Essential Tips to Implement in your Technical SEO for 2017

In 2016, the value of technical SEO went on quite a roller coaster. It was described both as makeup and being dead.  However, there were great examples of technical SEO brought to light that proved it has value and still warrants paying attention to. 

Why did people differ on the value of technical SEO anyways? Some people think that the problem lies within the definition of it.  Various definitions contribute to different thought processes and overall meaning assumptions.  If, however, we refer to it as: “the practices implemented on the website and server that are intended to maximize its usability, indexing, and search engine crawling”, then most people can all agree that technical SEO is a very important and essential piece to a company’s SEO success.

In order to start putting the best possible foot forward in your technical SEO for 2017, follow these essential tips:

1.    Check Your Indexing. In order to do this, you can enter site:domain.com in your target search engine or SEO crawler to yield a number.  The number should be equivalent to the number of pages on your site less the ones you do not want indexed. You want to make sure that the gap displayed is not bigger than you thought it would be, or you will have to review the pages that are disallowed.

2.    Keep Important Resources Crawlable. Use an SEO crawler that will give you a list of all of the blocked pages on your website.  All of your pages and resources need to be crawlable.

3.    Keep Crawl Budget Optimized. Your crawl budget is basically the number of pages on a website that search engines can crawl in a specific period of time. Google Search Console will yield you this information, but the stats will not be broken down.  For a more detailed version, use a specialized tool such as WebLogExpert.

4.    Audit Internal Links. In order for crawlability to be optimized, the site structure should be shallow and logical. Having internal linking will help spread your ranking power. When auditing internal links, check for click depth, broken links, orphan pages and redirected links.

5.    Review Your Sitemap. It is important to check your sitemap to make sure it is fresh, clean, and the appropriate size (shorter than 50,000 URLs).  Doing these things will enable search engines to discover your content faster.

6.    Test & Improve Page Speed. Page speed is Google’s ranking signal for 2017.  You can test this with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

Make Sure You’re Mobile Friendly. It is key that your site is mobile friendly.  You can test it with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool as well as track your mobile ranki