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If you’re looking to improve your website’s search engine rankings, one of the best ways to do so is by making sure your website is technically optimized for search engines. A technical SEO checklist can help you identify issues with website structure, coding, and other elements that could be holding back your website from ranking higher in search results.
Here are some of the most important technical SEO elements you should be checking for on your website:
1. Site Speed – Load times are crucial to great user experience and are a ranking factor for SEO. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test your site speed and see how you can improve it. Some things you can do include optimizing images, reducing the number of HTTP requests, and minifying CSS and JavaScript files.
2. Mobile Responsiveness – With over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s imperative that your site is responsive to mobile users. You can test your website’s mobile responsiveness using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Other things to consider include optimizing images for mobile, reducing the use of pop-ups on mobile devices, and ensuring that buttons and other elements are easy to tap.
3. SSL Certificate – Using an SSL certificate is essential for websites today to protect user data while browsing and Google agreeing to show HTTPs websites more. Ensure that your site has an SSL certificate installed, and use a redirect to ensure that all pages are served over https:// rather than http://.
4. XML Sitemaps – Search engines use XML sitemaps to better understand the structure and content of your site. Make sure you have an XML sitemap and ensure that it is updated regularly. Google Search Console can help in submitting a sitemap and tracking crawl status.
5. Structured Data – Structured data markup is essential to help search engines better understand the content of your site. Use tools like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure that your structured data is correctly implemented. Common examples of structured data include Schema.org and JSON-LD.
6. Robots.txt & Sitemap – The robots.txt file is used to tell search engines which pages to crawl and which ones to ignore. The sitemap tells search engines the pages on your site that you want to be crawled. Review your robots.txt and sitemap files to ensure they are complete and up-to-date.
7. Canonicalization – A canonical tag is used to avoid duplicate content issues by identifying the preferred page that should be indexed by search engines. Ensure that your website is correctly using canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
By using this technical SEO checklist, you can identify areas of your website that need improvement so that you can continue to increase your rankings and attract more traffic to your site.
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