A Crash Course on Technical SEO: Part 1
The best content strategy and the most beautiful, user-friendly website won’t matter if Google can’t crawl, index, and understand what it’s trying to say. Technical SEO is the core of a good search strategy but is also one of the most difficult for most SEOs to master. Here are a few tips to help your website find technical SEO success.
Make Critical Content Easy to Understand
A common theme from Carroll Consulting Services is that a website can’t rank for what it doesn’t talk about. With that in mind, it is equally important to present critical messaging front-and-center, requiring no kind of interaction to access, in plain HTML and CSS.
Most SEOs strongly recommend that all content that you want to rank for be presented in plain text and HTML. It is possible that search engines will process and rank a website for JavaScript or other post-load content methods, but I prefer not to rely on a “maybe” with indexation. There is little certainty in SEO, but building content in the most basic format as possible gets us close.
Website commonly fall into the trap of prioritizing design over a search engine’s ability to crawl a site, placing important copy in images or behind an interactive element. In doing so, content is hidden or won’t be prioritized, negatively affecting the ranking capability of the page.
A common theme from Carroll Consulting Services is that a website can’t rank for what it doesn’t talk about. With that in mind, it is equally important to present critical messaging front-and-center, requiring no kind of interaction to access, in plain HTML and CSS.
Aim to Improve Crawlability
Websites rely on search engine crawlers accessing, processing, and understanding the information on each page. Google still relies on links to identify new content to crawl, which makes the practice of interlinking very important to a website’s long-term success.
A basic search on SEO best practices will show that links are among the most basic tools available in an SEO’s arsenal, but it quickly becomes an overlooked factor as website continues to grow and change.
Each page on a website should have at least one link pointing to it, from the main navigation, body copy, or cross-linking between products and services. That may be enough for small business with a handful of products to offer, but becomes a daunting challenge once we talk about thousands of pages and transforming inventories.
SEOs need to create an organized cross-linking strategy that unifies similar topics and content themes, while still supporting the deeper content that something like a main navigation would navigate people directly to. Besides raising awareness to search engines about other pages, cross-linking also helps website visitors easily access related information, which will help lead to a purchase decision.
As cross-linking helps raise awareness of the pages available on a website, a clearly organized page hierarchy helps users and search engines understand the context and relationship of pages to each other at the URL level.
Group URLs for Maximum Efficiency
A website’s URL structure does more than communicate the location of a web page on the server. It provides context about the key topic of a page, what other content it is related to, and how specific the content will be to a topic. Creating a URL structure with a clear hierarchy which groups similar content can be the difference between ranking or not.
For example, imagine a website with two product categories and multiple products:
example.com/category-1
example.com/category-1-product-1
example.com/category-1-product-2
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-2-product-1
When Google accesses these five pages, the URL structure is inferring that they are all equal weight, and will place roughly the same ranking weight on each page.
Now, let’s take the same group of pages and optimize them with an SEO-friendly parent-child URL structure:
example.com/category-1
example.com/category-1/product-1
example.com/category-1/product-2
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-2/product-1
When Google crawls this new site structure, there will be a clear understand that all content within the /category-1 directory is related to each other, and search engines will also pass some of the value of the products in this category to each other. This structure shows that products are children of their respective categories. This helps Google understand the relationship between content and will directly influence what kind of content on a website will rank.
Stay tuned for A Crash Course on Technical SEO: Part 2