3 Technical SEO Tips To Boost Website Traffic in No Time

The SEO industry is constantly changing, and whilst we all would love to be able to stay up-to-date with everything that's happening, it's simply not possible. That's why we've put together a quick round up of what we feel are the most important technical SEO tips for website owners on the go. From keeping your site lightweight and mobile friendly, to keeping your site crawlable and indexable, there are some efficient ways you can ensure you're not putting your business at risk of Google penalties!

1. Keep your site's weight down to ensure it loads quickly

Your website is a place where your customers can get information about you and your business. It’s also a place where potential customers can get to know you and your business before they make a decision about whether or not to do business with you. If your site is too slow to load, then you’re going to lose customers. If your website is slow to load on mobile devices, you’re going to lose customers.

This year has seen the launch of some amazing new developments in the world of mobile technology. Researchers at the University of Durham found that mobile users spend up to 26% more time on websites and can spend up to 62% longer on a mobile website than desktop users. And this research only covers users browsing on mobile devices. That means the potential for a further 32% of people could be losing out if their mobile sites aren’t fast enough to cope with the demands of this increasingly mobile-obsessed market. So let's get into some of the metrics to see where you might be leaking revenue. Aim to establish a quick snapshot of the characteristics of your site to help you decide whether it’s too slow to load on a mobile device, or whether it’s optimized well enough for a mobile users to see it in the first place!

The speed of your website comes down to a few factors. Firstly, how many scripts are being loaded into your site. Google recommends loading scripts from a CDN (content delivery network) to aid page speed. Secondly, the make-up of your hosting provider. Are they lightning fast or predominantly floating servers? A fast hosting provider is going to be more than capable of getting your website up and running, and they’re going to be able to apply more of a discount on bandwidth charges. But think about any points where your site has to transition from an internal resource (files, images, videos) into an external resource (the user), and gives websites disproportionate time to get that off the ground.

2. Use a mobile-friendly design to help your audience find and use your site on their phones

It’s important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly because Google has been penalizing sites that aren’t for mobile users. Mobile-friendly sites are easier to use and load faster because they’re designed to be responsive to whichever device your audience is using to access your website.

Website performance is fundamental to all Google algorithms and page load times are one of the fastest ways to show Google that you’re not as fast as you could be. To try and make your site load faster, it’s essential to make extra sure that you’re optimizing your CMS and laying bare with the possible changes that could occur depending upon your particular site.

Make sure your website allows for spiders to crawl all areas of your website. Many CMS’ offer the ability to allow users to choose a crawl rate for non-HTML content. Linkscape gives a graphic breakdown for different content folders and ensures that the crawler will crawl them at a standard rate for all users. There are so many things to consider when making a website that people trust. The more reasons you can give for a web visitor to trust your website at any given point goes a long way to maintaining the type of trust that Google is placing on websites.

3. Make sure search engines can crawl and index all of your website pages

If you want your website to be found online, you need to make sure search engines can find and crawl all of your website pages. According to Google, they don’t crawl content within Flash or Java, so you’ll need to make sure that all of your website content is visible to search engines. Sure, if you’re running a photography site this won't be much of an issue! Google uses our photos to index so all of our photos are easily discoverable. However, if you have more advanced layouts such as maps, sections, or category pages, containing dynamic content, Google Images may not be responsive. It’s recommended you only use Google’s synthetic images to help your site be indexed — they are made with a high-quality image and are compatible with the web standards.

Creating dynamic site content isn’t as complicated as you might think — using Yoast SEO makes it a very simple process. Yoast SEO automates the process of writing, optimizing, and publishing your site’s optimal content so it’s always at the top of Google and optimized for competitiveness.

ISEEO looks at two things when crawling your site: the text and links in the body of your site, and the search queries. If Google saw it’s index was 100%, I guarantee it would be blacklisted! Just like an index of 300,000 results means the search engines are super confident with your site — but where you rank is simply a matter of luck. Indexing is a complicated process but it’s 100% possible! If Google is failing to find pages on your site, it’s simply because Google can’t tell them apart. Use your own tools — degree equations, static site generators, and Google magnet links — put them in your URLs and watch as your site crawls easier and faster.

It's important that you keep up with the latest trends in SEO, but there are also some things you can't afford to ignore, like getting a mobile-friendly web design or making sure search engines can crawl and index every page on your website. Through the growth of technology within the SEO industry, there’s come a point where SEO tools are becoming increasingly powerful. Today, it’s become easy to build Google My Business (GMB) profiles for your website, Google Search Console (formerly known as Search Console) reports for each page of your website, as well as other features like SEO Community Hubs. All of these tools have the potential to give your website a massive boost in rankings, so if you don’t use them or can’t justify their cost, it could be time for an update.

Rich snippets are essentially strings of text in your web pages that help search engines understand what specific website you’re on. Allowing search engines to understand how strong your content is and taking advantage of that is hugely beneficial for SEO. From getting a quick snapshot of your pages’ traffic, to fixing a site that isn’t optimized for mobile devices, understanding your rich snippets will make all the difference.

Each month Google updates its spider lists. The longer spiders build a database of websites and crawl them as necessary until they find something of interest. The shorter spiders pick up webpages and index them, unaware that such pages exist. This means that since a longer spider has to index all websites, they may return pages that aren’t optimized for mobile devices. During the crawling process, pages that sit outside of the index becomes “passive” content and can stay on the page.

It's important that you keep up with the latest trends in SEO, but there are also some things you can't afford to ignore, like getting a mobile-friendly web design or making sure search engines can crawl and index every page on your website. If you want to learn more about SEO or get started with us check out our SEO services page.

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