Technical search engine optimization is a vital component of modern SEO, though it isn’t as simple as many marketers assume. For beginners, technical SEO can seem mysterious and overly complicated with various terms and standards; however, it is essential to rank number one in search results.
Getting technical SEO right can be a daunting task. But you can make it easier with the help of SEO services.
Follow this technical SEO checklist for 2022 to help your company move up the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Table of Contents
Let’s explore the basic technical SEO checklist one by one
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Mobile-Friendly Website or Not
A mobile-friendly website is essential for countless reasons. Thanks to more than 50 percent of the Internet’s traffic coming from mobile devices, search engines like Google now follow a mobile-first approach to indexing, which influences search rankings.
There are many tools available to test the mobile-friendliness of your website. Enter your URL or HTML code and click “Test URL” to get your results.
What to do if your site is not mobile-friendly?
If your site is not responsive to mobile browsers, the tool will provide instructions on how you can fix it. A few steps are required, depending on the issue, and a developer will have to work with you to fix these issues.
It would help if you worked on solving this issue as it will impact the website rankings.
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Are you using secure HTTPS for your website?
Google uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) as a ranking signal. To rank highly, you should be using the secure version of HTTPS to transmit data across the Internet. If your website uses the unsecured HTTP version, you lose your website rankings, good traffic, and incoming sales.
First, you must ensure that your website is secure by checking if HTTPS is used. Navigate to your domain’s homepage and check the browser’s address bar. The webpage should begin with “HTTPS://” or “HTTP://” before the domain name.
When your website address bar features “HTTP://” instead of “HTTPS://,” your site isn’t using the secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS). You must address this problem by upgrading to HTTPS as soon as possible with the help of your developer and by following a few steps as shown below:
- First, you need to purchase an SSL certificate.
- Install it on your website using the given steps in the certificate
- Ensure that all of your internal links and canonical URLs are redirected from HTTP to HTTPS.
- In Google Search Console, verify that your website’s HTTP and HTTPS versions are set up properly.
- You should update your XML sitemap to reference the secure web addresses of all your pages instead of the HTTP web addresses.
If you install an SSL certificate on a site running WordPress, the CMS can take care of updating internal links and canonical URLs, which will save you time.
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Check for 404 Errors
A broken link is an error in your website’s code that prevents users from reaching content. If your website has many broken links, your users will experience problems using your website, and search engines may rank you lower and display warning messages next to your site in search results.
You can check for 404 errors on your website in several ways, including using a browser plugin to check each page individually, downloading freemium software to check your site as a whole, or installing a WordPress plugin to monitor the status of links.
Screaming Frog is an excellent tool for analyzing your entire website, while SEO Minion is a good choice if you’re publishing a new page.
Some of the links will likely be broken when you set up your site. It might be due to a typo or deleting a page, but server issues cause many 404 errors. Be sure to run your site through a 404 checker and fix any errors. After fixing, check the site again.
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Presence of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content on a website can damage the site’s rankings because it makes it difficult for Google to determine which pages are most valuable to users. Analyzing your duplicate content and meta tags will help you avoid this problem.
You can use several tools to find duplicate content on your site, including Screaming Frog, Copyscape, Siteliner, etc.
Screaming Frog is the best option if you want to conduct a sitewide duplicate content check. Although Siteliner can perform a sitewide check, it limits you to checking 250 URLs compared to the 500 URLs that you can use with Screaming Frog.
If your website has duplicate content, this can result in a low search engine ranking. Finding and removing duplicate content requires a certain amount of time and creativity.
You need to go page-by-page and ensure that the page title, meta description, and URL for each page on your website are unique. If you find duplicate content on your website, you will use a different process to resolve the issue.
Review the content to determine if you could expand it. If so, set up a 301 redirect from the merged page to the new one.
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Site Speed
A slow website frustrates users and can negatively affect search engine rankings. To provide a good user experience, you must make sure your website loads quickly on desktop computers and mobile devices.
If you want to evaluate your site’s speed, you can check With PageSpeed Insights, a free tool from Google. Google provides an overall score, ranging from 0 to 100, of your mobile and desktop page speed report.
When site performance is slower than expected, users are more likely to abandon a website than continue browsing; Google provides actionable recommendations for site owners and developers to address common issues.
- Checking your JavaScript
- Text compression
- Deleting unnecessary CSS
- Removing offscreen images
- Use Compressed images
- Serving images in next-gen formats
By following these rules, you can improve your page speed.
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Redirect Links
Companies that change websites, merge with other companies, or neglect to update their websites find themselves with a redirect chain. A redirect chain does not help a website rank in search results. Because of limits on the number of redirects, you can use, a chain of redirects can stall crawling by search engines.
A chain of redirects between web pages, where Page A redirects to Page B, which redirects to Page C, and so on, is sometimes referred to as a redirect chain.
Using Screaming Frog will help you find redirect chains on your website. While other tools can perform this task, Screaming Frog is a multipurpose tool that you can use for other tasks, such as checking for duplicate content and meta tags.
You can access the Redirect and Canonical Chains report in Screaming Frog by choosing Reports followed by the Selecting Redirect and Canonical Chains option and then saving the resulting report in excel format. It will help to understand the project. It can be shared and viewed easily and collaborated with other works making it easy to access.
To fix a redirect chain, your development team will need to modify the original redirects, ensuring that the redirecting pages point to the desired page. To ensure that your redirects work, you will want to confirm and verify them.
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Check the robots.txt File
All websites require a robots.txt file to prevent crawlers from indexing sensitive pages. The robots.txt file must be formatted correctly and placed in the correct directory on your server to function correctly.
You can test your site’s robots.txt file with a free tool from Google. You can also use the tool to modify the file–for example, you can tell a crawler not to index a certain page or PDF document. You can use this tool to test a specific URL.
If you notice that your robots.txt file does not conform to Google’s recommendations, you will need to fix it. You can use the Robots.txt Tester tool to check your file’s settings and fix the issue.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is important for every business, regardless of their SEO strategy. With this technical SEO checklist, you can improve your website’s technical SEO. Optimizing your website to improve its speed and mobile SEO can significantly improve your rankings, traffic, and profits.
If you are pressed for time or want additional SEO information, Ahbiv digital Agency can assist.
