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Technical Aspects of SEO
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On Page SEO
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Off Page SEO
Technical Aspects of SEO
- Site speed
- URL structure
- Mobile friendly design
- Robots management
- Redirections
- Canonical tags
- Site structure
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Site Speed
Nobody likes slow loading sites, not even Google. If a site or page loads slowly, it will rank lower than competing pages
- A fast loading page is one that takes less than a second to load
- Up to 3 seconds is considered acceptable load time
- Anything more than 3 seconds is considered slow
How to Reduce Page Lad Time
To reduce the time it takes the page to load, we can
- Look at suggestions from Google Analytics
- Compress images used on the page
- Reduce the number of images and embedded objects on the page
- Eliminate unused scripts on the page
- Load scripts in parallel to reduce load times
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URL Structure
- Most sites these days are created using a content management system which have their own ways for generating page URLs
- In most case, the default structure is not SEO optimized and will not let you control the URL
- Ideally, the URL should include the main keyword that is targeted on the page
Correct Way of Creating URLs
A page URL consists of two parts – the domain name and the page identifier
- The page identifier part of a URL can be controlled
- It should start with the keyword
- It should not be too long
- Ideally, it should not include any other word
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Mobile friendly design
With the number of mobile web users now exceeding the desktop users, Google is paying a lot of weightage to how a site a displayed on mobile devices
- Since most websites are designed for desktop, they do not display properly on smaller devices like mobiles and tablets
- A poorly displayed site degrades user experience so Google will push the page down in mobile search rankings
How to Make Pages Mobile Friendly
There are two ways a site can be made mobile friendly
- Create a mobile version of the site – an expensive option for most site owners – a small piece of code detects mobile devices and redirects traffic to the mobile site
- Create a Responsive site that adapts itself to device’s dimensions
- Most CMS allow easy creation of Responsive sites
- They use a switcher software that identifies the device accessing the site and adapts the pages accordingly
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Robots or Bots
Robots or Bots read and index page on the site. It is important to make sure they read all the pages you want indexed, but no more
- You use Robots.txt file to tell Bots which pages or sections of sites they can access
- You should block access to pages which don’t have content, like the shopping cart page, to prevent search engines from indexing them Robots Management
Managing Robots.txt File
Every site has a Robots.txt file. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, it will generate a default Robots.txt file
- It is usually stored in the root directory
- If your domain name is http://www.yourdomain.com, You can access it by typing http://www.yourdomain.com/robost.txt in the browser address bar
- You can also access it from Google Webmaster Tools
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Redirections
Many times, we change the address of a page or remove a page from the site. When that happens, a person trying to access the page will get a 404 – Page Not Found error
- If the page is indexed in Google, the search Bot will also get the same error when trying to re-index the page. Search engines do not like getting 404 errors as it shows that the site is not maintained properly
- If the page ranks in Google search results, someone who clicks on the link to the page in the search result will get 404 error which looks bad for the site
Using Redirections on the Site
If you have page that was moved (URL was changed) or if you deleted the page, you can use redirections to send traffic to another page on the site and avoid the 404 error
- If a page is temporarily unavailable because it is being updated, you should use 302 (temporary) redirect
- If the page is moved permanently to a new URL, use a 301 (permanent) redirect to the new URL
- If a page is deleted, use the 301 redirect to send traffic to another page, may be home page, on the site
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Canonical Tags
We use Canonical Tag on the pages with duplicate content to tell the Bots that this is a duplicate page and provide the URL of the original
- Search engines use this tag as a citation
- Any SEO benefits for the duplicate pages is passed on to the original page
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Site Structure
Site Structure is about how content is organized on the site
- Each site has many pages of content
- These pages are usually organized in groups of similar or related pages which can be accessed from menu
- The goal is to allow users (and Bots) to navigate to any page on the site using links or menu structure
- Remember, Bots can only index a page if they can acces it
On Page SEO
On-Site optimization is about helping the search engines find, index and understand the content on your pages
Optimizing on page means
Optimizing the non-content elements
Optimizing content for keywords
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Optimizing Non-Content Elements
Optimizing non-content elements includes
- User Friendly layout
- Tag cloud / category of the page
- Validating HTML code on the page
- Frequency and amount of changes to the page
- Using appropriate HTML tags
- Creating keyword optimized Title and Description tags
- Optimizing page for speed
- Creating optimized URL
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Optimizing Content Elements
Optimizing content elements includes
- Creating optimized headlines
- Quality of Content
- Adding keyword to content
- Adding keyword optimized multi-media content
- Adding outbound links
- Optimizing length of content
- Additional content elements
Off Page SEO
Off-page optimization is about helping Google understand how good your content is.
Off-page Optimization is about getting other sites to link to your pages
- Backlinks act as a vote of confidence in your content
- Increase the authority of page and domain
- Help your pages rank higher in search results