How Technical SEO Can Be Used to Increase Google Search Rank

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How Technical SEO Can Be Used to Increase Google Search Rank

How Technical SEO Can Be Used to Increase Google Search Rank

How Technical SEO Can Be Used to Increase Google Search Rank

If there is one thing that is crucial in digital marketing, it is none other than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This useful tool is loved for being cost-efficient and can work for any business.

However, some of us fail to understand its multifaceted nature. After all, mastering SEO isn’t just about focusing on a single area. It’s about understanding and taking advantage of the multiple types of SEO to increase our Google Search Ranking.

Now you are probably wondering “Hey, wait a minute. What do you mean there are various types of SEO?”

Yup, you read that correctly! While we would have loved to deal with just one type, so it is much easier to increase our SEO ranking, that is not the case. This is why our digital marketers do run into some obstacles when maintaining our website’s Google Search Ranking. However, reaching and maintaining our website’s ranking on the first page of Google is a sweeter achievement due to that challenge.

So, how can you utilise the various types of SEO to achieve your desired Google Search Rank? While we understand the desire to learn as much about SEO as possible in the shortest amount of time, it is vital to fully understand each type if you wish to achieve the best result. For this article, we will delve deep and focus on just one type of SEO – Technical SEO.

What is Technical SEO?

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is where you improve the technical aspects of a website to increase the ranking of its pages among the search engines. This is to make sure that the search engines can crawl, index, and render your website properly.

Technical SEO is probably one of the more well-known types of SEO because it refers to beautifying and cleaning up your website. This ensures that your website is easy to access and has straightforward navigation to improve a customer’s website experience.

The importance of Technical SEO

Let us put it in simpler terms. Suppose you are ready to give an important presentation in front of a prospective client that can bring business to your workplace. You would want to make a good first impression by dressing up for the presentation and appearing prim, proper and approachable.

Since the first impression always matters, what do you do to prepare? Perhaps you would be dressed in your best business outfit, spend more time on your hair and/or makeup, and even add on a touch of perfume or cologne to demonstrate that, “You’re the epitome of professional.”

To top this off, you may try to rehearse what you want to say and fix a few tiny phrases for the proposal you are pitching so it “sounds better” to the clients. An example of how you may dress would be like the following image:

The importance of Technical SEO

Well, that’s basically what technical SEO is. You are cleaning up the exterior of the website to give users the best experience possible, just like how you would polish up the outward appearance of yourself to provide the clients with the best experience at your presentation.

How Technical SEO can be utilised

As we mentioned earlier, a user-friendly website with easy-to-understand and straightforward navigation would gain credibility from Google Algorithms. After all, Google wants to perfect user’s experiences when it comes to surfing the net.

Therefore, if you want to earn that top ranking on Google, you have to fix issues such as slow loading speed, spam, broken links and other bugs. Here are a few pointers you may use as a checklist to help keep your website as clean and user-friendly as possible:

Decrease site load time (desktop and mobile)

Decrease site load time (desktop and mobile)

Here are two questions for you to consider:

1. Have you ever visited a website, only to see something similar to the image above? Or encounter a message that says, “Safari could not open the page because the network connection was lost”?

2. Have you ever exited the webpage because it was taking too long to load?

If you answer “yes” to both of them, you’re not alone. According to Website Builder Expert, 40% of the public will either give up on a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load or visit another website within a similar industry if they encounter these issues.

Therefore, one of the key factors that impact Google Ranking is the site’s load time. This is because of the following reasons:

1. As the seconds to load the page increase, the users’ patience decreases. Hence, if your website doesn’t load within three seconds on mobile devices and under two on computers, they are more likely to abandon the site.

2. Your website’s loading speed partly determines its Google ranking factor.

3. If users are leaving your site, they’re either closing the tab or clicking the back button. This contributes to your sites’ bounce rate, which Google also uses as a ranking factor.

(Additional note: Bounce Rate is where a user only views a single-page session on your site. It’s where only a single request is registered on the Analytics server. This only happens when the user opens a single page, and he or she leaves without another request being registered during that surfing time)

Increasing your site speed can be done in a variety of different ways.

1. Compress large images and optimise files
Slow loading speed is usually caused by large images, which take up a lot of data. Rich files that you use on the website will also take a lot of time to load. What you can do is compress the pictures you use and rearrange or rewrite the files on the website to help improve the loading time.

2. Removing unused scripts & files
Sometimes, when you are making changes to your website, the JavaScript remains unused. Every JavaScript usually contains more than 20 kibibytes of unused code.

This is worse when the JavaScript is render-blocking, which delays the execution of the script in the browser until it has finished its download. Unused code over the network also wastes data usage for mobile users. After all, not everyone has unlimited data plans.

To detect unused JavaScript, try using The Coverage tab in Chrome DevTools, which can give you a line-by-line analysis of the unused code for a website. If you think you can save those codes for future use, you can disable them with Asset CleanUp or Perfmatters.

Eliminate 404s or broken pages/links

Eliminate 404s or broken pages/links

Have you ever surfed the net and tried clicking on a link only to encounter the above error message? Well, this occurs when you click on a link that does not exist. In other words, these are broken links, which can dampen the user’s experience with a website. This usually occurs when the URL is changed or deleted in favour of another page.

When a link is broken, Google is unable to access it, which can negatively affect your search rankings. Furthermore, if this now-broken page was linked from other pages or external sources, you’ll lose the visitors that may visit your page through them.

If you are the owner of the webpage, you can create a 301 redirect to process access requests to inform visitors that the page requested has been moved to another URL. By doing so, you can redirect the visitors from the broken link to the latest version of your website.

However, if you have not updated your website in a long time, there are a few ways to find out which pages on your website are broken:

1. LinkMiner
LinkMiner is a Google Chrome extension that can display link data next to the links on the webpage you are accessing. It can also determine whether the pages you are linking to are active or no longer in use.

Its only limitation is that it only lets you check the current page you are on and not an entire site at once. Hence, this tool is great for page quality assurance when it comes to newer or more recently updated websites.

2. SEMRush
Running a site audit will allow you to scan a full website and receive a report on the various pages and their statuses within minutes. Based on this report, you can use that information to organise your 404 pages and decide the redirection of the pages links before implementing them.

3. Google Search Console
When you are logged in to the Search Console, you can get a list of links that Googlebot has difficulty crawling. It also includes the list of 404 error pages it encounters, which can be found under the “Not Found” category. For further information, you can click on “Linked Form” to check which websites or webpages the 404 pages are linked to.

Fixing All the Bugs

Technical SEO isn’t just about fixing all the issues within your website. You still have to check if your fixes are working and uncover any unseen issues. Try testing your updated website with tools such as www.webpagetest.org. It is simple to use; you only need to enter your site’s URL and start the test to check on the results of your website fixture.

It’s also important to create an updated sitemap to Google to inform it of the changes you have made. With the ever-increasing importance of website advertisement, polishing up the mechanics of your website is now a necessity.

Conclusion

To ensure your website ranks well on Google, you can’t just focus on one specific ranking factor. You need to utilise the various types of SEO in conjunction with one another to give your website the best chance to succeed.

However, there is a steep learning curve before one can fully utilise the various SEO tools to their maximum potential. We hope what we have shared in this article is helpful, and the tips help you better optimise your website, so it performs better on Google’s Search Engine Result Pages.