 14-point font size.

Use Structured Data Markup

Structured data is information about your site or specific pages on your site that are neatly organized in a database. Using structured data improves the chances of ranking in SERP features, such as rich snippets, which can lead to increased click-through rates from results pages to your site.

Schema markup is code on your site and helps search engines return better results by letting crawlers know what keywords mean. 

Here are some steps to get started adding structured data to your site:

1. Go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Then select the type of data you want to identify. For example, you might want to add Article markup to your blog posts, or Recipe markup if you have a cooking blog.
2. Add the URL you want to mark up. Add the elements or tags you want to include in the markup.
3. Add the generated source code to your CMS.

Finally, test your markup with the structured data testing tool to make sure it’s correct.

Technical SEO doesn’t end when you’ve fixed common errors. Tracking the impact of these fixes over time helps you learn which technical SEO factors most harm or help your rankings.

Therefore, you need a complete SEO guide checklist that hits all of the best practices for SEO if you want to boost your site’s overall ability to rank in search. That means adding an on-page SEO and off-page SEO checklist to your blogging schedule.

Download this complete SEO checklist to get a full SEO task list of everything you need to optimize your website. It includes 35+ action items related to on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Prioritize future activities based on that, and you’ll see positive impacts on organic traffic.

SEO can be difficult, but if you get to know it step by step and get this full SEO task list, I believe you can handle it. It takes a long time to get the result that you want, so you need to be patient.

Let me know below if you have some tips to be added here. I would like to know more about your experience with SEO!