A Basic Technical SEO Guide for Website Design
As most small businesses are set to spend around $75,000 on digital marketing this year, they need to make every dollar count in that budget. Using search engine optimization is a way to pivot your page to be found by search engines, which is as good as free promotion. Search engine optimization, notably technical SEO is important in making yourself known to users.
Here are five elements of technical SEO that you need to implement.
1. Page Speed is a Major Factor
When you’re using mobile, the speed of your page gets weighed into how good your site is as a match for users. It lets search engines know that it’s optimized, updated, and you’ve tried to streamline the code base.
If you’re thinking about user experience, page speed matters as well. When users rank how well a site works for them, they will factor in load time. If it doesn’t load within three seconds, they’ll consider it a bad match that doesn’t give them what they want. Isn’t that the ultimate aim of user experience?
2. Bot Instructions Are Case Sensitive
If you’re giving robots instructions for your site, you need to ensure that you take case into consideration. Instructions in your robots.txt file need to be all lowercase.
If you play with case, you change the way the information is going to be processed.
Web crawlers, the tool that search engines use to index every site on the internet, look for files on your main directory. If you hide them somewhere else, they may never get read.
3. You Need Infinite Scroll
You want your site to be designed in such a way as to load content as your user scrolls. When they’re going down your website’s pages, you don’t want the content to stop.
Paginated pages combined with a very long scroll will help users to keep reading and staying productive on your site. If new content is constantly available, you’ll rank much higher than your competitor’s site.
4. Sitemap is What You Want
While Google needs sitemaps to be in an XML format, that’s pretty much the only stipulation to worry about when setting up your sitemap. Your hierarchy or your structure can look however you want it to look.
When you choose a sitemap that works for you and makes sense, you make it easier for search engines to scroll through your site. As long as there’s simple logic, you can structure it however you please.
5. Your Homepage Matter
Your homepage needs to have everything that you want search engines to find out about you. Because search engines look at that page first, you want your site to be ranked fairly.
You can have other sites ranked as well so long as you include a link from your front page.
Understanding Technical SEO is an Advantage
If you want to have a strong advantage on your competition, you need to take advantage of what technical SEO has to offer. When you optimize your site for crawling and indexing, you make yourself that much easier to find by your potential clients.
If you want to audit your SEO ranking, check out our guide
