Ultimate Guide To Technical SEO and How To Perform An In-Depth Audit On Your Site

In the past, I’ve provided you with enough information that helped you understand the basics of not only starting a site but also ensuring it is indexed. 

Nonetheless, there is more to ensuring your site is indexed. In this article, I’m going to disclose to you, for the first time, how to ensure you do a technical SEO audit on your site.

Still, you would be having the same objective-to see your site indexed, even more.

However, before we look at the various ways, you can conduct an in-depth technical SEO audit, we must first understand the meaning of certain terms as used by various industry experts.

 

What is Technical SEO?

The term technical SEO is used to refer to a process in which web owners and experts ensure they optimize their sites in a bid to help the search engine to discover, locate, understand, and index different parts of a website such as pages and posts.

You should, however, know something. Modern search engines are sophisticated. Because they have robust machinery that helps them to locate your site fast –even without conducting technical SEO audit. Does that mean it is a waste of time conducting technical SEO audit? Far from that!

Although ‘clever’ as they may look, search engines such as Google, YaHoo and Binge fall short of their capabilities.

Technical issues such as lack of proper technical SEO audit practices will always prevent the search engine to locate, crawl, index, and even show your web pages when issuing search results.

Why am I talking about this? The biggest reason is I care about the web page results the search engine is likely to deliver to you when it crawls your website.

Therefore, I have created a few tips that are enough to help you conduct a proper technical SEO audit on your site.

The best thing about this process is that anyone, yes, anyone can be able to implement the technical SEO audit practices on my guide.

You do not have to be a tech guru or a genius for you to do it. As long as you are committed, you will make it. Of course, that will come a bit later in this guide.

So, let’s start from where we ought to start…

 

Why is Technical SEO Important?

As mentioned in the beginning, technical SEO is fundamental. You may have one of the best websites in the world with nice design (theme and what have you) and nicely written content from the best team of writers.

However, if your technical SEO is at a raw deal–messed up, your site is going to remain just as beautiful to you. It will not rank.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough that for you to appear and even rank, the search engine including the world’s leading Google, you need to employ good technical SEO practices on your site.

There is more, though.

Even if the search engine crawled, found, identified, indexed, or (whatever word you may use) your site, it is not all said and done. More is needed.

For a site to be fully indexed, crawled, and optimized all its pages should be secure to visit, free from any form of duplicate content whether local or from other websites.

Besides, your website should load super fast. I don’t mean super fast as if it’s a jet, but all I’m saying the reader should not watch for several minutes waiting for a page to load.

Lastly, your site should be fully optimized for all mobile devices. Is that all that matter? Oh no!

Dozens, even hundreds of other things matter for your site to be technical SEO viable, thus considered ranking by the search engine.

After saying all that I have said, it may appear that you need to have a perfect site for you to rank. However, that is not what I am saying. No site, yes, not even is perfect.

All webrenuers try their best to make their sites stand out and rank. You too need to keep trying to employ proper technical SEO tactics for you to stand a chance.

Notably, you need to constantly make it easier for the search engine to locate, find, crawl, index, and finally rank your site.

After such a candid intro on what technical SEO is and why it is important for you to perform a complete technical SEO audit, it is now the time to look into the timing.

 

When Should I Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

Apparently, the question is when is the right time for anyone with a serious website to do a proper technical SEO audit?

Surprisingly, experts differ in opinion on when is the right time to conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit.

According to many people, technical SEO audit should be a continuous process oblivious of the time of the year or the age of the website.

However, web SEO experts agree on something–proper technical SEO audit will not be done all the time.

Because it is a tedious process which sometimes requires a bit of technical knowhow, you might want to carry technical SEO audit in bits.

Let’s say, the first audit is done in the first month after you have put a substantive amount of content on your site.

Then, you will conduct a mini technical SEO audit at the end of the month to ensure everything is in place.

However, at the end of every third or fourth month, you need to conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit. At this time, you will need to ensure that all that a good site should have to rank is in place.

I’m talking of things such as page speed, good content that is not duplicate, designing, proper images, info graphics if any, videos, and proper optimization for mobile devices.

 

Tools For Technical SEO Audit

For proper technical SEO audit, you need a dozen of technical SEO tools. While a majority of these tools double up for other SEO audits, a few are, actually designed to help you audit for technical SEO only.

Here is a list of tools you need to conduct a thorough basic and technical SEO audit:

• Screaming Frog
• Moz
• SEO Browser
• DeepCrawl
• Wayback Machine
• Integrity (for those who use Mac)
• Xenu Sleuth (for those who use PCs)
• CopyScape
• BuzzSumo
• You Get Signal
• Google Tag Manager
• Google Analytics (in case you are granted access)
• Pingdom
• Sublime Text
• PageSpeed Tool
• Bing Webmaster Tools (in case you are granted access)
• Google Search Console (if you are lucky to have access)
• Annie Cushing’s Tagging Guide Campaign
• The Chrome Extension of Google Tag Manager

However, for only technical SEO probe, you need the following tools:

• Screaming Frog
• CopyScape
• DeepCrawl
• Bing Webmaster Tools (only if you have access)
• Google Search Console (as long as you have access)
• Google Analytics (still if you got access)
• Sleuth (for those who use PC)
• Integrity (for those who use Mac)

 

Best Technical SEO Practices

The best technical SEO practices dictate that you continue to improve, among other things, the following technical issues on your website:

• JavaScript
• URL structure
• XML sitemaps
• Site architecture
• Structured data
• Canonical tags
• Hreflang
• Duplicate content
• Thin content
• 301 redirects
• 404 pages

However, when it comes to individual technical SEO practices, there are those you must ensure you do a fantastic job on them.

Look at some of those technical aspects of your site that require a thorough scrutiny. In essence, your technical SEO audit must touch on the following areas among many:

 

Page Speed

You may ask why is page speed the first thing I need to look at? Evidently, you have the answer within your palms.

Or I should ask you, how do you feel when searching for something yet the site you’ve settled on can’t open? It sucks. Doesn’t it?

That explains why your site and individual page speed is vital. In simple terms, no one will wait for eternity for the page they have decided to click on to open while they have other things to do. People are busy thus, they need a page that opens up fast.

“Pages that are slow to load or do not open at all annoy,” said one information researcher.

The visitor acknowledged that some pages that take long to load appear to have good information, but the fact that they are unable to load at the right time annoys.

Because of the annoyance page speed brings to visitors, Google had to make changes in 2010 and 2018, respectively.

First, it became one of the ranking requirements for desktop users in 2010.

Later in 2018, Google went ahead to make it clear that for a site to rank for mobile users, the page speed must be optimized.

As much as we can speak about page speed as one of the main ranking factors, the subject is complex.

You need a dozen of tools as well as various metrics to make your page speed a reality. Thankfully, with resilience, diligence, and hard work, you will make it happen.

According to Google’s Pagespeed Insights, you can always start small and within a few days, you’d have achieved your goal of increasing your page speed.

One thing you will appreciate about GPI is that it will give you a scale, usually 0-100. The scale can be used to monitor page speed, whether it is on desktops or on mobile devices.

Once your site or page starts to show some numbers, you are able to see where you can adjust.

In fact, GPI makes it easy for you to adjust your site’s page speed by suggesting where you can improve.

However, because your main interest is to increase your site’s page speed, here are a few things that can help you reap substantive results:

Choose faster DNS providers–no doubt that by now, you know several DNS providers. Coincidentally, not all DNS providers in the market offer the best services.

Some are slow while others are super faster, thus providing your visitors optimum results. Clouflare (even if it’s their free version) is one of the best in the market. To get the best experience, you only need to register then swap your site’s nameservers.

Compress your images–as you know, images, especially raw images take a lot of space and if your site has many images, slow loading would be a norm.

However, it doesn’t have to be that way. By compressing your images, you will not only reduce the size of those images but also increase loading speeding by nearly 30%.

Several image compression plugins are available. Many are free, but if you get premium plugins, you will love the experience. Shortpixel is one of the image-compressing plugins you can trust.

Install caching plugins–thanks to a caching plugin, you are able to store files outside the site temporarily and deliver the files to your visitors whenever they are needed.

One good thing about caching plugins is that you don’t have to install them all the time. Besides, you need only one. For WordPress users, you can get dozens of good caching plugins in the market.

Use a CDN–using Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) is another ingenious way to improve page speed.

One way it does this is by stories a copy or copies of your published pages in various servers that are known to be robust around the globe.

Interestingly, CDN has a unique ability to direct your visitors to their nearest server instead of leaving them to wait for distant servers, which may take a long time to load.

That way, your page speed will load faster and your visitors will not have to wait for a long time to read whatever it is they want on your site.

Try to minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files–the good thing about minification is that it helps to get rid of white space as well as comments, which in turn reduce the aforementioned file sizes. Again, you will get good tools out there to help you accomplish your business.

 

Use HTTPS

Unlike HTTP, HTTPS helps encrypt data sent from back and forth your website and that of your visitors. In addition, it helps in the protection of sensitive information such as credit cards and other important personal documents from being compromised by notorious fraudsters.

Because of the benefit HTTPS gives to website visitors, Google has put it among the important ranking factors for more than 7 years now since 2014.

To know that your site is safe thus visitors can key in their personal information without the fear of comprising their safety, you need to visit:

https://www.yourwebsite.com. Check whether there is a lock icon in the search bar.

If your site shows a ‘Not secure’ in red, then it is evident that the site is not secure. It is not using HTTPS thus insecure to your visitors. Nonetheless, you shouldn’t worry a lot. You can revise the situation with a few steps.

Install a SSL or TLS certificate and you are good to go.

However, if you see ‘Not secure’ in grey, it means there is another problem. According to experts, a grey “Not secure” warning simply means that your site is running on two platforms.

The first one is HTTPS, which you’ve just changed to while the other is HTTP. In other words, while the page would be loading in a secure HTTPS, the resource files, which include CSS, images, and others, would be loading in HTTP. Perhaps you are now asking, how can I fix this problem without losing any content?

Here are four main ways you can fix the HTTPS error without losing any of your files or content:

➜ Make sure you chose a secure yet robust host (many are in the market but you have to find a reputable host. Some actually give their SSL certificate at a fee while it should be FREE).

➜ Do not put together the resource and the site. Separate the resource.

➜ If possible, as long as it is legally possible, host the resource on a local server.

➜ Use and apply HTTP CSP–Content Security Policy.

➜ Even if it is one page that has mixed content issues, that is likely to affect other pages. Therefore, you need to conduct a thorough audit on your site even if it is evident that it’s a single page that reports HTTPS error.

➜ Identify and Fix Issues on Duplicate Content

 

Duplicate Content

What is duplicate content? The term is used to refer to a copy of similar content appearing on two different pages of the same site or on a different website.

It is a criminal offense for anyone to knowingly publish another person’s content on his or her site. That is at least according to conventional information law, generally referred to as ‘Copyright Law.

Although no serious webprenuer can do this, some negligence on the side of the content manager can lead to duplicate content where a hired novice writer can simply copy content from an already published site and finally publishing it as their original work.

However, in spite of widespread public opinion, Google, or the search engine for that matter, does not penalize anyone for duplicating content.

In other words, Google doesn’t solve matters of the same material appearing in two or more websites because everyone can actually claim it’s theirs.

Nonetheless, duplicate content is a major factor when it comes to technical SEO.

As such, duplicate content or the same content appearing on two or more websites can injure not only the technical performance of your site but also the reputation of your online presence. This is how:

➜ Duplicate content causes backlink dilution.

➜ It leads to unfriendly or undesirable URLs when searching for the content on the search engine.

➜ A likelihood of syndicated or scraped content outranking your site.

➜ A waste in the crawl budget.

The good thing is you can now check on duplicate content from your site. To be able to do that, simply log into the Search Console, and click on ‘Coverage Report’.

From here, toggle in order to view those URLs that have been excluded. If you follow these steps, you will be able to find if there are any issues related to duplication of content.

NB1. Although Google does not penalize duplicate content, it does explain in this article, what the practice can cause your site, thus the need to avoid duplication of content at any cost.

NB2. Google does not exhaust the number of sites that might as well have your content.

That means, although the Search Console may be able to trace a few sites with similar content, there might be several others that it might not locate. You can use other tools to find a comprehensive report on duplicate content.

Once you find the problem, choose a single URL that appears within every group of duplicates and mark it to be main (canonical) version.

 

Create a Sitemap

Is a sitemap important? To many people, a sitemap is not important. However, if you are a serious webprenuer, you must know that a sitemap helps in listing all your content that is the search engine sees important on your site.

It is true that we live at a time when the search engine can locate your site, even index it without the use of a sitemap, thus the reason why many people don’t see the value. Nonetheless, Google has a different view of sitemaps.

In June 15, 2019, Enrique Hidalgo, a representative from Google said in one conference, “At Google, we recognize sitemaps and see them as the second most important factor in Googlebot.”

Sitemaps come is a variety of formats, but you will find out that XML files stand out as the most common of all sitemaps.

In addition, modern content management systems (CMSs) such as Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix generate a sitemap for you automatically.

However, if you are using WordPress, you might want to create your own sitemap using popular plugins such as RankMath or Yoast.

Whichever way you’d want to look at it, having a sitemap is an essential technical SEO feature that will help your site load fast and rank.

 

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

I talked about this, a little in number two above. However, there is more to using HTTPS that we did not exhaust.

Now that we are revisiting this again, it is important to know that even if your pages are using HTTPS, your visitors could still be accessing your site via HTTP, which we said is not secure.

It is embarrassing that a part of your website secure while the rest of it is running in an unsecure version.

Thankfully, you can check and analyze if your site is running in both at the same time.

If when checking for the HTTP version but your site redirects you to the secure HTTPS version, then there really isn’t any big deal. If it directed you to a safer version, then it will do the same to your visitors.

However, if your site opens only on HTTP version, then it is time you need to resolve the problem by redirecting HTTP to a secure version–HTTPS. There are two ways of making this happen namely:

➜  Adding a certain code to your htaccess file -you can get the code from your web designing expert.

➜ If you are on WordPress, you simply do this by changing your Site Address or WordPress Address from HTTP to HTTPS under Settings.

Although not common, some prefer doing this exercise from the servers. For this to work perfect for you, ensure you are using a permanent 301 redirect.

If you make a mistake of using a temporal 302 redirect, you will not achieve your goal of redirecting HTTP to a secure HTTPS.

 

Don’t Use Nofollow Internal Links

The main work of nofollow links is to slump outbound links to pages within your site that you don’t feel comfortable endorsing. In other words, nofollow links simply tell the search engine that it shouldn’t give ranking credit to those pages that are linked using the nofollow links.

However, you cannot be sure that will happen. In fact, in most cases, Google decides not to heed what your nofollow links say, thus pass the ranking credit to those nofollow links.

Because Google tends to ignore such ingenious yet meticulous suggestions, you should not use nofollow links for internal linking. However, a recent study that involved the top 100,000 sites, websites, over 3.6% of the sites’ internal links were nofollow links.

From that experience, it appears that many website owners try to use this method in a bid to block or ask Google to pass without giving ranking credit to certain pages of their site. As it turns out to be, nofollow works differently.  

It is fair to say that using nofollow links will cause your website more harm than good. In essence, the practice may lead to the cutting off the web crawling exercise and finally orphaned content. Besides, it is one of pagination’s common issues.

 

Hreflang

This HTML attribute works for a website that publishes its content in more than one language. Hreflang helps identify the geographical location of the visitor, thus serving your visitors to the optimum.

When used properly, each of the various hreflang signals to the search engine about the language and targeted geographical location. To that effect, hreflang is one of the important things in not just basic SEO but also technical SEO.

Even so, here are the reasons why hreflang is very important to your site’s SEO:

➜ Hreflang helps in site ranking–at one point, Gary IIyes, who works in Google’s in-house web ranking experts, explained that pages that have been put together in the hreflang cluster actually share what he referred to as ‘ranking signals.’

According to Gary, if your site is multilingual and assuming one of the languages, let’s say English page features many links, the French version of the same page share the same ranking signals. In that simple arithmetic, if your site ranks in one language, it ranks on another automatically.

➜ Hreflang aids in eliminating duplicate content issues–we have talked about duplicate content before and I’m sure you remember the impact it can have on your site’s ranking.

Assuming you have two pages with the same exact content. If you do not have hreflang, which helps change the content into a different language, that would be duplicate content straight away.

However, with hreflang in place, the search engine treats the same content in a different language as new and fresh content. It isn’t duplicate.

If it were not for hreflang, Google, or the search engine for that matter, would rank one of the contents, outranking the other. However, now that there is hreflang, the search engine ranks both pages.

Do you want to implement hreflang in your multilingual site? It is quite easy. Simply add the right hreflang tags to all the pages the content has been translated to.

 

Use Schema Markup To Win ‘Rich Snippets’

What are rich snippets? These are search results that come with extra information (usually important to the reader than he/she thought) that come under the title of the search query, description, or URL.

As the name suggests, rich snippets help improve search results, increased click-through rate, and in the end, excellent user experience.

The only things that may look as if it’s a setback is that the search only shows and picks rich snippets for a few types of content, especially the content that features pieces of information that utilizes schema markup.

Nonetheless, you may ask, what is schema markup? If it is the first time, you are hearing the phrase ‘schema markup’, then you must know that this is a special yet additional code, which helps the search engine to navigate and have a better understating of your content and represent it to your visitors in its various search results.

Adding schema markups is not an easy exercise, but a competent web designer can do it.

One thing you need to know is that upon adding schema markups, you will be helping Google or the search engine to pick, evaluate, and show rich snippets to your visitors.

 

Fix Your Site’s Orphaned Pages

Do you even ask why you need to take care of orphaned pages? Well, the simple answer why you should take orphaned pages seriously is they do not contain internal links that emanate from your site’s crawlable pages.

The outcome is detrimental to the orphaned pages. In fact, the search engine will not crawl, identify, or even index orphaned pages.

In other words, you may use a lot of energy or money to create content on your site, most of which end in orphaned pages. The result? Google will not find and index the pages.

Besides, even with the most sophisticated auditing tools at your disposal, it is often difficult to many web owners to identify and essentially find orphaned pages.

However, the best thing for those using a content management system (CMS), has the ability to generate a sitemap, they might still leverage this and finally use it as the source of the URLs.

In the event that your site’s sitemap location is not inside the robots.txt file, and that you cannot access the sitemap from mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml, then the only option you are left with is to check it from the crawl settings.

When there, click on ‘Specific sitemaps’ and paste the results on your website’s sitemap URLs.

To ensure you are doing the right job, head to the links report.  When there, ensure no orphaned pages have incoming internal links issue.

For any URLs that deem important to you, then you should ensure they have been incorporated into the site’s main structure.

If this is what you want to do, then it means you add more internal links either from the navigation bar or from other relevant pages as long as the pages are crawlable.

If you think, the URLs are less or not important at all, then the only option ahead of is to delete them. Alternatively, you have the liberty to ignore them completely or even redirect them.

 

Use Schema To Improve Your Chance Of Knowledge Graph Inclusion

Using Google’s Knowledge Graph is another technical SEO audit practice that comes with its own measure of benefits. For instance, the knowledge base provides aspiring and experienced webprenuers with the information on various site entities and their relationship.

Data from GKG shows up in various SERP features.

Although nobody knows exactly how to get into the Knowledge Graph, critics have it that if you employ proper organizational markup can lead to you achieving the Knowledge Graph.

One of the best and perhaps simplest ways you can get into the Knowledge Graph is to use Yoast, RankMath, and a few other WordPress plugins.

Alternatively, you can decide to go manually. If so, you can add it to your site using schema markup generator.

Before you start generating it, you have to make sure of these few yet important things, lest you will not achieve your goal:

➜ Use a genuine name, URL, or even a nicely designed logo. You also need to use sameAs properties.

➜ Include all social media profiles. These profiles should reflect what is in the sameAs references, just like it should be on Wikipedia and Wikidata pages whenever possible.

➜ Using a Google structured testing tool for data, validate the markup.

➜ Although you are at liberty to add the markups to a variety of pages, you need to give emphasis to three main pages, namely the Homepage, the Contact page, and the About Us page.

The other additional pages will just be a bonus. In fact, Google’s John Mueller said in 2019 that it is not necessary to add markups on every page of your site.

According to Mueller, adding markup to those three main pages is enough. Mr. Mueller spoke during the 2019 Webmaster Central Hangout.

➜ Ensure Important Content Is ‘Crawlable’ And ‘Indexable’

 

If your content is not easily crawlable or even indexed, then you are wasting your time to build a beautiful site.

A good and credible site should have among other things keywords placed at strategic points of the content and of course well researched to match what readers are looking for.

However, without proper and ideal keyword placement, your work would turn out to be futile, even useless.

It is equally important to learn the art of linking pages of your website. That way, you will be able to convince web spiders to try to find related information thus crawl or stay on your site for some time.

For instance, let’s assume you create and add a new page on your site and decide to link that page from your site’s homepage.

When the time comes for the search engine to crawl your site, it will realize there is a new page that has been linked to the homepage.

Once the crawling is complete, the search engine ‘makes’ a verdict that the page is worth visiting, thus indexes the page alongside the homepage and other top pages on your site.

The process of crawling and indexing individual pages is continuous, thus if you maintain good general practice, search engine robots will be visiting and crawling your site to see if there are any new changes or updates.

If there are improvements, your site will be ranked, and the result is gaining many visitors.

Q: How can you ensure your page/site is crawlable and indexed?

A: The file Robots.txt informs search engines such as Google, which of your site pages are crawlabe and those that are uncrawlable.

To check and end this mess once and for all, you need to visit mywebsite.com/robots.txt.

It is also possible to find out which pages (if there are any) that have been blocked. To know this, you need to click on Coverage report.

Once you are there, toggle to view the full report, which reveals excluded URLs. Finally, check out for and ERROR called ‘blocked by robots.txt’.

 

JavaScript

In 2015, Google, through a press statement, said that you are at liberty to use JavaScript.

The only condition Google gave is as long as you do not do anything that blocks your site’s robots.txt.

If you are wondering how you can fix JavaScript on your site, here are four simple steps that can help you do so.

In all these ways, you do not really need exceptional skills. Nonetheless, if you feel you are not at par with what is required, you may seek a web designing technician.

The first step is to review your site’s JavaScript. As you do so, your aim is to ensure that Javascript is not in any way locked by what we called robots.txt.

Upon conducting a thorough inspection, the second step is to ensure your site’s Javascript is running smoothly on the server.

When this happens, it aids in Javascript in producing plain data in the form of a text compared to when it produces data dynamically.

You can use different tools to check and install Javascript. For instance, you can use Angular Javascript to ensure your data is produced in text the way it is supposed to be.

Alternatively, you can use Screaming Frog. If you settle on this tool to fix your Javascript issues, visit Spider Configurations that is located on the navigation bar and from here, click on “Check Javascript.” Wait until crawling is complete then you will have a chance to filter the results from the “Internal” tab.

 

Fix 404 Pages

Have you ever visited a site then you encounter a bold 404 ERROR? What does this error mean? Simply, it means the article or page you are looking for has been removed by the website’s content manager or the site owner.

In many cases, you will find the content if you visit back another time. It could be that the page is being edited, or serviced for that matter.

Still, you may wonder, if the site owner is editing the site, how and why does Google still rank the ‘empty’ page?

It takes time before the search engine deregisters the page. In other words, if the page editor works faster to re-publish the page, the search engine will not know if the page was removed, even if it was for a few days.

If it’s your site, that is giving readers 404 errors, do faster to reinstall the page.

That way, you not only retain site credibility but also ensure that you do not lose search engine ranking, which is hard to come by.

 

Make Use of Canonical Tags

We have talked about duplicate content before and have seen how they will affect your site unless you are running a multilingual site.

Now, something is close to that is here with us–canonical tags or canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs or canonical tags are a perfect remedy for pages that have almost similar content.

For instance, you may be running product reviews or product descriptions on your site.

If it happens that you are describing different products under the same category such as different shoes, chances are most of your content would be speaking almost the same things–ankle, sole, laces, upper, toe area and so forth. As such, each page will have these same words for all the shoes you will describe on your site.

Depending on how you’ve arranged or designed your site, you might decide shoes of the same size to have a different URL whereas those of a different color, make or use have different URLs as well.

By using canonical tags, you’ll be sending a message to Google or to the search engine for that matter to inform it that ‘size XL’ version is the main product page whereas other sizes such as ‘S’, ‘M’, ‘L’ and ‘XXL’ are variations of the same page even if the pages may contain the same type of words used repeatedly.

 

Minimize Redirections

The internet is more of a road. When constructing a road, caring constructors put signs on the road to show diversion, pumps, slow down and many other signs to assist road users know what to do when they approach certain points.

It would be awkward even irritating for the constructors to erect pumps or put diversions ever few meters or kilometers.

Similarly, when and if you are redirecting your visitors, do not exaggerate.

Minimize the number of redirects. In fact, Google’s John Mueller, who was quoted earlier, said in 2015 that Google will not continue to follow redirects on your site forever.

In other words, Mueller warned that it reaches a time Google gets tired. It stops following redirects.

According to Mr. Mueller, Google only follows redirects as long as they do not exceed four.

 

Extra Technical SEO Tips You Must Know

After looking at the fifteen best technical SEO practices, do you think that is all there is to know? Hardly! Proper technical SEO practices go beyond the fifteen areas.

Here are more technical SEO tips you may want to implement on your site:

Set Up Structured Data

Setting up structured data involves more than setting up Schema, which incidentally does not improve site’s search engine optimization (SEO) directly.

That said, you must know that there is no relationship between first page ranking and Schema. Does that mean it is useless to set up structured data? Far from it!

Schema helps some of your pages to gain some rich snippets. As you know, rich snippets have a command in the SERPs, thus they have the unique ability to improve your page’s or site’s OCTR or organic click-through rate.

 

Check for Mobile Usability Issues

Any site owner who needs to be reminded that his or her site should be accessible via mobile devises is actually forgetting that we are in 2021.

Anyway, as you keep adding content to your site, keep ensuring that those who use mobile devices, who incidentally are the majority, need do so with ease.

Nonetheless, you need to check constantly that your site is visible and friendly to mobile users because critics are that even the mobile-device friendliest sites have issues.

Of course, it isn’t easy to identify issues unless users start to ‘throw stones’ at you in the name of complaints.

Thankfully, Google, through its Google Search Console Mobile Usability feature, can give you a report whether a particular page is not okay to mobile users.

After the report, you can improve on the page.

 

Check Your Site for Dead Links

You will not break any SEO rules if your site has a number of dead links. Having said that, do not think that all is good. Broken or dead links can cause your site or your business a major downfall.

Broken internal links are often associated with poor work. In fact, broken links make it difficult for Googlebot to locate and crawl individual pages on your site.

Once you find that your site has broken links, do faster to fix them because they can harm your site. SEMrush is an example of a good tool that can help you identify and fix broken links.

 

Validate Your XML Sitemaps

From experience, it is very hard to check and actually keep track of pages of a huge website which has been running for many years from your sitemap.

However, do not worry. Your work is now easy thanks to the Sitemap Validator, a premium tool that will help you keep track of a long list of website pages.

 

Noindex Tag and Category Pages

Noindex tag as well as category pages are yet another technical SEO probe that will help your site big time. For WordPress users, for instance, using noindex tags and category pages are excellent practices.

Unless the pages in question bring in many visitors, they are of no value to you. Therefore, you can use Yoast plugin to no-index these pages easily.

One of the main reasons why you should implement noindex tags is that it can easily lead to duplicate content issues.

 

Implement hreflang for International Websites

I bet it isn’t the first time you are hearing about hreflang. Well, if you are running a site in different languages, you had better implement hreflang, which as mentioned earlier, helps tip the search engine that although the content is the same, it is translated into different languages.

With hreflang in place, you escape the penalty, if any, of duplicate content. Implementing hreflang isn’t a joke, but with proper knowledge or hiring an expert who has dealt with sites with multiple languages, it will not be a problem.

 

Final Thoughts

By now, a lot is going on your mind. Think for a moment about it. Your site is your business. To others, it is what brings food at the table.

Yes, if it is what sustains you and your family, you have no option but to implement these technical SEO tips shared herein.

In case you feel incompetent of implementing some aforementioned technical SEO features, you can count on us.

We have a team of experts who will be willing to help. The aim is to see you succeed in this journey, and together we’ll be happy.