Technical SEO Guide 2019: 5 essential techniques

Technical SEO Checklist 2019

    1. SSL

SSL is a must. Not only does it protect your website but it gains both the client and search engine trust. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and its the technology creating an encrypted link between the server and the browser.  

2. Mobile Friendly

It’s 2019 and your website should be mobile friendly. Google indexes mobile first. You can use Googles Mobile Friendly  test to check if your website is mobile friendly. You can also check out a new free tool called MobiReady  which is a great tool for web developers and internet marketers.

3. Crawl

Use a tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to scan your site for for 4xx and 5xx errors. You’ll need to properly assess what’s needed for your given situation whether it’s 301 redirects or 410’s. Screaming Frog, used in the following example, is great tool overall and you can easily check your response codes by clicking the response codes tab or exporting links to a .csv file via Bulk Export > Response Codes > Client Error (4xx) and Server Error (5xx).

4. Intuitive navigation/ structure

Making search engines not work so hard to understand your site is crucial. You should review your sitemap. It helps search engines find your site. Also upload your sitemap to Google Search Console.

Review your internal linking strategy. Is it clear and concise? Your anchor text should clearly describe your website. Search engines will thank you for that.

5. Improve page speed

Your website should be loading in two seconds or less according to Google.

Steps to take for increasing web speed:

• Minify Javascript, CSS, and HTML
• Leverage browser caching
• Remove render blocking javascript
• Use A CDN
• Optimize images with a took like compressjpeg
• Enable Gzip Compression. In order to use it you’ll need to determine which type of server your site runs on and use the appropriate compression

1.     a) apache: mod_deflate

       b)IIS:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2008-R2-and-2008/cc771003(v=ws.10)

1.     c) Nginx http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_gzip_module.html

“Go to search console. Do you have any errors?”

This new site is one we just stumbled upon called MobiReady it’s great for developers and internet marketers.

3. Structured Data

Schema markup improves click through rate by providing users with a transparent snapshot of what your company does. It helps search engines understand your content through context.

4. Duplicate content

 Take your domain and plug it into Siteliner

Make sure you don’t have any plagiarised content. The truth about duplicates is, most of the web is duplicated. It’s ok to have some percentage of content that is the same or similar. It is hard for Google to decide which version of content is more relevant for a given search query if you have

• • Exact Duplicates: another pages is exactly the same as another URL
  • Near Duplicates: A pages that differs slightly from another (ex. Order of text, image, content)
  • Duplicate Titles: Two or more pages with the same page title
• Cross Domain Duplicates: Exact or near duplicates that appear across domains or subdomains

5. Optimize Robots.txt

This file gives search engine robots instructions on how to crawl your website. Every website can be crawled to a limited number of pages. So make sure your most important pages are being indexed. You’ll want to make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking anything you don’t want to be indexed.

For example:

• Temporary files
• Admin Pages
• Cart and Checkout Pages
• Search Related Pages
• URL’s that Contain Parameters

This is the total Technical SEO Checklist for 2019

In the future we will probably see search engines implement speedy and advanced crawling techniques using AI. For more information check out  Las Vegas SEO

Edan Mizrahi

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