11 Killer Technical SEO Factors That Will Boost Your Ranking | With Updated Check-List

We all have a basic understanding of What is SEO? and we have also discussed  On-Page and Off-Page so, along with these two types here is one of its major kinds you can say it’s a third type of SEO.

Today, we will discuss how technical SEO works. Why it is so important and what are the major factors.

So guys, let's relax and start reading this post.

Hope it will clear all your doubts regarding technical SEO. 

Note: If You Don’t Know What Is Blogging Go Here

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is known as one of the major types of SEO.

it is a kind of rule and guidelines via which you can ensure that your website meets modern search engine requirements.

Technical SEO refers to improving the Technical requirements of a website as a means to increase the ranking of your pages in SERP.

There are a lot of things that come under the factors of technical SEO. by improving these aspects, you can increase your site ranking chances.

Like;

improving your site Speed, creating a good user experience, optimize your site for mobile, and many more factors. 

Why Is Technical SEO Important:

Before studying the factors of technical SEO first, we should have an idea of why Technical SEO is so important? Is it worth it in 2021? so there could be many questions jumping in your mind

whenever you post on your blog, if it indexes fast, that means you have managed a good technical SEO because fast indexing depends upon technical SEO it means search engine bots can easily understand your site and this is only possible via Schema Markups

Google uses crawlers (bots) for understanding the site structure and behavior so, whenever they find a hard time crawling your site then definitely, you won’t rank in a higher position

because Technical SEO contains many factors like Site speed, is your site mobile-friendly? redirection, and many other factors so along with the best content and better on-page and off-page SEO you will have to manage your technical factors too.

Also Read: Descriptive Guide Of Off-Page Seo 

Note: Keep in mind that without technical SEO, you can’t even think to rank your site in higher positions on search engines. whether you have managed all other SEO setting perfectly 

Technical SEO Factors:

Let's talk about the Technical SEO ranking factors.

I will try to cover all these technical factors. After applying them, your site will definitely rank at the higher positions on SERP.

 At last, the updated checklist will be provided to you peoples 

(1) Create XML SiteMap :

You can say a sitemap is a map of your site. It helps the search engines to locate URLs(Links) and understand your site more properly while crawling. Sitemaps help search engines to find URLs. 

In fact, a Google rep recently said that XML sitemaps are the “second important source” for locating the URLs. Indeed, a well-optimized website doesn’t need any XML Sitemap.

If the site has its good internal linking structure then crawlers may identify all site’s content but, However, not all sites have that structure so creating a sitemap is best practice. 

How To Create Sitemap For Site Or Blogger:

I will show you an easy and automated way for creating a sitemap for your site. Blogger (Blogspot): if you are using a Blogger platform, you can easily create a sitemap 

step-1 – just add sitemap.xml at the end of your blog URL 

After that, you will have to upload this generated sitemap on the search engine’s search console.

(2) Robot.txt File:

The Robot.txt file is one of the most important files on any website. 

The purpose of robot.txt is to inform search engine crawlers which files and pages are permitted to be crawled and which pages are not allowed to be crawled by them. 

The robots and Bots which visit your pages index them, so if you don’t want them to do that and you don’t want to approve crawling privileges to search engines, you can control it via the robots.txt file.

How to create a Robot.txt file?

Using an automated tool, you can create a well-structured Robot.txt.

Search engine crawlers can be blocked with the robot.txt file, so some little misconfigured files can ruin your search engine presence.

Step-1: Go through this site and add your site link after that click on the “create robot.txt” button. Hurrah! it’s done.

Now you will have to paste the below-generated code on your blogger/Site robot.txt files settings 

(3) Site Must Be Mobile Friendly:

A mobile-friendly website always wins the race. According to the study, 70% of visitors come from mobile devices. You are responsible for ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly! Every search engine uses it as a ranking factor.

In order to rank your site on the top ranking of SERP, you must make your website or blog fully mobile responsive by installing mobile-friendly themes on your blog. 

Recommendation: How To Select Theme For Your Blogspot Blog

To test your site’s mobile friendliness go to this site and paste your site’s URL and check is it mobile-friendly or not.

As you can see from the screenshot, this tool will automatically check your site with all mobile responsiveness factors and give you the final result. You can also check your site status through the google search console “mobile usability tab”

If Google finds any webpage on your site which isn’t optimized for mobile, then it will acknowledge you and show an error under the error tab.

(4) Website Speed:

In today’s modern SEO strategies, one of the most important SEO factors is site speed. In today’s world, web pages must load faster in order to give a great experience to users.

The study indicates if a site’s load time is more than 3 seconds, then 55% of mobile visitors will leave the site, which will lead to an increase in bounce rate and have an adverse effect on the overall SEO. 

But it doesn’t mean that only increasing site speed will boost your ranking. you will have to obey all SEO rules like OFF-Page SEO, On-Page SEO with Proper keyword Researched and optimized content. 

How To Improve Site Speed?

A lot of methods can be used to increase the site’s speed, but as a blogger, I’d recommend the most effective techniques to increase your site speed. 

(1) Reduce Your images size:

According to my experience, if you reduce your image size, it will adversely affect the speed of your website. Use compressed images to improve your website’s speed. To do that, use modern image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP that often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG. 

you can convert your images into web format  easily Just go to this site 

(2) Purchase Fast Hosting:

generally, slow hosting affects your site speed. so I recommend you to purchase a fast hosting service. saving some money can cost you more in the future. 

(3) Use minified CSS:

Many websites use internal and inline CSS, but it is a bad practice for SEO you must have to use external CSS files for your site.

it will increase your site speed. for the best practice remove unused CSS from your website.

As you can see in this photo that because of unnecessary CSS my blog knowledge-shout losing its speed up to 1s.

google page insight also suggests where you have to remove your unnecessary CSS. for the betterment of your site speed, you must have to deal with CSS as well 

(4) Keep Clean Your Cache:

The cache is a kind of temporary memory that holds user and application data for faster operation. when you access it next time.

when a visitor visits your site again, your browser is able to refer to the data in cache without sending another HTTP request.

but sometimes it becomes complicated for your browser to manage cache data so for that the alternative solution for a blog is to install a W3 Total Cache plugin  (for WordPress) in order to easily manage the cache. 

I have outlined all major and working ways to speed up your website in the following paragraph. let’s talk about the remaining factors

(5) Add Structured Data Markup:

Structured data markup is one of the best practices to increase your ranking importance in Google SERPs. It is a piece of code that helps search engine crawlers easily understand your site content. 

Structure data markup also helps you to add rich snippets on your blog/site like; start rating, FAQ schema, breadcrumbs, and many more 

You must have to use at least 15 of the most popular schema markups in order to boost your rankings website. 

Try to use the themes, which must be highly data structured and must have these following schemas breadcrumbs list, BlogPosting (if you have a blog site), hatom and etc

you can check out your site structure data markup here 

How to Add Rich Snippets Markup Data Statically?

Are you working on WordPress? if yes then it’s quite easy for you to add Schema just install Yoast SEO Plugin then you will be able to add schema with a single click.

if you have a static website or working with a blogger like me then how will you add these schemas??, FAQ Schema, Star Rating Schema, Article Schema, and so on, for that, you will have to add Schemas manually

But Don’t Worry I am here to solve your problems  Just go to this automated schema generator tool and generate your schema. I am about to teach you how you can FAQ Schema. 

As you can see in this picture it’s quite easy to generate FAQ schema just select your option and Add questions. After that code will be generated automatically. 

Now you just have to insert this code where you want to add a schema. you can also create other types of schemas like star rating, blogpost and etc 

(6) Clean Up Your Blog From Broken Links:

We should first understand what a broken link is before going through the cleanup procedure. 

What are Broken Links?

In HTML, they are known as deadlinks. A broken link is a link on a webpage that takes the user to no longer existing pages or 404 pages (dead pages). 

What causes Broken Links?

Let us suppose that the linked page URL runs out with the passage of time or is removed due to any reason, then it will stop functioning and the user will not find that URL. Broken links on your site are not your fault because that page no longer exists. but it will affect your site.

there can be many causes behind the broken links let’s discuss how broken links can actually hurt your SEO? 

How Boken Links Destroy Your Ranking 

 95% of users will leave your site if they encounter a broken link or non-existing page, according to the study. 

when users bounce back from your site, there will be an increase in bounce rate. If the bounce rate increases, then the ranking will decrease. 

Google search engine considers that when a user bounces back from a site it means he’d not found any useful content that’s why he left the site. Since the content is king, and Google is concerned about its users, Google might penalize your site for it. 

How To Fix Broken Links?

After analyzing your broken links it will show you 404 and other links in the form of the table now you will have to click on “src” and you will redirect to the broken link affected page after that find your broken link and remove it from your site. 

(7) Install An SSL  Certificate On Your Site:

I can say this is the biggest ranking factor of advanced SEO.Google also declared SSL secure connection as a ranking factor. 

if you don’t have an idea what SSL certification is then don’t worry I will clear your all doubts. SSL certification Or HTTPS secure connection is the same thing. 

The main purpose of installing SSL on your Web Hosting is to secure your connection from hackers and scammers. 

When you install an SSL connection on your webpage it activates the padlock and replaces your HTTP(hypertext transfer protocol secure) to HTTPS connection (hypertext transfer protocol secure).

 I know, now you are thinking about how to install this SSL certificate? so keep one thing in your mind if you are using the Blogger platform then google provides this certificate to you for free.

 And, if you are using WordPress or any other CMS then you will have to pay the appropriate price for that.

but don’t worry now every hosting provider provides SSL at a very cheap price. If you are a Pakistani blogger then I have a plus point for you.

you can try inspedium Web Hosting it will provide you free SSL certificate and rocket fast hosting at a very cheap price.  

(8) www and non-www Issue:

Some of you are aware of www and non-www concepts but some people aren't.

 Let me clear your concept and see which one is good for the SEO perspective: a  www or a non-www URL.

 if we talk from a technical perspective so it doesn’t affect your ranking it’s just your personal preference. 

The basic concept of a non-www URL is, it is known as the backed domain, and www URL can act as the hostname There is simply a slight difference between them. www URL can manage DNS properly and hamper browser cookies when utilizing other domains.

 but there is no technical or SEO perspective benefit on whether to use www URL or non-www URL 

Note: But I recommend you to use the www URL structure rather than the non-www structure.  

(9) Use Canonical Tag To Avoid Duplicate Content:

It is a” Tag” or you can say HTML elements that help search engines to identify which URL is original Another Most important technical SEO ranking factor is canonical URLs which deal with handling your site duplication. 

Let's take an example for a better understanding of canonical tags. Let's suppose, Whenever you publish a new blog post on your blog after posting you might have to work on your post in order to rank it.

For that, you might share your links and sometimes will have to publish your content on content distribution platforms like Medium, Reddit, etc.

 So, whenever any search engine crawler visits your medium post and if it accidentally doesn’t find any canonical reference, it will be considered as duplicate content of the original site and it will affect your SEO very badly. 

This Could Be these kinds of URLs, 

• https://knowledgeshout.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/
• https://knowledgeshout.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

to prevent this kind of issues you have to use rel=’canonical ‘ Tag whenever you wanna republish your site content on any other social or content distribution site it will tell to search engine’s crawlers that this is a duplicate URL don’t crawl it How to add rel=” canonical” Tag To Prevent Duplication? just add rel=” canonical” tag on your HTML code like that; 

now it will guide the search engine bot about the original URL This is the manual method. But if you are using WordPress cms for blogging then it’s quite simple for you Just install Yoast Seo Plugin and set up your canonical tag with just a single click. Here is the complete Yoast SEO plugin Guide 

(10) Fix Error 404 Not Found:

This error is thrown by the server when you are trying to reach a webpage that doesn't exist on the server. That's why the server throws a 404 error.

Let's talk about how a 404 error hurts your SEO?  let’s take an example; when a user tries to access that page which doesn’t exist then the user bounces back within 2-3 seconds because the user didn’t find any related content.

so, when the user bounces back it causes an increase in the bounce rate. that will negatively affect your SEO efforts so try to remove these 404 non-existing pages from your site or blog otherwise search engines may slap your ranking.

 Note: This is also known as a broken link which e have discussed above already 

(11) Make Your URL’s SEO Friendly:

For a better understanding of crawlers as well as users your URL should be short, easy to read for bots as well as users, well maintained, containing your main/primary keyword Tip: kindly do not do keyword stuffing on your URL. it should be short and well maintained. 

 This means if your post is about SEO then your URL should be “https://www.example.com/what-is-seo” (this is a short and well-maintained URL) Wrong-Way: “https://www.example.com/what-is-seo-best-seo-cheaklist-onpage-offpage-seo” 

This is the wrong practice of adding only keywords in your URL.

Avoid It So that’s all about the technical SEO probably I am forgetting some of the points but the major reason and factors which will also be considered as a ranking criterion of search engines I have covered.

 As I told you at the start of the post that I would give you a surprise complete checklist of technical SEO so, here it is. 

Technical Seo Updated Complete CheckList:

 (1)  Create your XML sitemap

(2)  Make sure you have a well-structured robot.txt file

(3)  Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

(4)  Make sure your site loads fast

(5)  Add structured Data-makeup

(6)  Remove Broken Links

(7)  Install SSL Security on your site

(8)  use the canonical tag

(9)  Fix 4o4 ERROR

(10) Seo friendly URL

(11) Check 302 Temporary Redirection

(12) Add Metadata And meta description ion your site

(13) Meta Tags

(14) Fix breadcrumbs Issue

(15) Alt Tag

(16) Anchor Tag

(17) Minified Your CSS and Javascript Coding

#Technical SEO #seotips #seo #learnblogging #knowledgeshout