If you are planning on making your business successful in the modern era then there is no way you can ignore the power of the digital platform since all the businesses out there are thriving on the digital platform. There used to be a time when digital platform and words like digital marketing was a taboo for most of the businesses out there but as people started using the internet on a large scale and as businesses realized the importance of digital marketing, businesses started moving to the digital platform without any hesitation. But do you think that just being on the digital platform is enough?
One of the main things that you will have to focus on while running your business on the digital platform is SEO. You can consider SEO as the soul of the digital platform and there is no way you can ignore it. But the world of SEO is very vast and there is no way we can cover it all in one blog. This is why, in this blog post, we are going to discuss one of the most important part of SEO only and that is technical SEO audit.
Understanding on site optimization
All good marketers want to improve the visibility and search engine ranking of their websites. To do that, they have to optimize the elements of their website for search engines, which exactly is called on-site SEO optimization. On-site SEO optimization is also known as on-page SEO optimization.
This is basically a set of technical tasks. It involves making sure your web pages, meta tags, content, and overall structure of your web page are optimized in regard to your target keywords. Simply put, on-site SEO optimization is things you do on your website to boost visibility. In contrast, off-site SEO is things you do outside the website to boost visibility and search engine ranking.
Now you understand the basics of on-site SEO optimization, here is what you need to know about technical SEO audit
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.
It is called “technical” because it has nothing to do with the actual content of the website or with website promotion. The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website.
To understand what is the true meaning of technical SEO, let’s start with some basic terminology.
Best practices of technical SEO
Specify a Preferred Domain
When setting up your website or blog, you need to specify your preferred domain. By doing so you instruct search engines as to which variation of the domain you want to use throughout the lifetime of your website.
Let’s see why you need to do this.
A website by default is accessible with www and without www in front of a domain name.
For example, if your domain is example.com, your website can be accessed by both http://www.example.com and http://example.com (i.e. without the www).
Optimize your Robots.txt
Once you are done with setting your preferred domain, the next step is to check and optimize your robots.txt file.
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file residing in the root directory of your website that gives instructions to search engines as to which pages of your website they can crawl and add to their index.
The format of this file is very simple and in the majority of cases, you don’t have to make any changes to it.
Optimize Your URL Structure
The next item in your technical SEO audit list is to revise the URL structure of your website. By URL structure we mean the format of your URLs.
Best SEO practices dictate the following about URLs:
- Use lowercase characters
- Use – to separate words in the URL
- Make them short the descriptive
- Avoid using unnecessary characters or words
- Use your target keywords in the URL without keyword stuffing
In general, once you define the format of your permanent link structure, the only thing you will have to do is to optimize your URLs when publishing new content.
If you are using WordPress as your CMS, you will notice that when creating a new post, WordPress takes your post title and creates the URL. For example, if this is your post title “10 Technical SEO Best Practices For Beginners”, the URL generated by WordPress will be http://www.example.com/10-technical-seo-best-practices-for-beginners. This is not bad, but you can make it shorter like this http://www.example.com/technical-seo which is more targeted and easier to remember.
The Complete Technical SEO Audit Checklist
Complete search optimization is just as much about good technical SEO as it is about content and user friendliness. In order to have your website perform optimally for search engine rankings you need to make sure that your technical SEO strategy is without flaws. A technical SEO checklist and audit can help.
Search engine algorithms from Google or Bing send crawlers to your site to analyze the HTML code, JavaScript, performance, structure and more. This means that a fully optimized website needs more than just keyword density and good content for successful SEO results. Many online marketers and business owners know that SEO can be important, but technical SEO auditing is complex and may be difficult for anyone without expertise.
A good way to determine what you need is to create a technical SEO audit checklist to determine your website’s health. We’ve created this complete technical SEO audit guide to help you work through some of the most important elements of modern search optimization. A checklist like this will help online business and eCommerce sites determine where they could be suffering.
Work through our audit guide below to be sure that your technical SEO is complete. We’ve designed our guide using nothing but free technical SEO tools, so that you can get a complete audit much more easily
Author Bio
Saurabh is a technical content writer at MyQbHost a QuickBooks hosting provider he has long experience of working in the accounting industry. With an accounting background and interest in technology, topics like cloud accounting, cyber security and accounting software become his favorite topics.