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Being found online takes sustained effort in several areas. Much of the important work falls under the category of technical SEO (search engine optimization). Technical SEO is about the website and its content. Off-site SEO is about driving traffic to the site. Good keyword research is essential to both, but technical SEO focuses more on coding.

Essentials of Technical SEO

Many of these tips apply regardless of whether you offer goods or services and whether you sell to businesses or consumers. In no particular order, here are 13 technical SEO tricks to implement on your site.

1 – Make it mobile-friendly.

Google loves responsive design, meaning sites that look great on desktops and mobile devices. Not only is responsive design great for Google, but mobile device users also get turned off by sites that aren’t easy to use on their smartphones.

2 – Create and submit an XML Sitemap.

You can create a sitemap in several ways. Google has a sitemap creator. WordPress offers Yoast and Google XML Sitemap plug-ins. You can also use Google Search Console to submit the sitemap.

3 – Put keywords in image tags.

Keyword text helps search engines identify the topic of a page, so using words versus alphanumeric labels can help your rankings.

4 – Do a site audit.

You can find software that will crawl your website and find things that hurt your potential rankings. These issues include missing meta-descriptions, duplicate pages, and missing alt tags for images. Fix as many of those issues as you can.

5 – Install an SSL certificate.

Google is serious about data security, and not just their data. A site that implements SSL encryption (indicated by the “HTTPS” prefix in a URL) may rank a little bit higher because of this.

6 – Find ways to speed up your site.

Slow page loading can hurt your site’s ranking. Do what you can to reduce the size of each page by reducing the size of images

7 – Optimize your internal site links.

Generic hyperlink text such as “buy now” or “the best price” should be avoided in favor of things like “shop for a factory reconditioned laptop” or “browse deals on laptops.”

8 – Find and fix broken links.

Pages that produce 404 and similar messages give a bad impression and can hurt your search engine rankings. The bigger your site, the more likely it is some links will go bad over time.

9 – Create canonical URLs.

The word ‘canonical’ indicates a preferred link for that specific content. You want to create one link that supersedes all others on your site so Google doesn’t penalize you for having too much duplicate content.

10 – Use structured data markup language.

Search engines like Google use microdata to better understand the content of your site and create rich snippets in search results. Rich snippets tend to bring a higher click-through rate than standard search results.   

11—Use a robots.txt file

When search engines crawl a website, they typically first access a site's robots.txt file. Among other things, this file tells the search engine what pages to index and what pages to ignore. You don’t want any customer-facing pages to be skipped.

12—Optimize your titles.

Each page should have a meta tag that serves as a page title. A concise, descriptive title tag that accurately reflects your page's topic is important for ranking well in search engine.

13- Optimize meta descriptions

Meta descriptions provide a short snippet that describes a web page. Accurate and interesting descriptions can help increase both your search rankings and a user's likelihood of clicking through to your page.

Technical SEO is an Ongoing Activity

Like off-site SEO, the technical work on your site has to continue. Keywords that were easy to rank for become much harder, new long-tail keywords become relevant, links break, images change but alt text does not change. Regular site audits are important for those reasons. The technical SEO experts at DevDigital have helped hundreds of clients improve their rankings and get found by more customers.