3 Beginner Friendly Ways to do a Technical SEO Audit on your Website
Having an online presence is critical to gain an audience and potential customers for a product or service. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way a website can acquire visitors through techniques that ensure it appears high on the list of search engine results.
You can see how important utilizing SEO techniques are now, right?
An often overlooked part of SEO, however, is the technical aspect. Many know the techniques of on-page SEO like creating robust content with a good word count and off-page SEO like building backlinks to increase site authority. Technical SEO, on the other hand, pertains to the structure of the website. Your website has to perform well so that search engines can easily crawl your website and its pages to properly index them.
Technical SEO can get, well, technical. It’s easy to get lost in the vocabulary and jargon of the website building and maintenance. Especially if you’re a beginner in tackling back-end tasks, it’s easy not to know where to start.
Here are three easy ways to get your foot in the technical SEO water.
Site speed
Think about it this way–what’s the point of having good content when it takes more than 2 to 3 seconds to load the webpage? That length of time might not sound like the longest duration in the world, but I challenge you to take a timer and let it run for several seconds. Would you wait for a website to load for that long? Most likely not. You would become impatient and exit back onto the search results page. This isn’t the dial-up age anymore; we have been spoiled by high speed internet. We don’t just like quick loading websites, we expect it.
Thankfully, technical SEO can help with that. You can use speed test tools to check if your website is loading up to standard. Some of these tools even diagnose your website so you can get to fixing.
A good beginner-friendly way to improve site speed is by removing plugins that you don’t use. Having too many can affect a site’s speed, so if it’s not a plugin you rely on or use, it’s best to toss it.
Site Security
With the release of Chrome 68 browser on July 2018, all HTTP websites and pages now have the phrase “not secure” displayed in the address bar as a warning to visitors. Google’s aim is to advocate for a safer web, and an internet user who cares about their internet safety will definitely be deterred from an insecure website. A secure website can be achieved using an SSL certificate and is indicated with HTTPS in the URL. The S stands for “secure.”
There are different kinds of SSL certificates available in the market. Many are commercial certificates, meaning you pay to get both an SSL certificate and tech support. Let’s Encrypt, however, offers free SSL certificates, making having a secure website as easier and more accessible than ever.
Image Optimization
An easy way to improve site performance is to make all images web optimized. One way to do that is by compressing them. You retain the quality while significantly reducing the file size for a faster loading speed. TinyJPG and Compressor.io are some tools you can use. You can also save an image file by selecting the “Save for Web” option available in Photoshop.
In addition, it’s a good idea to scour for broken images and either remove or fix them. Just like broken links, this can hurt your website especially if your website relies on images for content like a recipe blog or a photography portfolio.
Missing alt attributes is also an issue. Alt attributes provide a text description of your image, which is helpful to search engines that crawl your website since they determine the kind of images you have. Adding the alt tag is a simple fix for this.
Conclusion: Technical SEO
In conclusion, technical SEO can be difficult but there are easy things a beginner can do to improve their website’s ranking in the search results. You can begin by improving your site’s speed, securing your website, and optimizing your images. Don’t be that person left in the dust by neglecting technical SEO strategies.
