Technical Details and SEO Issues
It’s no secret that Google favors websites that provide great user experience. This is why such factors as unique content, page speed, and mobile friendliness are paramount for SEO. Besides, there are other technical issues that you may need to address in order to increase your rankings.
Duplicate Content
When SEOs talk about unique content, they refer to texts that have no duplicates on both other websites and other pages of the same website. While it is possible to use standard phrases for certain UI elements, make sure you don’t repeat yourself over and over again. Duplicate content checker or similar resources can help you identify if there are any issues with duplicate content on your website.
Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps help search engine crawlers understand the structure of your website and navigate through your web pages. In essence, sitemaps are files with lists of web pages. You can submit sitemaps via the Search Console and learn more about them from Google Search Console Help.
Robots.txt
Open a random website (like forbes.com), copy the URL of its main page, paste it into the address bar of your browser, add “/robots.txt”, and hit Enter. For most websites, this will show a plain text file with instructions for search engine craw ers. For instance, you can instruct search engines to skip certain pages, or block specifi crawlers from accessing your content. You can google a list of available instruction or use this handy cheat sheet from Moz.
Loading Speed
The longer it takes for your website to load, the more potential clients you lose. To see if page loading speed is an issue for your website, check out the PageSpeed Insights from Google. This online tool estimates the loading speed of your website and provides you with detailed descriptions of any issues that might cause the problem.
Mobile Friendliness
If you keep abreast of the web-related news, you might’ve heard about a thing called “Mobilegeddon” and the hype surrounding a recent update of Google’s ranking algorithms. Starting from April 21, 2015, Google started to give higher priority to mobile friendliness as a ranking factor. To see if your website meets the new requirements, have it checked with Mobile Friendly Test from Google.
Header Response
The term “header response” refers to a set of numerical codes used by your website to communicate with search engines on a technical level. For instance, the pages that are no longer present on your site have 404 codes, while the normal pages use 200 codes. To make sure everything is okay with your website’s header response, go to headers.cloxy.net or use the Server Header Checker at tools.seobook.com.
Redirects
Redirects occur when you move something from one place (i.e. URL) to another. Basically, you need to avoid shifting your content to new URLs whenever possible because such relocations result in search traffic loss, broken links, and other headache
Still, redirects are inevitable in some rare cases that include moving content to a different site, removing the “www” portion of your address, and altering your information architecture. Any of these tasks requires a professional, but, in case you’re a DIY type, here are a couple of resources that may be helpful: