Technical SEO Checklist

technical SEO

Technical SEO checklistLooking to maximise the visibility of your website? Ranking factors are continually changing. This comprehensive technical SEO checklist from Web Design High Wycombe can help you stay ahead of your competition.

By implementing an SEO plan and staying on top of the changes as they happen, your small business can improve and grow. This checklist is the first in a series of three to help your small business develop its SEO strategy. This article focuses on technical SEO and follow up articles will cover on-page optimisation and external factors. So stay tuned!

Technical SEO Checklist

Before you focus on the content across your website, it’s important to ensure your website can be indexed and crawled. This process falls into the technical SEO category.

There are a number of tools that can support you in this process. Sign up to the following for diagnostic and analytics to support your SEO strategy.

These analytics can help you focus on aspects of technical SEO that will help search engines crawl your website.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a table that details the content of your website. A sitemap enables you to submit the pages of your website to search engines. This helps ensure search engines are aware of the pages available for crawling.

Website platforms such as WordPress will create a sitemap that collates the pages of your site for you to submit. There are also plug0ins that can be installed to create sitemaps.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file instructs search engines on what part of your website should not be indexed. Without such files, a search engine will review all content it finds.

It’s important to review this file to ensure the information included within the robots.txt file is accurate. You don’t want to accidentally prevent important content from being indexed.

Speed

Statistics show bounce rates are getting less and less, which is why search engines have updated their algorithms to include page speed as a ranking factor.

To reduce page speed it’s important to rely less on JavaScript and heavy loading code. You can achieve this by discovering ways to cache or load elements externally.

A professional web designer can help you identify areas of your website to optimise. Thus ensuring page load times are optimal.

Mobile-Friendly

These days websites must be optimised for mobile devices. You can check out how your website fairs by running it through Google’s mobile-friendly test. Conduct as much user experience testing as possible across mobile devices. This will ensure your website performs as users would expect.

SSL

It’s as important as having a mobile-friendly site with optimal page speed, as it is to have a secure site. Your website, therefore, needs an SSL certificate. These days, search engines tell users if the site they are visiting is secure or not. Avoid losing visitors before they’ve even landed on your site, install an SSL certificate to verify your website as secure.

Site Architecture

Mapping out your site structure is important. Think about how content is organised to prioritise the necessary aspects of your website and funnel visitors accordingly. Building a well-structured navigation will benefit users and allow search engines to easily crawl your site.

Domains

If you redirect multiple domain names to your primary website make sure they are 301 redirects. Avoid mirroring or 302 redirects. Don’t overlook this as it can cause issues with duplicate content. It can also cause uncertainty over which domain is the correct one.

404 Pages

Create a custom 404 page with useful links, contact information and site search functionality. Don’t rely on the default browser error displaying should an issue arise.

Google Core Web Vitals

Last year Google updated its algorithms to encompass Core Web Vitals. Updated ranking factors include mobile-friendliness and page speed and are in addition to Page Experience factors. When it comes to Core Web Vitals it’s important to enlist a developer with technical know-how. They are equipped to optimise your website effectively for LCP, FID and CLS.

Get In Touch with Web Design High Wycombe

For support with technical SEO optimisation, get in touch with the experienced team at Web Design High Wycombe. Call 01494 356778 for more information about our SEO packages and get your site ranking better in no time.