Website optimization is vital to any SEO strategy. Well optimized content will make your site technically perfect and in turn boost your traffic.
Website optimization refers to practices applied on a site with an aim to optimize its usability and crawling, indexing, and rankings on Google and other search engines. Here we list the most crucial factors of website optimization.
Indexing
There are different manners by which you can check the quantity of pages on your site that search engines have indexed. For instance, SEO crawlers can assist you with discovering more on this. You can likewise enter site:domain.com in the search engine that you’re focusing on. This number ought to preferably be corresponding to the complete number of your site’s pages and less the pages you don’t need indexed.
Page Speed
Page speed plays a large part in Google’s ranking. You can use certain programs to enter all the URLs of your website pages to test their load time. If your page fails some of the test’s aspects, you’ll get details on how to fix these. If your images are too high resolution, for example, it provides a downlink with their compressed version.
Get mobile-friendlier – Google recently started the “mobile-first indexing of the web” which gives higher priority to mobile versions of websites than their desktop versions. This means that your mobile version will play a big role in how well you rank for both mobile and desktop search results.
Crawlability
You can use robots.txt to check the crawlability of your site. Robots.txt restricts pages from being indexed. You can take check of every single blocked page by utilizing an SEO crawler, independent of whether the data was in noindex meta tag, robots.text, or X-Robots-Tag.
It is important to ensure every one of your pages and different resources, for example, JavaScript and CSS are crawlable in order to not risk having your website’s dynamically generated content not indexed by Google due to its inability to crawl it.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is defined as the number of pages that are crawled by search engines in any given time. Once you’ve determined your crawl budget, you should aim to increase it. The main factors that Google uses to assign crawl budget are the number of internal site links and external backlinks from other websites. These points can help you improve your crawl budget:
- Avoid page duplication. Canonical URLs are not necessary as far as crawl budget goes.
- Pages with no SEO value ought to be blocked from indexing. Irrelevant pages should be disallowed in robots.txt.
- Broken links should be fixed.
- Update your sitemap and register it on the Google Search Console.
Sitemap
Sitemaps help Google find out about your new content once published by telling them about your site structure. Use the following points to enhance your sitemap:
- Freshness
Update your XML sitemap whenever new content is published on your site.
- Cleanness
Your sitemap should be free of 4XX error pages, redirected URLs, pages blocked from indexing and non-canonical pages. Failure of this could potentially cause Google to ignore your site entirely.
- Size
The Google sitemap crawl limit is 50,000 URLs. Reducing that number will ensure that the most important pages are crawled more often and thus the crawls will be more effective.
Internal Link Audit
Internal links help to increase page rankings. A site with a shallow and logical link structure ensures good user experience and crawlability.
These points can help you improve internal linking:
- Click depth
The most important pages should be kept at a maximum of three clicks away from your website’s homepage. You can keep the structure of your site shallow by observing this three-click rule.
- Broken links
Broken links waste ranking power and confuse people who visit your site. The majority of SEO crawlers detect broken links, but they don’t always find all of them. As well as HTML elements, you can find broken links in HTTP headers, tags, and sitemaps.
- Redirected links
Redirected links affect crawl budget and load time negatively because when users visit your site, they are taken through several redirects before arriving at the correct page. Find links with at least three redirects and update them to redirected pages.
- Orphan pages
Orphan pages are website pages that are not linked to from any other page on your site. Aim to reduce or eliminate these.
Avida Brands looks at all of these aspects of website optimization among many others as part of our initial technical SEO audit. Please get in touch if you’d like more information.