Moz Seo Guidelines: 10 Technical SEO Tips To Instantly Boost Your Visitor Numbers in (2021)

Moz Seo Guidelines: 10 Technical SEO Tips To Instantly Boost Your Visitor Numbers in (2021)

Technical SEO is one of the most fundamental aspects of SEO. You may have the most incredible piece of content for a hot topic in your niche, but if your site has unresolved technical SEO issues, you’ll struggle to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Hence, it is very important that you spend some time optimizing your website’s technical SEO.

In this article, I’ll explain the key aspects of technical SEO and share 10 actionable tips you can implement right away to improve your site’s search presence. Plus, I’ve also included a technical SEO checklist, downloadable in PDF format, that will help you put these SEO tips into practice.

But first, let’s cover some basics of technical SEO.

(Do you already know the basics? Click here to jump straight to technical SEO tips.)

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What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the crawl, indexing and rendering phase of your website to achieve higher search results.

Neil Patel, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of CrazyEgg, has a simple definition of technical SEO: “Any SEO work done alongside the content. In essence, it lays a strong foundation for giving your content the best chance of ranking by relevant keywords and phrases. “

Yoast’s team sums up this concept well:

In its most basic terms, technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website to make it rank higher in the search results. It’s a broad field, encompassing a wide variety of SEO topics including:

• XML Sitemaps
• Search and Indexing
• Mobile Optimization
• Website Speed
• Site Structure
• of SSL Certificates
• Image SEO
• Internal and External Links
• Canonical URLs

Recommended Resource: If you are new to SEO, I highly recommend reading the chapter on technical SEO in ‘s Beginner’s Guide to MozSEO.10

Useful Technical SEO Tips

Now that you know the basics of technical SEO, here are 10 tips you can use to improve your site’s technical SEO and improve your search rankings.

1. Make sure your website is mobile friendly

Let’s start with the most basic SEO technical tip

One of the major Google algorithm updates in 2015 was to be more preferred to mobile-friendly, responsive websites. In what came to be referred to as “Mobilegeddon Top websites more mobile-friendly web template”, several were penalized for not adopting.

Fast forward to the present day, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever.

Google’s mobile-friendly test will determine whether your website meets Google’s criteria for a mobile-optimized website.

HubSpot’s Website Grader and GTMetrix provide more insight into what you can do to improve the mobile friendliness of your website.

BONUS: Check out this article from Startup Cafe Digital on How to Make Your Website 100% Mobile Friendly and download the Mobile SEO Audit Checklist.

2. Create and Optimize Your XML Sitemap

Sitemaps are necessary for Google to find and index your web pages.

Fortunately,it is easy to create an XML sitemap. If you are a WordPress user, you can generate it with free WordPress plugins such as  Yoast or Google XML Sitemaps.

After creating the sitemap, submit it to Google via Google Search Console.

To do this, login to your Google Search Console account and navigate to Sitemaps -> Add new sitemap then click ‘Submit’.

Once your sitemap has been successfully submitted, follow these XML sitemap best practices:

• If you block a page in robots.txt, it has nothing to do with your XML sitemap
• Prioritize high-quality pages in your sitemap
• If you has a large site with over 50,000 URLs, use dynamic XML sitemaps

Recommended Reading: How to Create (and Send) an XML Sitemap for Your Website to Google

3.Your Website

Speed ​​UpSpeed ​​of the site is important. Make no mistake. If your site is slow and takes a long time to respond, Google will place a small fine on your website.

That means that even if your content is the gold standard for that particular topic, your website will rank lower in SERPs than if your website had faster loading times.

This is a technical SEO aspect that you simply cannot ignore.

If your site takes a long time to load, it can seriously affect the user experience. Follow these steps to speed up format your website:

• Optimize your site images – Use a compressed image such as JPG in most of your posts. Use a tool such as TinyPNG to further compress the image files. For more tips, check out Image SEO: 7 Useful Tips to Boost Your Organic Traffic.
• Enable browser caching – This allows you to temporarily store certain information on a visitor’s computer so that they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your site.
• Enable Compression – According to Yahookan, enabling compression on your website will reduce HTML and CSS files by 50-70% and significantly increase site speed.
• Shorten server response time -server Google recommends keeping response time below 200 ms.
• Use a Content Delivery System (CDN) – Use a CDN such as BunnyCDN or Cloudflare to increase the speed of your site.

4. Fix Your Site Mistakes By Conducting Weekly SEO Technical Site Audits

You need to our resolve on-page SEO issues bya weekly conductingSEO technical audit if you want to rank higher in SERPs on a consistent basis.

So how do you perform a technical SEO audit?

There are several tools on the market that can help you with this.

Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs are all great tools. But I would highly recommend Semrush for this activity as it is considered the gold standard in the industry and it offers the most comprehensive glimpse into the technical aspects of your website.

If you don’t have access to the tool, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Semrush Pro.

To perform a site audit on Semrush, click on “Add New project”, enter the details and select “Set upsite audit”.

Select the number of pages you want SEMrushBot to crawl and click ‘Start site audit’.

Semrush scans your website for errors, warnings and issues and then provides recommendations on how to fix these errors and improve the overall technical health of your website.

Footnote: Semrush is a powerful digital marketing suite that can help you with more than just technical SEO site audits. Read my full review of the software for more information.

5. Optimizing Links

internalAn internal link is a hyperlink that points to another page on the same website.

While internal links may not have the same impact on search results as external links, they still play a vital role in helping search engines understand the information hierarchy for your website and establish SEO-friendly site architecture.

So what’s the easiest way to optimize your site’s internal links? Moz recommends using descriptive keywords in anchor text that give an idea of ​​the keywords the source page is trying to reach.

For more information on optimizing internal links on your website, check out this comprehensive guide on internal links.

6. Include Your Most Important Keywords In Alternative Image 

Text Google can’t see what’s in an image. Rather, it uses metadata such as the image filename and image alt text (alternate text) to determine what’s in an image.

Alt text is used in HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page.

Usually the best practice for alt text is to keep it descriptive with enough use of the main keywords you are targeting. At the same time, make sure not to stuff it with keywords.

Image SEO is more than just adding alt text. Image optimization can lead to improved performance of your site in search engines. Here are seven actionable image SEO tips you can implement right away.

7. Use canonical URLs to avoid.

duplicate content issues Your first priority should always be to remove duplicate content from your site. Again, use an SEO tool like Semrush to scan and fix duplicate content issues on your site.

That said, there are some instances where duplicate content on your site cannot be avoided. In such cases, use canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs are useful when copying a blog post from one website to another. They are especially useful if you are running an ecommerce website with hundreds of identical pages.

So to avoid content duplication and a Google penalty, set a canonical URL using the rel-canonical tag. You can add the real canonical tag through the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.

Just navigate to advanced settings on Yoast, then go to Canonical URL and enter the URL of the original article.

8. Install an SSL certificate for your website

Google confirmed in 2014 that SSL certificates or HTTPS ciphers are now a ranking signal.

So if you are thinking about getting an SSL certificate for your website, now is the time to upgrade, not just for enhanced security but SEO as well.

I recommend SSL certificates from Namecheap if you are looking for a cheap, yet effective SSL implementation.

Pro Tip: While there are several web hosting services that offer SSL certificates, I highly recommend that you try Namecheap SSL certificates. They are reliable and very cost effective compared to other SSL providers.

9. Check and fix crawl errors in Google Search Console

Check for crawl errors infix Google Search Console once every week and immediately them as these are serious technical issues that can hinder the performance of your website and hurt your ranking.

While you’re at it, also check your robots.txt file to make sure you’re not blocking pages that shouldn’t be blocked.

Related: Robots.txt and SEO: The Ultimate Guide

10. Finding and Fixing Broken Links on Your Site Broken

links are not only bad from an SEO perspective, but they can also hurt the user experience on your site.

You wouldn’t want any of your readers to land on a “404 Not Found” page. That just makes for a bad first impression and the user may never return to your site.

Therefore, you should regularly check for broken links on your site and correct them as and when they appear on your site.

Fortunately, if your site runs on WordPress, there is an easy solution to this problem. Just install the free Broken Link Checker plugin.

Once activated, the plugin will scan your entire website for broken links every 72 hours. You will receive email notifications when the plugin finds broken links on your site and you can fix them quickly.

To learn more about this tool and for a step-by-step guide on Broken Link Checker,this video tutorial below:

watch Bonus Tips and Resources

Technical SEO is a comprehensive topic that should be constantly pursued and updated. While I will keep updating this article to give you more insight into SEO, here are some more tactics you can use to optimize your site’s technical SEO:

• Use Google AMP – AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. These pages are designed to load super fast on mobile devices. While Google has made no announcement that AMP is a signal for search engine rankings, Google has pushed publishers to use AMP. If you’re a WordPress user, implementing AMP is super easy. Just download the Google AMP plugin and you are done.
• Use structured data from Schema.org – Click here for more information
• Check and minimize the number of 301 redirects for your site – You can use a tool such as Semrush or Broken Link Checker (see # 10) to check the number of 301 redirects on your site .
• Always Prefer Subfolders Over Subdomains – This is a long, ongoing debate, but most SEO experts agree that subfolders rank better in SERPs than subdomains.