Every New Year people set up and make resolutions aimed at improving their life, body, and mind. But don’t forget to make a few SEO resolutions too. Everyone is fighting for visibility online these days, and great content is a good way to get those rankings. However, don’t let your technical SEO slide. Working through technical SEO issues may be frustrating, but it’s vital to a successful SEO strategy.
Here are three areas of technical SEO to focus on and improve this year!
Site Speed
Our digital age has made users impatient on the Internet. If a page doesn’t load within 3-5 seconds users will leave. That’s a short window, so make sure you address site speed this year. Not only will users note if a site is slow to load Google will too and it will definitely impact your rankings.
Improving site speed, and individual page speed is tricky. There isn’t a magical button that will make everything go faster. Instead, this requires making small technical improvements that will make pages load faster. And don’t forget to check mobile site speed too!
Here are a few tips to create a faster website:
- Limit redirects
- Enable compression
- Set up caching
- Strip unnecessary code
- Optimize images
- Optimize CSS delivery
- Prioritize above the fold content
Site Navigation
Have you ever visited a site and gotten so frustrated trying to navigate it that you just gave up? Make sure users don’t feel that way about your website. Site structure is important to both search engines and users. A website should be intuitive and easy to navigate.
There are a few ways you can improve or check on your site’s structure. First, look at your sitemap. If you don’t have one then create one ASAP, as a sitemap is what helps search engines find and index your site. Make sure to keep it up to date, free of errors, and coded correctly.
Internal linking is a great way to help both bots and users move through your site. Go through your pages and blog posts to see if there are any anchor texts that could link to other pages. This is also when you should go through and weed out broken links!
It may be time to reevaluate your menu bar too. Things should be organized logically. Make sure important pages aren’t buried and that you aren’t prioritizing content that isn’t as useful. Not being able to find key information is frustrating to both search engines and users.
Indexing
In order for your website to appear in search engine results, it must first be indexed. Google sends bots to crawl your site and index them. If the bot isn’t able to crawl it then it won’t be indexed. This is basic SEO, which means if your site doesn’t have it you’re at square one so sort it out now.
Check the indexation status of your website to ensure essential pages are indexed. If they haven’t been, send a request to index to Google. Before you do this though, ensure that the search engine will be able to crawl and they’ll like what they see. Eliminate duplicate content, prioritize pages, link internally, and fix any broken links or images.
Also, remember that Google now employs mobile-first indexing. What this means is that now they will crawl the mobile version of your website instead of the desktop one. If you don’t have a mobile responsive site, or it isn’t as fully functional as your desktop one, making it so should be your top priority.
