Whether you are a business owner, a website developer, or an SEO specialist, it’s important to learn the basics of technical SEO. Even if you aren’t the one implementing these techniques, knowing the purpose of what it does and why it works is imperative to achieving successful SEO results for your website.
1. Meta Tags
Meta tags help to describe page content. Every page on your website can have meta, and you can customize properties such as the meta title and the meta description. Although these aren’t visible to the user visiting your website, it is definitely visible by search engines.
Your meta title is the title of your page and you typically want to include the name of your website and/or business. Your meta description is a short snippet that describes what that entire page is about. These very commonly show up in search results to users so having an interesting and informational meta description has a huge potential to increase your click-through-rate.
website coding of meta title & description
how the coding appears in a Google search result
2. URL Structure
Similar to how every page has meta properties, every page also has a unique URL. Make sure that you take the time to customize these URLs before putting them live in your website. For instance, you do not want to leave prepopulated page IDs.
www.yourwebsite.com/home.asp?pageid=1234
www.yourwebsite.com/clearance-sale/blue-cotton-sweater
In the example above, the second, customized URL gives your customers (and search engines) much more detail about the page. From the URL alone, we know that the page is about a blue cotton sweater that is being offered at a discounted price whereas we know almost nothing about the first URL.
Also, remember that hyphens act as spaces between words. Typically, search engines have not treated underscores as spaces so when in doubt, use a hyphen! Even Matt Cutts says so.
www.yourwebsite.com/contact_us
www.yourwebsite.com/contact-us
3. Use of Canonical
Let’s say you have multiple pages that have duplicate content. This is typically common when you create categories with the same items listed, when you publish content outside of your own website, and for taking care of dynamic URLs. You come to the conclusion that there is no reason to redirect them without causing a massive headache, but you do not want to suffer a search engine penalty. Here’s where setting a canonical URL tag can fix that problem.
What you want to do is pick pick one page as the canonical. This tells search engines to treat that URL as the preferred version over the other URLs. Additionally, it is almost always better to use absolute URLs rather than relative ones in your code:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”/seo/what-is-seo” />
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.yourwebsite.com/seo/what-is-seo” />
To learn more about canonicals and how to properly set them, Google has more information here.
4. Proper Redirects
Whether you are moving one page to a new URL on the same domain or migrating your website to an entirely new domain, you want to make sure that every single URL is redirected properly. This is extremely important to preserving all of your SEO efforts that you’ve gained so far.
Make sure you (or your website developer) are using 301 redirects. This is a signal that the page has permanently moved so whenever people visit the old URL, it will automatically redirect them to the new URL while keeping 90-99% of the SEO link juice. If you are moving your entire website, make sure to individually redirect every page to its closest related, new page rather than pointing all of the pages to the home page. Once you are done writing your redirects on the backend, double check them on the live website to make sure that the old URL is in fact redirecting and not giving a 404 error.
website1.com/red-shoes → website2.com
website1.com/red-shoes → website2.com/red-shoes
5. Robots.txt File
Lastly, check your robots.txt file. This is placed at the root of your domain, and it lets search engine spiders know how to access your website files and directories. If there are certain ones that you don’t want indexed, you can use your robots.txt file to specify those permissions. This is useful for disallowing directories with sensitive information and duplicate content.
Not sure if you have one? Fortunately, it can be found in the exact same place on every single website. Just type in your URL and add /robots.txt to the end of it like so: www.yourwebsitehere.com/robots.txt
Be extremely careful when editing your robots.txt file. If you accidentally use the wrong syntax, you may be blocking your entire site from search engines. You can learn more here about how to test your file.
Remember, as a business owner, even if you aren’t implementing these techniques, knowing the basics behind them can help you navigate the different aspects of what your website team can and should fulfill for you.
About the Author
Jennilyn Adefuin is the SEO Director at OMNI Online Solutions. With a passion for data and strategy planning, she oversees optimization best practices and technical performance for our clients.
The post 5 Ways to Use Technical SEO to Your Advantage appeared first on OMNI Online Solutions.
