How To Do SEO in 2024 – Technical SEO
Technical SEO
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Technical SEO is crucial to your overall SEO strategy. Without ensuring the technical aspects of your website are solid, your keyword research and content optimizations won’t pay off.
There are a lot of technical optimizations to make on your website. I will do my best to explain these steps below. However if you have a web developer on your team, you may need to enlist their help on some of these.
SSL Certificate / HTTPS
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It is a digital certificate awarded to websites that have had their identity authenticated by a 3rd party. In short, it essentially means that your website is safe and secure for websites to use.
You know a website has an SSL certificate if their URL starts with “https” rather than “http.”
SSL certificates positively impact your SEO game because they indicate to search engines that your site is trustworthy. In 2024, chances are your web design or web hosting company will include the SSL certificate in your website. If not, check out this article walking readers through obtaining an SSL certificate for their website.
Check for Multiple Versions of Your Website
There can be 4 different versions of your website, so it’s important to make sure that search engines are only indexing one version. The 4 versions are:
- https://examplewebsite.com
- https://www.examplewebsite.com
- http://examplewebsite.com
- http://www.examplewebsite.com
All of these versions should redirect to one version. If you have an SSL certificate, the main URL all other versions should point to should be one of the “https” URLs.
You can check to make sure 3 of the versions redirect by searching each variation in your search bar. If you get redirected to one main “https” URL, you’re good to go. If not, contact your web developer to help you correctly set up 301 redirects.
If you don’t have a developer on hand, here’s an article that will help you set these up on your own.
Click the image below to get an SEO checklist that follows this guide!
Improve Your Website Speed
Website speed is a really important ranking factor for search engines. If your website takes a long time to load, chances are users are going to get impatient and go to one of your competitors. First, get an idea of your starting point by testing your website’s speed.
There are tons of online website speed tests such as Pingdom and Lighthouse. Lighthouse is a Chrome Extension. It is my preferred speed test as it is very easy to use once installed and allows you to run the test in both Mobile and Desktop view.
Once you have a baseline score, you can start working on improvements. Remember to take a look at and even prioritize your performance in mobile view, as this is what a majority of your visitors will experience.
First, let me say that your website’s server plays a large role in your website speed. If you make optimizations and your website speed isn’t improving much, you may want to consider moving your website to a different server – especially if you use a low-cost provider that hosts a lot of sites on one server.
When you run a speed test, it will provide details on improvements that could be made. Before you get too in the weeds with the speed test report, go ahead and install and configure a website speed plugin. If you have a WordPress website, I recommend using WP Rocket. This is not a free plugin but it’s well worth the cost.
I recently wrote an article about the best WP Rocket settings for your WordPress website. Follow along on this guide to get your WordPress website performing as fast as possible. If you don’t have a WordPress website, I recommend spending some time researching the best website speed plugin for your CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc) and finding a guide on the best settings to use.
This is also a good time to go through the backend of your website and delete any unused plugins. Deleting unused plugins reduces database bloat, which causes slower load times. Inactive plugins also create vulnerability and security risks, so regardless of speed, this is a good practice for a healthy website.
Optimize Images
Image optimization is a significant aspect of SEO. Images help engage your visitors, which send positive signals to search engines. However, images drastically impact your website’s loading speed, so it’s important to optimize all images from a technical and keyword perspective.
You should aim to have at least one image on each page of your website. Original images are better than stock photos, however, if you lack original images, there are plenty of stock photo websites that allow free downloads. Some of my favorites are Pexels and Pixabay.
Later, I will discuss how to keyword-optimize your images.
For now, let’s focus on the technical aspects of image optimization. For the most part, an image-optimization plugin can do most of the work for you. For WordPress websites, I highly recommend using Imagify. They have a free version with limitations. However, their paid plans are very affordable and worth the cost for improved website loading time.
Image format. In 2024, WebP or AVIF are the most ideal image format for fast loading while retaining quality. WebP was actually developed by Google 10 years ago, but has been gaining traction in recent years. AVIF was launched in 2019 by the Alliance for Open Media. AVIF has better compression and quality capabilities, but it is not as widely-supported as WebP. AVIF is expected to grow in support over the next few years, so it will likely surpass WebP as the overall best image format choice.
There are plenty of free online converters that can change your image’s format to WebP or AVIF. The most recent version of Imagify will also convert new and existing images on your site to either WebP or AVIF, whichever you choose. Imagify recommends WebP for more compatibility across browsers and AVIF for better compression.
If you can’t or don’t want to use the WebP or AVIF format, JPEGs are more SEO-friendly than PNGs. This is because they have better compressing capabilities. JPEGs can be reduced up to about 70% without compromising on quality. If your image has a transparent background that you want to keep, PNG is a better choice.
Image Compression. This is the process of reducing an image’s file size while maintaining a high-quality resolution. This helps SEO by improving your website’s speed and the user experience.
To compress your images, you can use a plugin or find a free tool online, such as this one. Imagify also compresses images when you turn on the “Auto-Optimize images on upload” setting.
Image Size. Image size refers to the dimensions of an image. This is different from the file size, which refers to the storage space an image requires. For SEO success, you should optimize both. This is because high resolution or large images delay your website speed.
Selecting the best dimensions ensures images fit appropriately on different browsers and screens while retaining their quality. There are a number of free online image resizers, such as this one. Imagify also has a setting to “Resize larger images”, which I recommend enabling.
If you’re curious about the best settings to configure in Imagify, check out this guide written by Imagify themselves.
Look for Any Crawl or Index Errors
Search engines use “crawlers” to index your website. Think of these crawlers as little robot spiders that systematically process the pages of your website and their contents. Crawl errors occur when search engines try to access your website or a webpage but cannot.
This is a big issue for your SEO because if that page cannot be crawled or indexed, it will not show up in search results. Because you have already submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can access a report on your website’s indexing. This report will indicate the pages the search engines have crawled and indexed, as well as pages with errors and the category that the error falls under.
To view Google’s indexing report, head to Google Search Console and click on “Pages” under “Indexing” on the left-side menu.
Here, you can see data about your website indexing and any issues you need to resolve.
First, click “View data about indexed pages” and review the pages that are indexed to make sure they are all URLs that you want search engines to crawl and store.
Then, scroll down to “Why pages aren’t indexed” and look through each category to make sure there are no issues with pages you want search engines to access.
For more detailed information on the reasons a page might not be indexed and how to resolve the issue, take a look at this article. If you’ve resolved any issues through GSC, you probably don’t need to analyze Bing’s report as well, as they will likely show the same results. However, if you do want to take a look, head to Bing Webmaster Tools and click on “Site Explorer” to review indexing.
Fix Linking Issues
There are a couple of instances where links on your website to another page of your site or to a different website could have issues.
- Broken Links. Broken links occur when you have a link pointing to a page that no longer exists. You might recognize these if you’ve ever come across a page that just says something like “404 (page not found).” These broken links happen when a page has been deleted or moved URLs without a 301 redirect in place. Here is an example of a page with a 404 code:
Broken links negatively impact your SEO because they create a bad experience for your website visitors.
You can use an online tool like Semrush, Moz, or Ahrefs to audit the links on your website. You will probably have to either create a free account or purchase a subscription to run the audit. However, you probably already did this when you conducted keyword research!
Once you’ve identified the broken links, you can fix them by either removing the link completely or updating the URL.
- HTTP Links. Most websites these days have SSL certificates and use “HTTPS.” However, there’s still a good chance that you’re linking to some “HTTP” pages. While these websites probably have 301 redirects set up for their HTTP pages, this creates an extra step for search engines to go through before delivering the correct page to users (which slows down the loading speed).
You can find these links when you run a site audit in Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. To fix these links, simply update the target URL to the “HTTPS” version. If you have a really large number of HTTP links, they are probably site-wide redirects. You can update these through your templates or menu items in your website dashboard. If you’re unsure of how to do this, contact your web developer for help.
- Redirect Chains and Loops. A redirect chain occurs when there are multiple redirects from the initial URL to the destination URL. They are bad for SEO because they slow down your website’s loading time and inhibit search engine’s ability to crawl your website.
A redirect loop occurs when a URL is redirected to another URL that actually redirects back to the original URL. These are bad for SEO because they create an infinite loop that doesn’t allow users or search engine crawlers to reach the final destination URL.
Look for both of these issues in your site audit and fix them by either updating the link to the final URL or removing the links entirely.
- 302 redirects. These response codes indicate to search engines that a website/page has been temporarily moved. This is different from 301 redirects, which tell search engines that the site/page has been moved permanently.
302 redirects should be used when you want to send users somewhere else only for a short amount of time. Typically, you would use these when you’re updating or redoing your website.
If you determine that the redirect will be permanent, these should be changed to 301s. You can find and fix 302 redirects through the site audit you ran earlier.
Mobile-Friendliness
As I’ve mentioned before, search engines place an emphasis on the mobile functionality of your website. It is imperative that your website looks and performs well on mobile devices. First, ensure that your website’s theme is responsive (meaning adapts to a mobile-view).
You should’ve already run a Lighthouse Speed test in mobile view. This will give you an idea of your mobile performance and indicate where improvements can be made.
I also recommend taking some time to go through your website either on your phone or tablet and making a list of anything that looks off. You can also shrink your screen on your desktop to see how it looks in a narrow, mobile-view. Then, go through and update those issues for improved mobile performance.
Site Hierarchy
Per technical SEO best practices, your website’s hierarchy should be logical and easy to follow. This is mainly for user-friendliness, which sends positive signals to Google and helps your SEO. The structure of your website and the linking of the pages should resemble a tree. The homepage should be at the very top with categories below it, and each category divided into subcategories.
A general rule of thumb is that each page on your website should be accessible from the home page within 3 clicks. If you have pages buried in your website, users probably will not find them. Each page should also have a way (link) back to the home page.
The structure of your website can depend on the type of business/industry you are in, but the below image is a good universal example of how to structure your website.
URL Structure
This may seem intuitive, but your website’s URLs should be simple and accurately portray the intent of that page. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your website.
An SEO-friendly URL is something like this:
Rather than this:
You should keep URLs as short as possible and use hyphens in between words (instead of underscores).
**Disclaimer- Changing URLs on your website after it’s been set up will cause some linking issues that you need to fix. You’ll have to go through and update any links to the old URL and set up redirects if there are external sites that link to that page. You also may want to keyword optimize your URLs, so avoid changing them until you’ve read the on-page optimizations section later in this article.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of code implemented on a website that helps search engines understand what a page is about. Here is an example of what some of the code looks like:
The extra context and information schema markup relays to search engines helps your website stand out on SERPs (search engine results pages) because it can add extra features to your organic result, known as rich results or rich snippets.
While the above information about schema might sound like a foreign language, you actually probably recognize schema markup in action. For example, if you’ve ever searched for a recipe you’ve probably noticed reviews, cook time, total ingredients, or other information included with the website:
Another example is frequently asked questions, which can appear directly on the SERP:
These results are made possible by schema markup.
There are different categories of schema markup that you can use on your website. Some websites may not qualify for any sort of schema markup. A popular type that businesses with a physical storefront should use is called the Local Business schema. This allows you to give search engines more data about your business and its location. If you have any frequently asked questions on your website, you can add schema markup for those. For a full list of schema markup categories, visit Schema.org.
Adding this code to your website can seem daunting if you’re not familiar with coding. However, there are plenty of schema markup plugins available to simplify this task.
If you have a WordPress website, my preferred schema plugin is Schema Pro. With Schema Pro, you can use the following schema markup types:
Once you have configured the schema on your website, you can test it with Google’s Rich Results Test. This test only checks for certain schema types. For a more detailed check of your schema markup, use Schema.org’s validator tool.
If you don’t have a WordPress website or you want to do your schema markup manually, follow along with this YouTube video.
That wraps up the Technical SEO section of this guide. For the next section, On-Page SEO, click here.
Up next: On-Page SEO
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