Technical SEO Checklist: The Ultimate Guide to Rank Higher
Technical SEO is a pillar topic that only a few marketers make use of while doing SEO. Digital marketers of these days should not miss to include this technical SEO checklist in their SEO journey.
Which SEO practices don’t come under the technical one? If you look closely, indexing errors, page loading speed, and user-friendliness all come under the key term “Technical SEO checklist.”
If you are tired of putting so much effort into getting higher rankings on Google & failing to get visible results, then this guide is for you. My specially designed Technical SEO Checklist will cover the essential elements to boost your website’s search ranking.
I wanted to discuss the majority of the elements of technical SEO from site speed optimization to mobile-friendly site checking, thoroughly in this blog post. Now go through this vital technical SEO checklist to understand your website’s technical part completely & practice better to secure higher search rankings.
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Table of Contents
What is a Technical SEO Checklist?
Technical SEO Checklist is a set of SEO guidelines that ensures your website’s performance back on the web page to maintain higher search engine rankings. The major goal of technical SEO is to optimize elements such as mobile responsiveness, indexing, page speed, page security, redirection & crawlability.
Key aspects include adding HTTP, generating XML & HTML site maps, ensuring clear site structure, finding & fixing broken links, improving core web vitals, and optimizing robots.txt files. Technical SEO also includes adding Structured Data Markup to get higher search rankings.
If you follow this Technical SEO Checklist, it will guide you through the process of understanding search engines better with effective page indexing. Once you improve these technical elements, potential users can access your website easily, leading to higher organic traffic & better rankings on search engines.
Why Technical SEO Checklist is Important?
Technical SEO is the technical activities or technical practices on the web page leading to improved search ranking, organic traffic & more!
Increased Website Performance: Following this Technical SEO checklist can guide you in optimizing your site’s speed & other major activities. Fast-loading sites keep potential audiences highly engaged with lower bounce rates.
Higher Search Rankings: The more advanced your technical SEO is, the higher search engine rankings you get. The technical tasks are tricky but very easy if you pay attention to these technical elements. Better search rankings will bring you more organic traffic.
Better User Experience: Technical SEO checklist often improves the site structure, security & entire user experience. This results in improved audience engagement and a more enjoyable user experience. The conversion rate of satisfied visitors is higher.
Cost-Effective: Technical SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertisements. It offers long-term results with continuous organic traffic growth.
Improved Website Crawlability: This specially designed Technical SEO checklist helps search engines crawl your website efficiently. This helps all your web content get higher search engine rankings.
Higher Organic Visibility: Technical SEO helps to improve the organic visibility of your website. This captures more audiences without running any paid ads.
Enhanced Credibility: A highly optimized website looks more trustworthy & highly professional to rely on. This boosts the credibility of your website to both search engines & potential users.
Better Indexing: Accurate application of technical SEO helps search engines index your website correctly. This results in higher search rankings & more precise search results.
10+ Technical SEO Checklist for Higher Search Rankings
Look at the ultimate Technical SEO Checklist that is creating buzz over the latest digital marketing practices & securing top search rankings in 2024. If you are looking for ways to boost your rankings & attract more organic search traffic, you should follow these technical optimization steps below for guaranteed SEO success.
Enhance Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals of Google are very important technical metrics that measure the whole user experience of a website, which impacts search rankings. The elements of Core Web Vitals are LCP, INP & CLS.
LCP, or the largest contentful paint, assesses the time a webpage loads the biggest element on the webpage. It should not exceed 2.5 seconds to offer a higher user experience. As per the latest core web vitals updates, INP has replaced the FID (First Input Delay). INP or interaction to next paint assesses the responsiveness of the user interface. It should not exceed 0.2 seconds.
CLS or Cumulative layout shift assesses the stability of visual elements on the screen. It should not exceed 1 second. You can use tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess these core web vital matrics & improve as needed. This can result in higher search rankings with improved user experience.
Check For Site Loading Speed
Site or page loading speed has played a major role in influencing ranking factors in the past few years. As users these days are expecting a faster page loading time, the majority of Technical SEO experts are focusing on this specific technical aspect.
If a page loads slowly, extending the page loading time, then your site might expect higher bounce rates with visitors leaving the site. The recommended page loading time is 2 to 3 seconds, and the loading speed should not exceed this.
A fast-loading site keeps the potential audiences highly engaged & reduces the bounce rates. The activities you should consider to enhance site speed by optimizing your visual elements, using browser caching, optimizing server response time, & usage of a content delivery network.
Fixing Broken Links
Another major element of the technical SEO checklist is Broken links. All you need to do is find & fix broken links. A daily broken link auditing is highly recommended as it negatively affects user experience. Broken links can frustrate visitors, leading them to a dead end. These can also affect the website’s overall SEO performance & ranking.
You can get help in finding the broken links on your site with DrLinkCheck.com which charges nothing to scan your site thoroughly. You can also use the Google Search Console & Streaming Frog tool to find these broken links. Offer users a smooth website experience by fixing these links & improving the credibility of your website.
Redirection Auditing
Auditing your website’s redirections is often considered to be another vital technical factor one can not miss while preparing the technical SEO checklist. Inaccurate redirections can harm the site’s SEO by confusing the visitors. You can use 301 or permanent redirections & 302 or temporary redirections on your website to improve user experience.
The things you should keep in mind are to avoid redirect loops or chains, which can impact the loading speed of your site & affect user experience.
Include Breadcrumb Menus
Breadcrumbs are seen as another major technical SEO factor that boosts indexing & crawling in search engines. Adding breadcrumb menus is essential for large websites which has a hierarchical website structure.
Breadcrumb menus help users to go through the website easily by locating the things they need on that website. Breadcrumbs guides user way back to their journey where they started on your website. It also offers ease of website navigation and accessibility to the visitors for a better experience. For single-level websites like a blog, these are not recommended.
Add SSL & Review HTTPS
HTTPS is a vital ranking factor & guides you to get a higher SEO score. The HTTS allows your site to become a secure site. The lock icon before the HTTPS address points out that the site is secured for browsing. Google doesn’t want to negatively impact the user experience by referring am unsafe web address to users, navigating them to an unreliable site.
An insecure website with an HTTP web address needs an SSL certificate. Secured websites give you the facility of data encryption, assuring your digital data are in safe hands, and no data leakage will happen further.
All you can do is add an SSL, review HTTPS, find the security issues & fix those as needed.
Fix HTTP Errors
HTTP Errors can hamper the activities of search engine bots by blocking their entry from one important page to another on your website. Therefore, you must find these errors & solve them immediately.
As HTTP errors are unique, therefore each of them needs a unique solution. Some major HTT errors, such as 404 & 500, impact the overall user experience negatively. All you need to do is monitor your website regularly for these HTTP errors with the Google Search Console tool.
To solve the 404 error, you must create custom error pages with redirection options. You must check the configuration of your server to solve 500 errors. Fixing these errors will give you a better user experience with higher search engine rankings.
Find & Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate or thin content can hamper the performance of your website’s SEO ranking. You must ensure that there is no duplicate content on your website. One thing you have to do is to allow Google to Index the original version of your website.
You can fix the issues related to duplicate content by following some steps, including setting up 301 redirections to the primary webpage, putting no-index tags on such pages, and setting up a preferred domain & parameter handling in Google Search Console.
You can also delete such pages, but only after redirecting them to other pages.
Find & Fix Crawl Errors
If you want to appear on top of the search engine result pages, all you need to do is find the crawling errors & fix them accurately. When search engines like Google try to reach a webpage but fail to find the page, there is a crawling error.
All you can use is to use Screaming Frog tool to scan crawl errors. You can also check these in Google Search Console. When you are searching for crawling errors, you must check the error pages to check where to redirect them, identify & fix the redirect loops or chains, and use 301 or 302 redirections.
XML Sitemap Setting & Optimization
A well-organized XML sitemap allows Google to see whether your website is organized or not. It helps Google to locate your website. XML site maps make a detailed list of your Vita pages, guaranteeing that they all are indexed.
You can add relevant & high-quality pages to your website. All you have to do is update your XML site map daily whenever you add any new content to your website. Make sure your website is clean without having any crawling errors or content issues.
Robots.txt File Optimization
The Robots.txt file is a vital SEO ranking factor. This controls search engine crawlers to crawl from visiting all web pages. It assists you with which pages to crawl and which should not be crawled for indexing. If you wish to higher your SEO score, you must correctly configure your robots.txt file.
The site’s crawlability can also be boosted with a well-configured robots.txt file. This is responsible for better indexing of the site/ page, leading to higher search ranking. This the Google’s Tester tool; you are able to test the robots.txt file.
Robots.txt limits the indexing of duplicate or irrelevant pages. It also enables Google to place more importance on relevant & high-quality web pages. You should carefully set up the robots.txt file.
Include Structured Data Markup
While talking about technical SEO checklists, Structured Data Markup is another major element that saves your time & effort in the SEO journey. Structured Data Markup is a type of Schema markup that offers Googlebots or crawlers additional data about your webpage, like if it contains a product, service, feedback, rating, or job posting. Sometimes, it also generates an advanced & extended page version in search engine results, which only users can see.
With the help of Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, you can track whether a page uses structured data/ schema markup or not. You can also use free tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to mark up webpages that already exist.
Wrapping Up,
Following a well-planned technical SEO checklist, you might open the door to organic traffic & higher search rankings. Technical SEO factors play a major role in appearing your website on top of the search engine result pages.
Firstly, this complete technical SEO checklist will guide you through the solutions on how to make your page load fast. Next, I have discussed the functionality of these technical SEO facts to find & fix these issues like indexing or crawling.
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