Technical SEO: 12 tips to improve your website’s positioning

Improving the positioning of web pages in popular search engines is one of the biggest concerns of digital marketing professionals or blog owners. In this context, SEO has revealed itself as a roadmap to success on the web, even though it doesn’t always yield the desired results. But does this mean SEO is not as useful as it was once believed? Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the 12 technical SEO tips to improve the positioning of your website.

Technical SEO is one of the most powerful techniques to stand out in the World Wide Web, as long as it is implemented correctly. Check out the following tips to improve the positioning of your website by incorporating technical SEO into your strategy.

SEO can be divided into:

  • Technical SEO: Techniques related to indexing and crawling your site properly⠀
  • On-Page SEO: Creating content and optimizing it to get a better ranking⠀
  • OFF-Page SEO: Related to the links that your site receives from other websites, blogs, Social Media, Newsletters, Forums, etc⠀

In this article we will discuss only the technical part.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

Contents

1. Install an SSL certificate

Improving search engine positioning is not synonymous with introducing complex syntactic structures to respond to the most common online searches. The most secure web pages have a prominent position, like the ones with an SSL certificate. Google, for example, improves the positioning of those websites that have such certificate. There are different levels of certification, so you can choose the one that interests you most based on the size of your page.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

2. Does your website have a responsive design?

I had some doubt about whether or not to include such a basic recommendation in this post. Responsive web design will help you reduce the loading time of the page and users will stay longer because of its high readability. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly yet, you should stop reading this post now and get to work immediately, (once you’ve completed this task, you can always continue reading the rest of our tips).

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

3. Set up a SiteMap and send it to Google and Bing

This is a trick that’s not yet well known when it comes to improving the website’s positioning in the main search engines. The SiteMap is a file that contains general information about the page (including videos and other content) and it improves the indexing of a website. There are free pages to generate a SiteMap, depending on the result you want to obtain and the volume of pages to be processed. Once you have created the SiteMap, you must send it to Google, Bing and any other search engine in which you are interested in improving the positioning of your website.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

4. Increase your website’s speed

Did you know web pages that take more than two seconds to load can significantly worsen their bounce rate and / or user permanence? It is a priority for your strategy that you do not design an excessively heavy web page (unless this is essential) and that you have good web hosting. There are different options to enjoy faster and more powerful hosting. As always, your budget will decide whether or not you can make the investment.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

5. Do you dream of a greater international presence for your website? Use Hreflang

Enjoying an optimal international presence requires having versions of the website in different languages. Aside from using website translation, remember to use hreflang tags, which inform Google and other search engines of the languages ​​in which your page is available. This will optimise searches from other countries or in other languages.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

6. Stay away from toxic Backlinks

I am not saying that backlinks shouldn’t be used at all for your website. In fact, they can be highly beneficial if used correctly. However, when backlinks lead to poor quality or low reputation pages, Google may penalise your website. Therefore, we suggest that you first check these backlinks through the Google Link Deauthorisation tool, which allows you to choose which backlinks you want to use in searches. If you are not sure how to do this, visit the following links (and no, they are not toxic links!)

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-disavow-links
https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

7. Redirect the right way

Have you changed your website address or any of your subpages? Have you recently changed your domain? If so, do not forget to let Google know, otherwise you could lose many visits, not to mention your reputation. You can use 303 redirect to point out that the page has moved to another address.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

8. Create your own 404 error page

It never crossed your mind? The 404 error page is one of the most frustrating pages on the Internet but it is likely that our website will also have to load it from time to time to notify a user that their specific page can’t be found on the server. Take this opportunity to reinforce the image of your page, implementing your own design for the 404 error page to include, for example, links to your home page.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

9. Use the robots.txt files correctly

Not everything on your page should be indexed by Google and the rest of search engines. To exclude some aspects of your website from user searches, you can use robots.txt files to store this information in the root folder of the website. As we know, this can be a little complicated so try to follow the steps in the following links:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
https://yoast.com/wordpress-robots-txt-example/
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062596?hl=en

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

10. Take advantage of canonical tags (Canonicals)

Canonical tags or canonicals inform search engines like Google that your URL is the master copy of a page, thus preventing problems caused by duplicate content. These tags are highly essential in letting search engines know which version of a page they should index. Find out more about canonicals on this page:

https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/canonicals-in-yoast-seo

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

11. Use AMP

The AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages tool is offered by Google and aims to create an open source that improves the ability to load web content from mobile devices (which is already the most popular way in the world to access the Internet).

AMP contains three features:

  • AMP HTML (“lighter” web pages)
  • AMP JS (restriction of JavaScrip to gain speed)
  • AMP CDN (use of caches to expedite future visits)

It is an option that’s not yet gained popularity among Internet professionals but it does offer different options for implementation.

If you use WordPress, you can take advantage of the AMP tool from this link:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/accelerated-mobile-pages/

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

12. Keep your code clean (Clean Code)

All those who have ever undertaken the task of creating a website from scratch will be able to corroborate the effort that this entails and the large number of factors that should be taken into account during the process. This is perhaps why many forget to “clean” the code on their page. This is a basic task that can significantly improve the image of the website. To do this, you only have to remove the CSS and JavaScript from the page (store them as separate files), in order to improve the user experience. Some providers, such as WordPress, have specific plugins to perform this task automatically.

SEO Tecnical, técnico, on-page off-page

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