Technical SEO

Don’t Let Your SEO Efforts Go to Waste

Any web developer worth his or her salt is an expert at both off-page and on-page SEO. Simply put, good on-page SEO means a website contains content that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases so that the site’s search rankings and relevance to users are improved. Good off-page SEO means a site gains authority and relevance by building and effectively managing backlinks from other relevant, authoritative sources.

All that attention and focus on having just the right on- and off-page SEO will go to waste if the technical aspects of SEO are ignored or improperly handled. The following checklist contains recommendations for achieving the best results in terms of your site’s user experience, search engine crawling, indexing, and of course, ranking.

  • Set up and manage your website’s sitemap: A sitemap informs search engines about how your website is structured. Make sure your sitemap is clean/error-free, updated when content is posted or removed, concise so crawls can be more effective, and registered in Google Search Console.
  • Check the pages on your website that are indexed by the various search engines, including those that have been restricted from indexing, to make sure the number of pages indexed is about the same as the number of pages on your website.
  • Use an SEO crawler, not just robots.txt, to check that every critical resource on your website is crawlable and not blocked from indexing. An SEO crawler performs a more comprehensive check that includes CSS and JavaScript files, orphan pages (those that are on your site but are not internally linked), and more that might be restricted but should not be.
  • Enhance the frequency with which search engines crawl the pages of your website during a specific period of time – your crawl budget. Google statistics provide the average number of times the pages of your site are crawled daily, and from that you can calculate your monthly crawl budget. Use that intelligence to maximize the crawls that are being performed. How? By removing duplicate content, restricting indexing on pages that don’t support SEO, making crawling more efficient by adding URL parameters, and fixing broken links and redirects.
  • Audit your site’s internal links to make sure the structure of your site is both logical and shallow. For example, check to ensure your site’s important pages are reachable within three clicks of the homepage (the depth of your pages). When fixing broken links, look for those that could be hidden in link tags, sitemaps, and HTTP headers. Address linking on orphan pages to make it easier for visitors and search engines to find them.
  • Audit your website for HTTPS issues that could affect your site’s ranking. Check the different types of content on pages you believe are secure; if you have mixed content, it could be coming from an HTTP connection that is not secure which, in effect, makes your page less secure and can even stop a browser from loading it altogether. Make sure all the links, redirects, and canonical URLs point directly to HTTPS pages to reduce/eliminate the number of unnecessary redirects, which make a website appear slow and eat away at your crawl budget. If your site is still HTTP, consider migrating to HTTPS, given that Google uses HTTPS as one of its ranking signals.
  • Make sure your site’s pages load in two seconds or less. Google factors speed when ranking a site, and a page that loads quickly and efficiently provides an optimum user experience as well as improves your bounce and conversion rates because users will be less inclined to click away from a page that has loaded quickly.
  • Prioritize the mobile friendliness of your website and perform an in-depth audit of the site. With search queries from mobile devices on a steady rise, Google is planning to change how it indexes website pages. They will soon begin indexing mobile versions of websites first, rather than their desktop versions. Google provides a mobile-friendly test that lets you check a variety of criteria such as text size, plugins, how pages are viewed, and more. The key is to perform the test on every landing page of your site, since Google determines mobile friendliness on a page by page basis.
  • Just as you need to restart your computer for software updates to take effect, you should have search engines re-crawl your website to make sure fixes and changes you make to your site go immediately into effect. You can submit requests to Google and Bing to re-crawl and re-index on a URL basis or on your entire website.

By systematically addressing the technical areas of your website that impact SEO, you both improve the ability of your site to rank well in searches and enhance the user experience across the entire site. The end results are well worth the effort. At Perfexion, Inc. we specialize in making sure clients’ websites are technically sound and perform to the best of their ability.

Note: Thanks to Link-Assistant.com (https://www.link-assistant.com/news/technical-seo-audit.html) for the valuable tips presented here.

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SEO in Non Techy Terms

What is SEO? SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – is a tool used by web developers and digital marketers. Its purpose is to enhance the visibility of a website or web page in search engine results so that, when a user performs a search using their preferred search engine – Google, Yahoo, or Bing – the website or information the user searched for appears at or near the top of the list on the search engine results page, or SERP.

When a user performs a search, they enter a word or series of words in their search engine’s search box and wait for the search engine to provide its results. The words a user types are called keywords, and users generally know the keywords they type should be specific, rather than general, to get the best results from their search. For example, if a user enters the word “sweater,” they’ll receive hundreds of billions of results. But, if they enter “fuchsia cardigan sweater under $20 in size 8,” the number of results returned decreases considerably.

This type of search query is called a natural search, and the results returned are called organic or unpaid search results. In a matter of seconds, or split seconds, search engines process through billions of entries in their index and return results that are the most relevant to the search terms used. They analyze the keywords entered as well as the larger context of the query to match these with websites, web pages, etc., that are useful, informational, and relevant. These results are typically listed on the left-hand side of the search engine results page. Websites and webpages with a well-organized, well-managed SEO strategy have increased chances of appearing at or near the top of the list on SERP.

SEO Algorithm & Strategy

Early on, SEO relied on the repeated use of keywords and links in web pages. Copywriters crammed pages with keywords to the point the content was both awkward and poorly written – all in an attempt to outsmart the likes of Google. In time, search engines saw what was happening and updated and changed their search algorithms. In effect, so users would be satisfied with the search results they received and so businesses would improve the content on their websites and basically have to compete to appear high on the SERPs.

If you’re starting to see a connection between users, websites, search engines, and search engine results pages, it’s because one exists. A user performs a query using certain key words and phrases. A website is written and designed in anticipation of how a user – the business’s target audience or customer – searches for the product/service offering or information provided on the website. Search engines look for web content that contains indicators of value in response to the user’s search, such as links, images, and other relevant content on a website. The SERP lists websites/web pages that have the highest SEO relevance and value based on 1) how the user queried and 2) how valuable web content is.

SEO for Beginners, SEO Best Practices, What is SEO
SEO for Beginners, SEO Best Practices, What is SEO

SEO Strategy

The successful marketing of any business online requires a thoughtful SEO strategy. SEO requires business owners and marketers to fully understand their audience – both existing customers and their target market – and work to align web content to react appropriately to what the customer wants and how they ask for it.

Businesses need to closely examine just how their target market searches for products/services online. Today, SEO and the power behind search engines go far beyond filling a web page with keywords and matching a user’s search terms with the keywords on the website. That is because search engines rely on more than keywords when providing results to a query. They look for web content that is appealing. Content must be useful, informative, and interesting. It must respond to whatever type of request a user makes, whether it is to buy a product, solve a problem, learn how to do something, hire a service, watch a video, and more.

While SEO values the content that is visible on-screen, that is, the words, images, etc., everything that goes on behind the scenes – technical SEO – is equally important. Technical SEO is what helps search engines crawl to your website and index it. Web developers, those who handle the technical aspects of SEO, understand the techniques search engines use to access and crawl to websites, and they make sure their clients’ websites are in alignment with those techniques.

SEO Audit & Strategies

Developers are necessary for improving SEO for a variety of reasons, such as conducting SEO audits to locate issues that impede crawling; eliminating duplicate content; fixing errors; and making sure content all links and pages work the way they’re supposed to. They, along with digital marketing experts, follow all trends, practices, and updates relating to search engine optimization. As experts, they understand the trends and how they relate to the digital marketing efforts of their clients.

The web developers at Perfexion, Inc. specialize in SEO and the entire gamut of online marketing channels and strategies. They pride themselves on ensuring clients’ SEO and digital marketing efforts perform at optimum levels and that their digital marketing investment always provides a positive return. We are a Philadelphia based web design and development company located in Plymouth Meeting just outside King of Prussia.

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