Benefits of Optimizing Your Website’s Structure: When you optimize your website’s structure, the end result is almost always noticeable.
Importance of Technical SEO for Website Rankings: Many people underestimate the importance of technical SEO service. The simple fact is that you can have the best content, market it well, but if you disregard technical SEO, organic search engine traffic may never occur. This has been the downfall of many startups and ventures with great ideas and products. They use a motto that is something like “if you build it, they will come,” and unfortunately, this does not apply to website traffic.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the backbone of any SEO campaign – it is the best understanding of your site and making it easier for the bots to navigate and understand. It is also about making sure that search engines have access to the content on a website for indexing. If a site has a poor Technical SEO, there are many obstacles that the bots may face which results in poor ranking. Technical SEO is also cost-effective – it may involve making a few changes to the website, but this will result in continuously improving search visibility if done correctly. On the other hand, editing a web page and creating quality backlinks for example, is an ongoing process and there is no guarantee for better search visibility. It’s clear that Technical SEO is a necessity if you want to see greater results for minimal work.
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that search engines can crawl, index, and understand the content of your website. This is done with the purpose of improving organic search visibility. Before getting into what Technical SEO is, it’s important to understand what an SEO is. An SEO is a person who optimizes websites to make them reach a higher position in Google’s or any other search engine’s search results. In simpler terms, it is someone who makes the right changes to the website to make it appear in the search results when someone looks for information online. Now, Technical SEO is one of the many parts of SEO. Just like how a driver has to constantly maintain his car in order to ensure it runs efficiently, one has to ensure their website is in top condition for it to work efficiently. All SEOs will have to make changes to a website when they are trying to improve the search visibility, and Technical SEO is the part where you make the site well-optimized for search engine crawlers. The reason why this is so important is because no website is the same. Just like how different houses require different ways to properly maintain it, different websites require different SEO tactics in order to improve search visibility. Technical SEO makes sure that the website is Google-friendly in order to achieve the best results.
Importance of Technical SEO for Website Rankings
This is essentially the goal of the work. Your website may look awesome, really it might, but it’s of little use if when searched for by topic no one can locate it. Part of building a powerful, findable website is having the understanding that not only what you say issues, but how it is crawled and indexed matters greatly. This is where technical SEO services come in. A technical SEO expert will start by checking out the bots and spiders. Which may sound really frightening, but you can rest assured that a professional SEO manages anything scary or remotely resembling a spider with the utmost compassion. Bots and spiders are what search engines send out to find and pull your website back to the search engine. This process is known as crawling and if your website has yet to be crawled, then it is not findable by search and not indexed. Which means it may as well not exist. Even if you do have a brand new website and are looking forward to a future brimming with traffic, it’s still a long road ahead. Technical SEO support will ensure that your website is found and indexed the right way. The next portion deals with the keyword targeting. This is a crucial aspect of technical SEO and it is the equivalent of a word association game between your website and the search engine. The aim is for your website to become associated with certain words or phrases. These words and phrases are the keywords and it is vital for a website to rank for the right keywords. Making sure that an incoming search on a keyword can lead straight to your website is called providing a landing page. Not only is it crucial to rank for the right keyword, but it must also be termed the semantic keyword. This means the keyword to said landing page can bear the same results as the search. It’s no good playing coded word association with the search engine and ranking for a keyword that only vaguely resembles the content of your page. The final result and overview of technical SEO is countless organic traffic. This essentially is what every single website owner is dreaming of and is the ultimate purpose of a search engine finding and indexing your website correctly. If your SEO consultant has created a searchable website, with correctly associated keywords on a semantic level, then your website will generate continuous traffic using these keywords as best SEO results are long lasting.
Benefits of Optimizing Your Website’s Structure
The second benefit is that a well-structured site allows for the distribution of link weight to internal pages. Link weight is the amount of ranking potential that is given to a page from the links to it from other internal and external pages. The home page of a site typically has the highest link weight because it has the most backlinks. As the home page accumulates more link weight, it begins to give off more link weight especially from backlinks to it. This will increase the home page’s ranking potential, and the more link weight it can “funnel” to the inner pages, the more ranking potential the entire site will have. An inner page that has more link weight has more ranking potential of its own, so building more link weight to an inner page is beneficial for the site. This can be done with backlinks from external sites or with internal links from the home page or other internal pages. An internal page with little or no link weight may have trouble getting indexed or ranking at all.
There are two main benefits of having a well-structured site. One of the most important is that it makes it easier for search engine spiders to find all of your pages. The easier it is for them to find your pages, the more pages they will be able to index. The more pages they index from your site, the more traffic it can receive in the long run. An indexed page does not always mean traffic, but it is a possibility. If a page is not indexed, it has no possibility. Though indexing does not guarantee traffic, it is crucial for it. An analogy for this is building a bunch of roads that lead to different cities as opposed to just building highways that only lead to a few cities. The more roads there are, the more cities can be reached. Creating internal links for your pages is one way to make sure all your pages are indexed. This should be done with a text link menu on your pages. Try to avoid using JavaScript drop-down menus or flash menus, as they are not as effective for this purpose.
A website’s structure is very important for search engine optimization. If it is not easy for a search engine to crawl your site, it will not index it in the proper way. This can impact your rankings and keep traffic from coming to your site. By simply focusing some of your efforts on your site’s structure, you can greatly increase your possibilities for high rankings and heavy traffic.
Website Architecture Optimization
Most people should be familiar with the term “URL” by now. It stands for Universal Resource Locator: it is the address that we type into a web browser to reach a particular page. We should be ensuring that our URLs are as accessible and descriptive as possible. This will help both users and search engines understand what the page is about, before they even click on the link. This can be done through 301 redirects or 404 error page handling. The 404 error page is what a user lands on when they try to access a page that doesn’t exist. This generally provides little information and makes users just exit the site. With a custom 404 page and a redirect for broken URLs, you can direct users to where you want them to be, ensuring they do not leave the site. This conducts PageRank to deeper pages within your website, rather than losing it at the homepage.
One of the most important aspects of technical SEO is optimizing a website’s architecture. A well-structured website makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index it – and an indexed site is one that can be published in search engine results. It’s all about making the site easier to understand – and this should benefit the site’s visibility. From the bot’s perspective, the easier a site is to understand, the easier it is to index. From a webmaster’s perspective, a well-structured website also makes it easier for users to navigate. And, with good URL structure and a hierarchical sitemap, users can get a quick glimpse of how your website works – both of which are a big advantage.
URL Structure
A well thought out URL structure can do wonders for the higher rankings on your website. There are a few things that need to be considered during the process of bringing search engine friendly URLs to life. Static URLs will achieve high rankings with search engines. Dynamic URLs with special characters like question marks and ampersands will often times not index well with search engines. Incorporating keywords into your URLs will achieve greater rankings with search engines. The directory format of the URL is also a large factor in how the page ranks. Using a minimal amount of directories to describe the page is the most ideal way to set up a URL. Static pages are usually found in the root directory. Following these guidelines for URL structuring will lead to higher page rankings on your website. Separation of different elements in a URL can also determine how well the URL indexes with search engines. For example, older websites that use underscores to separate words in their pages will not index as well as a site using hyphens to separate words in the page. Standardization of the URL is also important for URL structure. All letters in the address bar appear as lowercase in a standard URL. This prevents the same page from having multiple different addresses and thus gumming up the website with duplicate pages. A site containing duplicate pages often runs into indexation issues with search engines. Chances are if you enter site:mywebsite.com into Google you’re going to find more pages indexed than your website actually contains. This is a result of poor URL structure and can be fixed with proper URL structure along with 301 redirects on duplicate pages to send to the original page.
Navigation and Internal Linking
Search engines have a specific way of understanding a website’s structure and how it is linked, both from URL information and internal linking. This is useful to understand the major sections of your website as deemed by the search engine and which pages are most important. Often a website is many layers deep from the home page so it is useful to link from the ‘deep’ pages back to the home page and other core pages. This can be achieved by editing the navigation menu or using breadcrumb trails. Link sculpting is the modification of a website’s internal linking to influence the flow of link juice (ranking power) around it. This can be done on a page by page basis or with more general changes such as the footer link of every page. Usually link sculpting is used for the purposes of increasing the search visibility and PageRank of certain pages or sections of a website by providing them with more link juice. An important thing to understand about how a website is accessed by search engine spiders is the crawl depth of the homepage compared to other important pages on the site. It is common for a website’s homepage to be a PageRank of 5 and for deep pages to be unranked. In cases with a large difference in PageRank, it is unlikely that the deep pages will be indexed as the spiders will not follow the links to find them. Static websites are another important issue to address when considering navigation. A static website is becoming less common with the increasing use and power of content management systems using databases. A website is ‘static’ when the content is served in a form that is different from the crawling of a webpage. An example of this is many websites utilizing URL parameters to serve content. Static websites often present indexing issues because the content visible to a user is not actually on a web page for a search engine to crawl. Static websites often rely on sitemaps to inform search engines on how to index the content.
XML Sitemap Creation
XML sitemaps are text files that list and describe the files within a site. The XML document types for sitemaps are defined on the sitemaps.org website. The sitemap document type is defined as: <code>?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?</code> <code>?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsl”?></code> <code>xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″</code> This code defines the version and encoding method of the document. It also defines a stylesheet known as a siteindex.xsl. This XSL file is a document that can be used to format the sitemap into HTML to easily view it. This file is not required to be used, but it is a valued option. The final line of this code is where most sitemap code will be implemented. The urlset tag is the root node and includes all URL entries within it. Each URL entry contains a lastmod tag that specifies the last modified date of the URL. This is a date that is useful to search engine crawlers to determine when it should crawl the site again. The loc tag contains the location of the site that it links to. The location should be the exact URL including all characters around it. The URL can also contain a changefreq tag which specifies how often the page is expected to change. This can be used as a hint to search engine crawlers. Other optional tags that can go within the URL tag include priority and URL entry comments. These are tags that may be used but can be determined to be valuable or not by individual site administrators. A sitemap can contain multiple URL entries and can have a file size of up to 50MB. If a site has a file that is larger than the aforementioned, a siteindex format can be used. This format splits the sitemap into multiple files, each containing a sitemapindex tag that has multiple sitemap tags as children.
Page Speed Optimization
At the end of the day, the fundamental reason we’ll be taking a gander at the time a page takes to load is that it is one of Google’s ranking variables. However, there are other valid justifications that should give you the motivation to work on your webpage load times. In our own research, it’s been proven that if a page takes longer than 4 seconds to load, over 1/3 of guests will abandon it and go to another site. Besides, Amazon’s own estimates suggest that if their pages were to slow down by just one second, it would cost them $1.6 billion in sales every year. Ultimately, it’s about guest satisfaction, and no one likes to wait a long time for a webpage to show. Any of you that have Google Analytics/AdSense installed will also have realized that in your report, there is a measurement of your site’s average page load time. These timings are being taken from guests that have the Google Toolbar installed, so it may not be entirely accurate. Yet, regardless of that, having a slow page will affect your users’ experience unfavorably.
Importance of Page Speed for SEO
Website load time is crucial to gaining and keeping users on your site. Pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load have a higher bounce rate and a lower time spent on page. Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And also, that it is only a small signal and can affect a small percentage of the sites that are affected by a much larger weighted signal such as the relevance of the page. In our experience, high traffic websites having a high bounce rate in organic search often are not rewarded with strong long-term rankings. This is likely because the low engagement and high bounce rate are also a signal to search engines of poor user experience. High bounce rates can also impact performance-based advertising, so search and site speed are very important. Site speed can be easily measured using the Google Page Speed Tool or Web Page Test, but it is also important to get a clear indication of the load time of an important landing page across different countries. This is because the load time of a page is dependent on the geographical location of the user and the location of the server. This can vary dramatically if using a CDN.
Optimizing Images and Media
CSS can also be used to create image sprites. An image sprite is lots of images of the same size, all merged into one. This method is typically used for buttons that change appearance when hovered over. By displaying only part of the sprite at once and changing the position when the button is hovered over, an effect similar to a change in image can be achieved. This reduces the time taken to load several images and reduces the number of server requests made by the browser.
Icons and decorative images can be displayed using CSS. CSS can be used to display text in a particular font, without it being plain text. This is achieved by the text being enclosed in a tag, which uses the font definition from the site’s stylesheet. The text can be replaced with an image by applying the image to the tag as a background. This method maintains the ability to specify the image dimensions using the ‘height’ and ‘width’ attributes and allows alt text to be added to the tag. This way increases page accessibility, as screen readers will get the alt text, and if the image fails to display, the user will see the text. If the image itself was inserted in place of the text, none of the previously mentioned information could be defined.
Ensure all images and media are saved at an appropriate resolution. Images that are saved at resolutions higher than necessary can have a big impact on a site’s loading speed. Using images that are 1024 x 768 pixels in size, when they will only be displayed at 320 x 240 pixels, results in the browser needing to downsize the image. This not only increases the time taken to display the content but also increases the time taken for the user to see the page as a whole. Similarly, images displayed as small thumbnails should be of low resolution.
Minifying CSS and JavaScript
Rewriting your CSS can be very time-consuming, depending on how it’s set up. If you don’t have lots of time on your hands, your best bet is to use CSS sprites. CSS sprites only load one image as opposed to many. This is achieved by showing only a portion of the full image at any one time. Individual images of the smaller graphics are called upon using background images and a set of coordinates. This method is often more complex to design at first, especially when tweaking the positioning of the images. But when it’s all set up, the page will load much faster, and the user only has to wait for one image to load. On top of containing your images, CSS sprites can be applied to your regular CSS too. By combining many images into one set of coordinates, the amount of file requests your page makes can be greatly reduced. This would mean that instead of your page asking for, let’s say 8 different images, it only makes one request for the combined image. This reduces loading time significantly and is a great way of optimizing the speed of your web pages.
Mobile-Friendly Design
Sites that are built with mobile-specific configurations have the same HTML and content on the same URL regardless of the device (this is called the vary HTTP header). These sites often serve different documents (this is also referred to as the transcoder configuration). Google perceives this to be the same as cloaking, and depending on the implementation, there could be some SEO implications, and it can be quite complex and difficult to maintain. This is why we are not recommending it. With this configuration, there are some potential SEO benefits, but it is our view that the additional development work on a mobile-specific site is now undue as responsive design has overcome the issues and is the superior mobile configuration.
Responsive web design is Google’s recommended design pattern aimed at serving the same HTML for all devices and using CSS (works fine with Google) to render it depending on the device. This is the dominant design pattern and the one we recommend. This is the configuration the URL above is using. With responsive design, the same URL for a piece of content is used regardless of the device, and the content is just reconfigured to fit the device on which it is being displayed. This saves time and resources when Googlebot crawls and indexes content as it only has to crawl and index one URL for a piece of content rather than multiple URLs with different pieces of content. In addition, Google prefers this design because the content lives on one website and one URL rather than multiple websites and multiple URLs.
Responsive Web Design
If it isn’t already obvious, a mobile-friendly site is very important and is a requirement for mobile first indexing. As previously stated, a responsive web design counts as mobile-friendly and is recommended by Google as the industry best practice. Industry best practices are surely recommendations for a reason, but in this case, it is recommended by Google—a lot. Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern. They argue that responsive design simplifies things for their algorithms/future updates, makes it easier for users to share and link content, and for there is only one URL to index and crawl. Google has also stated that responsive web design is their configuration of choice. Having a configuration of choice, or in a sense having a preference for how you want something, often hints that its chosen configuration is how you prefer things to be. A stated preference by the largest and most used search engine is weighty and should not be taken lightly. However, they do approve of other mobile configurations like separate mobile site and dynamic serving if implemented correctly. If resources allow, it’s quite possible to have a highly optimized mobile site perform equally to a responsive site. For possible guidance, it may be worth researching responsive design best practices from highly reputable sources such as Google. Despite this, it’s obvious that responsive design is easier and more straightforward; that being said, the choice is still yours!
With the new year having two more updates and Google’s recent mobile first index release, a responsive design has never been more important. In November of 2016, Google announced that they would be moving to a mobile first index, meaning that their algorithms will primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, with the intent to better help – primarily mobile users – find what they’re looking for. This will have substantial effects on search results. For now, Google is using a Googlebot primarily dedicated to smartphone resources for the indexing and the snippet that is shown in the result, and when indexing a page, they look at the content of the mobile page. If a site is not a mobile-friendly site – and having a responsive web design counts as mobile-friendly – then it is highly likely the site will rank poorly and lose out to competitors that are mobile-friendly. In addition, Google has begun to place a “mobile-friendly” label on sites that meet their criteria for being considered mobile-friendly, meanwhile labeling sites in search results that are not mobile-friendly. If a mobile-friendly site is now required for the mobile first index, non-mobile-friendly sites are going to find it hard to rank or even show up in the search results at all for mobile users.
Responsive web design is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to present an optimal viewing experience, easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. A responsive design is accomplished by utilizing fluid grids and CSS3 media queries, which are an extension of the @media rule. The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points. Flexible images are also sized in relative units, so as to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element. Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, most commonly the width of the browser.
Mobile Usability and User Experience
Mobile usability and user experience are huge in the age of mobile. Many sites have a mobile version of their site which will serve content on user agents to detect if a user is coming from a mobile device. If your site is one of these, be sure to redirect mobile users to the mobile equivalent URL (mobile.example.com or m.example.com). If you are using responsive design as recommended above, you likely won’t have to change a thing. This being said, your mobile and desktop site are the same URL, in which case you have one version of your site that serves all devices. This is Google’s recommended way to serve web content and the recommended configuration for smartphone-optimized sites. No matter what configuration you choose, be sure to avoid common mistakes that Google identifies with smartphone sites. This includes unplayable videos (videos that require flash), faulty redirects, smartphone-only 404s, app download interstitials, and irrelevant cross-links, to name a few. Google has stated that if your site is not mobile-friendly, the site will not rank. To check if your site meets the mobile usability standards, you can check your mobile usability report in Google Search Console.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
The concept of mobile optimization is a critical element to the structure of your website and its functionality. Google has placed a higher focus on mobile optimization and rankings are now based on the mobile version of a site, not the desktop version. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project that was created as an alternative to responsive web design to increase the speed and performance of web content on mobile devices. AMP is essentially a stripped down version of HTML with a specific set of rules and restrictions, this is so content is simplified and page speed is increased. The drive to create AMP pages is prompted by Google search which now has a mobile index that prioritizes mobile optimized content. Creating AMP pages gives the potential for higher search engine rankings and visibility to a greater audience. AMP is effective for web content but may not be suitable for an entire website, as complex and interactive content does not suit the AMP framework. E-commerce sites would find it less effective to use AMP as it is more beneficial for publishers. AMP versions of pages are stored on a user’s mobile cache, which impacts the potential for increased visibility and faster load times. A downfall of using AMP is that it can take away the branding and customization from your site and can also cannibalize on existing organic mobile traffic. AMP pages can be monitored with the AMP report tool in Google search console with any errors and fixes being displayed. AMP will generally not have a direct impact on search rankings. AMP is a relevant option to consider for mobile optimization but can be discussed further in terms of your specific site and its web content.
