Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website for search engines. It allows search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content. In this guide, we’ll share the best technical SEO tips and tricks to help you get higher search rankings.

Technical SEO is a critical part of the search engine optimization process. It helps search engines crawl, index, and understand your website. If search engines can’t crawl your website, they won’t index your content.

If search engines can’t index your content, you won’t rank in the search results. If you don’t rank in the search results, you won’t get any traffic. And if you don’t get any traffic, you won’t generate any leads or sales.

That’s why it’s important to optimize your website for search engines. In this guide, we’ll share the best technical SEO tips and tricks to help you get higher search rankings.

Make Sure Search Engines Can Crawl Your Site

The first step in making sure your website is set up for success in the search engines is to make sure it can be crawled and indexed.

Crawling is when a search engine sends out a bot (or spider) to find new and updated content on the web. Indexing is when the search engine adds that content to its database.

If a search engine can’t crawl your site, it won’t be able to index your content. This means your site won’t show up in the search results, and you’ll miss out on a ton of traffic.

To make sure your site can be crawled, you need to:

• Submit your sitemap to the search engines

• Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any important pages

• Make sure your site doesn’t have any crawl errors

• Make sure your site doesn’t have any noindex tags

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

It’s no secret that mobile usage has been on the rise for years. In fact, in 2021, mobile devices accounted for over 50% of all web traffic worldwide.

Given the prevalence of mobile, it’s absolutely crucial that your website is optimized for mobile. This means that your site should be fast, easy to navigate and look great on mobile devices.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be missing out on a huge chunk of potential traffic. And, what’s more, Google now uses mobile-first indexing, which means that it primarily uses the mobile version of your site to determine your search ranking.

So, if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, it could be hurting your search ranking.

Use Structured Data

Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a way to provide search engines with additional information about your website and its content.

This can help search engines better understand what your content is about and how it should be categorized.

There are many different types of structured data you can use, including:

• Business information

• Product information

• Event information

• Recipe information

• And more

By adding structured data to your website, you can help search engines better understand your content and improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

Make Your Site Super Fast

Page speed is one of the most important factors for search engine rankings. If your site is slow, you could be losing potential customers and harming your SEO.

There are many factors that can affect your site’s speed, such as the size of your images, the number of plugins you have installed, and the quality of your hosting. One of the best ways to improve your site’s speed is to use a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN is a network of servers located around the world that caches your website’s content and delivers it to users from the server that is closest to them. This can dramatically reduce the time it takes for your website to load, which can improve your search engine rankings.

In addition to using a CDN, you should also take steps to optimize your website for speed, such as compressing your images, minifying your CSS and JavaScript files, and reducing the number of plugins you have installed.

Fix Your Redirects

When you change your URL structure or move a page, it’s standard practice to set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This tells Google to pass the old page’s rankings and authority to the new page.

But what if the page you’re redirecting has its own 301 redirect? This creates a redirect chain, which can slow down load times and lose a little bit of authority along the way.

It’s best to keep your redirects as clean and efficient as possible. Use a tool like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find and fix any redirect chains on your site.

Fix Your 404 Errors

We’ve all encountered a 404 error or “page not found” message when browsing the web. It’s not a great experience, and it can lead users to leave your site and go elsewhere.

404 errors can occur when a page has been deleted or moved and the URL has not been updated. They can also happen if a user misspells a URL or if there is a broken link on your site.

To fix this issue, you need to identify the 404 errors on your site and redirect users to a relevant page. You can use a tool like Google Search Console to find 404 errors and other crawl issues on your site.

Once you’ve identified the 404 errors, you can set up 301 redirects to send users to a relevant page. This will help improve the user experience on your site and prevent users from leaving and going to a competitor’s site.

Create an XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap is like a roadmap that helps search engines find and index your website’s most important pages.

If your website is small and has a simple structure, you may not need to create a sitemap.

However, if your website is large and has a complex structure, a sitemap can be a critical tool for ensuring that all of your most important pages are discovered and indexed by search engines.

There are a number of tools you can use to create an XML sitemap, including:

• Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• Google Search Console

• XML-Sitemaps.com

After you’ve created your XML sitemap, you’ll want to submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This will help ensure that all of your most important pages are discovered and indexed as quickly as possible.

Create a Robots.txt File

A Robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages and files on your website should be crawled and indexed and which ones should not.

This is an important file to have on your website, as it can help prevent search engines from crawling and indexing pages that you don’t want to be found in the search results.

For example, you may want to prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your website’s admin pages, login pages, or private files.

To create a Robots.txt file, simply open a new text document and add the following code:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /tmp/

Disallow: /junk/

In this example, we are telling search engine crawlers to not index any files in the /cgi-bin/, /tmp/, or /junk/ directories.

Once you have created your Robots.txt file, you will need to upload it to the root directory of your website.

Use a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a series of servers located in different parts of the world that store copies of your website.

When someone visits your website, the CDN will serve the website from the server that is closest to the visitor, which can help to speed up your website and improve the user experience.

In addition to improving website speed, using a CDN can also help to improve your website’s security and reduce the risk of downtime.

Fix Your Canonicals

Canonical tags are a great way to tell Google which version of a page is the original. This can help prevent duplicate content issues and ensure that the correct version of your page is indexed and ranked.

However, if your canonical tags are set up incorrectly, it can cause big problems for your SEO. Make sure that your canonical tags are pointing to the correct version of your page and that they are self-referential (i.e., they point to themselves).

If you have a lot of pages on your site, this can be a time-consuming process. But it’s worth the effort to make sure that your canonical tags are set up correctly.

Conclusion

So, to unleash the power of technical SEO and dominate search rankings, you need to ensure that search engines can crawl your site, optimize your site for mobile, use structured data, make your site super fast, fix your redirects and 404 errors, create an XML sitemap, create a Robots.txt file, use a CDN and fix your canonicals.

By implementing these expert tips and tricks, you can improve your websites visibility in search results and attract more organic traffic. Keep in mind that technical SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular maintenance and updates to stay ahead of the competition.