How to do technical SEO in 2018
Hi there! I’m Navneet Singh, CEO, and Founder of SEO Company India (seoexpertscompanyindia.com).
I specialize in Digital Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and have often been asked about what it is and how it works.
As the name suggests, SEO is increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website using search engines results.
Search engines use algorithms to search for keywords and pattern recognition from the content on the website to provide suitable results.
However, you could ensure that this algorithm will search your website faster than the others by increasing the visibility of your website.
Today, I will provide a few technical steps for a successful approach to optimizing your website to increase traffic exponentially.
It is not mandatory to follow these steps to the last word; however, I would recommend following the key points in each step to ensure that you don’t waste your resources.
How 2018 Technical SEO Works
Being an expert on SEO with more than 8 years of experience in this field, the most common misconception I have noticed about SEO is, business owners concentrate on excellent content and attractive websites and neglect SEO.
This might be unintentional both from the client and developers point of view; however, you need to know that 93% online experience starts with search engines.
Without further ado, I will provide a few helpful tips for SEO in 2018:
1. Essential Tools – Before you start with the technical part of SEO, you will need certain tools to assist you.
Some of the absolutely necessary free tools are:
Google Analytics – Track web traffic and gain information on your visitors
Google Search Console – Measure your site performance and errors
Yoast SEO plug-in – This is applicable to all WordPress sites and this plug-in optimizes your content, metadata, sitemap, keywords and many more features
Screaming Frog – To keep a track of every technical aspect of your site.
These 4 are the bare minimum and mandate tools required for improving the technical aspects of your SEO. There are several other options that you would need to consider and these options are applicable for veterans in the business with the neck to neck competition.
# Applications or software to monitor your link health, fix broken links and errors and exploit new opportunities
# Avoid much as 404/500 error pages, faulty redirects, and validation errors
# Ranking analysis with a deeper keyword for both local and global SEO
# Constant monitoring to discover and update any content errors and duplicate content
# Spy on your competitors to compare backlinks, anchor texts, hyperlinks and many more by using tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, etc.
2. SEO strategy and Planning – Without a proven strategy and planning, you will not be able to achieve success, this is applicable here as well.
You need to have a proper vision for the next 6 months to 1 year, the status of the website for that period and how to improvise on a periodic basis. This can be easily done with a professional like me.
You could check for various options to implement; however, maximum productivity with minimum resource consumption should be your goal here.
3. Device Compatibility and Speed – As you know, more and more people started using cell phones to access online content and if your website isn’t supporting those devices, it will be a big negative point.
Multiple device compatibilities with an improved overall performance will certainly provide a much better user experience.
This is the age of speed, people are not patient enough to wait for a second extra for the site to load and they jump to a different website.
The load time of your website should not be more than 3 seconds.
Ensure to check for the site's performance on a periodic basis to ensure all the resources are being utilized in an optimum way providing maximum productivity.
4. A few things you need to avoid – Not everything you see online is helpful to you and some will certainly harm your website. I would recommend you to keep all your spyware and malware checkers updated and working round the clock. Some of the most annoying things to look out for which will hinder your site’s performance are:
Duplicate Content – A duplicate content will have a negative impact on SEO, this will be the exact opposite of what you are trying to achieve. Page content, metadata, meta tags have to be checked to ensure no duplicate content has been posted.
Broken Links – Broken links lead to negative publicity and user experience. Keep fixing broken links whenever you find them to ensure an excellent user experience.
Hacked Content – A secure site makes the user feel more comfortable, your site should not only be clean but secure from breaches and hacks. A weak security site will have a negative impact towards your Google site ranking. An automatic and periodic check for hacks and malware is recommended.
Cloaking – Showing different content or URLs to search engines and users which shows different data to search and different data to users. Search engines have an option to legally penalize for doing so.
5. Think ahead (Responsive web apps, and mobile pages) – Update your site with the latest features; innovation has no limits.
Why should your site have them? Think about making the user experience a little better, one step at a time. This will give you many ideas and some of those ideas which were not possible in the past is possible now.
6. Responsive and Progressive web applications – Mobile users increasing day by day has made applications to be in demand. You could build an application for your website to support and provide better features for mobile users.
Conclusion
I have been an SEO promoter for the last 8 years and I must say that the last couple of years have been exciting. To increase the online visibility of your Business, SEO optimization has become an integral part of web building and maintenance. I hope this information is helpful to you and I would be delighted to know if it did help you in any way.
