Anyone doing SEO for a website need to have knowledge about the technical as well as non-technical aspects of SEO. While it certainly does not mean that they have to be experts in coding, they need to have a broad understanding of how websites work, how Google crawls the websites how to interpret the various reports that are generated by some tools like Google Search Console. And of course, a knowledge about coding in HTML and CSS will help them to go deep into the technical aspects of SEO and identify and rectify any errors quickly.
The importance of user experience:
Google wants to provide a great experience to its users by providing high quality and relevant websites in its search results. A great way to improve the user experience is to create good quality content which resonate with people and possibly go viral as well. This will help you to attract traffic and reduce bounce rates.
However, there is a debate about what extent user experience actually helps in getting a better rank, mainly because good content is very subjective, and the perception varies from users to users. Though this aspect difficult to quantify, every website should pay special attention to it, as its importance will only go up over time.
Technical SEO
Many SEO experts have recently started commenting that technical SEO is rapidly being undermined by the non-technical factors in determining the search rankings. While there is no denying that the non-technical factors are extremely important, it will be wrong to say that technical SEO is dead.
You need to pay special attention to the following aspects of technical SEO:
- Crawlability
Every page on the site has to be properly structured in order to ensure that the webpages load fast and the search bots are able to discover all the links contained in the pages. Unless the links are discoverable and searchable, a large part of the website is at the risk of not being crawled properly. So even if those pages provide a good user experience, most of it will remain undiscovered by the search engines.
On the other hand, use parameters like rel=nofollow and the robots.txt file to disallow certain pages which you don’t want to be crawled by the search engines.
- Page speed:
The speed at which a page loads on your website is of critical importance. Regularly monitor the page speed is and rectify any problems that might be preventing your page from loading fast.
- Use proper Redirects:
If you delete or move any page or even the entire website to a new URL, remember to put the proper redirects in the old URLs, in order to avoid 404 errors. Ensure that none of those pages generate an HTML 200 code which can be problematic.
- Mobile friendliness:
With more than half of the world’s search is being done on mobile devices, you better ensure that your website is mobile friendly. Google has recently imposed a penalty on websites which fail to follow this requirement.
- Use Rich snippets:
Rich snippets allow you to present your pages in a very attractive manner on the search results. Make full use of this facility. Use the Google Structured Data Tester to analyze how the Metadata on your website is being interpreted by Google and make improvements to that.
- Analytics:
Analytics is what powers SEO. Install a proper analytics tool like Google analytics and regularly monitor your progress. The Google search console is another great tool that you can use to boost your SEO efforts. It will help you to analyze what is working and what is not.
Related Post: How Search Result Analysis Can help to craft a Better SEO Program
