Technical SEO - It’s a strategy that every online business must adopt, but leaves aside because they are never sure whether their website is going to benefit from it, especially when algorithms keep changing every year. But, optimizing a website for search engines like Google, Bing and the like improves your online presence so that you can be found more easily competent visitors in search results. Hence, it is only impertinent that businesses never ignore strategies related to technical SEO, else the results can only get disappointing.

To help businesses understand more about the ins and outs of technical SEO, here are 6 strategic tips will play a key role in its enhancement.

Immediately Fix any 404 Errors, Broken Pages and/or Links

#Strategy 1: No one like finding a treasure map to find that the treasure was never even there. 404 errors, broken links, and broken pages are disappointments that your visitors never want to encounter.

Error 404 happens when a link or page that was once there does not exist anymore. These links are broken and don’t make an experience that is best for either the user or you. This problem is most likely caused when you had a page that originally lived at a specific URL, but you changed the URL later, or maybe you didn’t need the page anymore, so you unpublished it. If this happens, you as a website owner must ensure to set up a 301 redirect, which allows the old page to bring a visitor to the new page it’s being redirected to.

Additionally, when a page is broken, Google cannot crawl it. This can negatively affect your search rankings as a business. What’s more, if you’ve linked to this page from other pages, or external sources have linked to your page, you’ll lose the authority you once had.

Once you’ve rectified your broken pages and links, it’s a best practice to generate a newly updated sitemap to submit to Google to let it know you’ve made these changes.

Regularly Check for Website Indexing:

#Strategy 2: “Index your website because it is the only way for search engines to know that you exist online.”

How can you sure about how many pages on your website have been indexed by search engines? Furthermore, how can you ensure that the pages you don’t to be indexed are excluded? You can’t, unless you check your domain link manually on a search engine by entering site:[domain.com] or by using an SEO crawler. Manual indexing ensures that your webpages are found by potential visitors on the web, in the process increasing your online presence and ROI.

Decrease Site Load Time (Desktop & Mobile)

#Strategy 3: The visitors on your website are not going to wait around for the pages to load. An average human has an attention span that’s shorter than that of a goldfish (9 seconds). So, fix your website’s load time on all devices, unless you want the competition to win.

• Wait for the page to load; or
• Shift to another website offering a similar service.

It’s only natural that option B will have the highest votes because we humans do not like to wait. Did you know? Almost 40% of online users have abandoned a website because of the slow downtime.

Even Walmart shares its experience by saying that their conversions declined sharply whenever their load time went from 1 second to 4 seconds. According to Google, traffic to a website can decrease by up to 20% with an extra 0.5-second delay in search page generation. So, if businesses are losing out on customers, it’s time to check if this issue is the culprit.

Remove any Duplicate Content

#Strategy 4: You must have heard that “Content is King” which is true unless you misuse it. Redundant, boring, and repetitive content is a turn-off for online users. Furthermore, having identical content on more that one page of your website can confuse Google as to which page to rank first.

Duplicate content can negatively affect the search rankings of your website, in turn, also affecting the rate of your website traffic. You can always use online tools to check if you are guilty of having duplicate content, like SEMRush’s Site Audit tool.

When you have detected the pages that are similar or have duplicate content, you can begin fixing them. Always ensure that your pages are unique. If need be, edit the content on your pages or by removing some of the duplicate pages altogether and then redirecting the link to a working page. You can also use a rel="canonical" link to one of the pages in the case of duplicate content, in case you do not want to remove the page, so that search engines can know which page you want them to show in search results.

SSL is Important:

#Strategy 5: The first strategy for a successful online business is to install a security certificate on your website domain and migrate your website to HTTPS.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security protocol that is used to determine encrypted links between a web server and a browser in their communication online. SSLs were more commonly seen on e-commerce websites to safeguard buyers’ payment credentials. It was also seen when someone needed to sign up for something that required sharing his/her personal information.

But, in the present time, SSLs have become an important component of maintaining any website, irrespective of the purpose they serve. The significance of this was further emphasized when in 2018, Google Chrome and other web browsers rolled out the “Not Secure” movement, which was marked on any website without a security certificate. The result was that anyone visiting a website without the SSL certificate would know that they were entering a risky environment, potentially risking the loss of customers in the process.

Submit your XML Sitemap and Update Status

#Strategy 6: Google needs to know whether you have enhanced your online presence even after you have made all the aforementioned necessary changes. You might think that it will happen eventually, but why delay when it can be done now and you can rank faster.

Hence, submit your newly updated sitemap on Google manually so that it crawls them and ranks your website aster. With a sitemap in place, Google is essentially informed about all the most important pages on your website.

Author Bio:

Namrata N Diengdoh (also known as Ibanrilin) is a writer, editor, and content marketer at Marak Technologies Pvt. Ltd. She has 12 years of experience in writing for blogs and stories and still believes that there is more to learn. Initially a fitness writer, she has gradually moved on to other niches and absolutely loves her work every day.