Technical SEO Cape Town Guide: What is Technical SEO?
This Technical SEO Cape Town Guide will teach you the fundamentals of technical SEO, and how to use these to your advantage. Technical SEO refers to what’s behind the scenes or under the bonnet. It’s essentially SEO work done to the architecture of your website, which sets a foundation for your content. Trust an SEO Company.
The main aspects of your SEO we’re going to discuss in this Technical SEO Cape Town Guide include improving the speed of your website, it’s crawlability, indexability, and rendering. The general success of your technical SEO depends on these areas. Let’s move on to the next question, why are these so important for your business?
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide: Why is Technical SEO important?
Imagine you are searching for something online and you find a promising webpage with the relevant information. You go to open the site but it’s too slow and you become impatient. Studies have shown that too slow is under a couple of seconds. Thus, the faster your page loads the more conversions it will generate.
Your site doesn’t only need to be fast loading, but it needs to have the correct structure and coding for search engines to find what they want. Crawlability refers to the ease in which search engine “spiders” can find the desired information, hence increasing your site’s rankability.
When these little spider bots find the information they need it needs to be indexed. Your page will be indexed according to its relevance and given eligibility to be ranked on SERPS. It’s therefore key to the success of your SEO to make sure your pages get indexed.
In order to optimize your SEO, your site needs to be easy-access. The ease of rendering makes your site more accessible. To ensure your website is not restricting access you’ll need to audit for errors and other rendering issues.
Your website also needs to be accessible to mobile visitors. It’s crucial to your technical SEO that your site provides positive mobile-friendly pages. This Technical SEO Cape Town Guide will explain how to make your site more compatible for mobile users.
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to Site Speed
Your site needs to run as fast as possible to optimize your technical SEO. You can’t rely on your perfect content to generate conversions if no one ever sees it. Here is a Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to speeding up your website.
You can optimize your page speed by compressing your files enabling GZIP compression. This will reduce the weight of larger files such as images, HTML, and CSS. In order to reduce speed more effectively, however, you’ll need to try and shrink down the entire webpage.
Tidy up your coding by eliminating all non-essential third-party scripts, spaces, and comments as these will slow down your load time. You need to get rid of any excess weight so think of creative ways to trim the fat. Out of date plug-ins and cheap hosting are also major culprits, so it might be time for an upgrade.
Try to reduce HTTP requests to increase speed. You can do this by merging Javascript or CSS files into one file. Use sprites to combine multiple images. Get rid of plug-ins that automatically load their own Javascript or CSS.
Your URL also affects the speed of your website. Don’t leave out the end slash (/). This causes the server to have more issues recognizing the URL and unnecessarily perform a 301 redirect which takes longer. Audit 301 redirects regularly.
Consider using a content distribution network (CDN). CDNs are web servers that store copies of your website in different locations. This means there is a shorter distance to travel between servers, and your page will load faster.
Frequently test the speed of your website on sites such as webpagetest. Try it with and without the CDN, to ensure that this is working properly as well. You can then find out if your website’s speed is the reason for your lack of traffic or conversions.
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to Crawlable Code
Crawlability is one of the main fundamentals of technical SEO. Here in this Technical SEO Guide, you can learn more about how to make your site more crawlable with various strategies. The more crawlable your site is, the more you will improve your SEO ranking.
First of all, you need to implement technical SEO to ensure that your most important pages are easy to navigate. You might need to update certain elements on your website to make it an ideal space for crawling, your XML sitemap for example. Ensure you regularly update and audit these details.
There are several ways in which you can optimize your “crawl budget”. First, make sure you have allowed crawling in Robot.txt. You can do this by adding Robot.txt to a web auditor tool which will then enable you to permit crawling on any of the pages on your domain straight away, rather than trying to do it manually.
Generally, crawlers are better at crawling over HTML than Javascript or heavier coding, so try to stick to the basics. If you use CSS and Javascript make sure these are crawlable too. Remember as well that your crawl budget isn’t infinite so try to prioritize important pages.
Optimize your crawl budget by removing duplicate pages. Look out for unnecessarily generated URLs that send crawlers elsewhere. You want to focus crawling on your key pages.
Use your Google Search Console account to your advantage. You can add these pesky extra URLs to your account, so they won’t get mistaken for duplicates. Set the appropriate URL parameters and test regularly.
You also need to “tell” Google about localized versions of your pages that might get in the way. Use the to point out these URLs. Crawl budget depends on the number of links Googlebot wants and is able to crawl, so it’s essential you try to optimize this.
Your crawlability also depends on your site’s architecture. A logical structure and link between layered pages are essential. This structure helps bots understand the relationship between the pages. A link from your homepage to another content page carries more importance.
You need to set a hierarchy where you include pages like “About”, “Product” and “News” at the top and that these have the highest number of relevant internal URLs. This way you’re telling the bots which pages are more important.
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to Indexability
In this technical SEO guide, you can also find out how to make sure your pages are getting indexed. This gives them the eligibility to be ranked by search engine results pages (SERPS). Here are some ways you can ensure your pages get indexed.
Audit your redirects and make sure they’re set up properly as otherwise, they could cause problems for your SEO. Ensure you don’t have any broken URLs or redirects set up incorrectly. Remove duplicate content and make sure you’ve set up canonical URLs for any main pages.
Mobile sites are always prioritized so use Google’s Mobile-friendly test to test your to make sure you are providing mobile visitors with a positive experience. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly it’s much less likely to be indexed. You can find out more on the technical SEO Cape Town guide to mobile-friendly websites.
As well as redirects, keep an eye on other HTTP errors that may inadvertently block search bots. These include your run of the mill 403 Forbidden Messages, 404 Error Pages, and 502 Bad Gateway Error. Look up the source of the error in your log files. Anything that hinders accessibility also impedes the effect of your technical SEO.
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to Rendering
To make your site more accessible you need to optimize your rendering. This technical SEO Cape to rendering will help you do so. Here is a checklist for you to perform a renderability audit.
Server Performance
Check your server performance. It’s important to troubleshoot any HTTP errors or server timeout. If your website keeps coming up empty on searches, then search engines might remove it from their indexing. So, it’s important to stay on top of these server issues. You can use a web crawler like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to perform an audit for you.
Oprhan Pages
Careful with loose links and “orphan pages”. A page without links is known as an “orphan page”. Search bots won’t know what to do if pages are linked to anything and all pages should have links included.
Information Architecture
Structure your site in logical, clickable “layers”. Ideally, important pages should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. Don’t bury your product page somewhere the bots are never going to find it
The idea is to maintain the accessibility of your website by using the correct technical SEO. It’s more simple than you think. The structure and coding should be intuitive.
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to Mobile-Friendly Websites
By now, in the year 2020, if your site isn’t mobile-compatible then you are seriously behind the times and your SEO will be affected. Since 2016 Google searches have prioritized
mobile-friendly sites for obvious reasons. Here are some technical SEO tips on how to make more mobile-friendly websites.
One way to improve your mobile-compatibility is with responsive web design. This means the design is able to fit the screen of any device that your visitor might be using. Set the CSS to “respond” to the device size.
Use accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to deliver fast content to mobile visitors. This works much better because it collects data from the cache servers rather than the original site. It uses its own version of HTML and Javascript.
Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and that the content doesn’t differ too much between web apps and mobile sites. It could create problems for your SEO if it’s inconsistent. Since 2018 Google has been using mobile-first indexing which means it scans your mobile pages first. This happens regardless of mobile-friendliness.
Technical SEO Cape Town Guide to Rankability
Rankability depends largely on internal and external factors. Here in the technical SEO guide to rankability, we will look at both of these to provide an overview. Both on-page and off-page elements are required for successful SEO.
In order to improve your ranking, it’s necessary to boost your “clickability”. You can get more clicks the more you stand out in search results basically. Write well-structured data and relevant content. These work together to increase indexability and clickability.
What you produce on your website needs to have a logical sense to both the user and the search bots, and this will greatly improve your SEO. The hierarchy of your website and the relationship between the pages and content is crucial.
Optimize your use of schema. This is microdata you can add to your HTML. This is essentially like labeling your content in your coding. This provides you with “rich snippets” for Google to find. You can improve your chances in the SERPs with rich results.
Rich snippets include things like top stories carousels, review stars, sitelinks search boxes, and recipes. Using structured data will help generate rich snippets. Have a look at Google’s Quality Guidelines to help you to produce structured data.
Always keep user experience in mind when designing your website. This is where technical SEO and external devices come together. Could you make your site more accessible in other ways?
For international users, you can add the option of a different language, by embedding a hreflang tag. These point Google to versions of your page in another language. You can also include a country code in the URL. These are some technical ways you can boost the SEO of your site and the customer experience as well.