Imagine this. Someone types in a question in the search engine and you have the perfect answer to it. But if your site isn’t technically sound, search engines might miss it entirely. Technical SEO is about becoming fluent in the language of the search engine so that they can easily understand your website and deliver your content to those searching for your expertise. In this video, we’ll talk about the nine best practices for technical SEO.
Let’s go. Hey, it’s Jack from Rank Math, the one, tool, that provides easy to use SEO and AI tools, and this channel provides you with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help you grow your search traffic.
So if you’re new to us, consider subscribing. And without further ado, let’s talk about the first best practice for technical SEO. In case you don’t know, one of the ways search engines discover, crawl, and index pages is through visiting links.
So if you have created a new page on your site and other pages on your site that were already indexed are linking to the new page, there is a a high chance that the search engines will quickly find, crawl, and index that new page. If you have any pages that do not have any links pointing to them, in other words, orphan pages, then it is a good idea to add links to them. To find out if your site has any orphan pages, hover to post, go to your post list, and if you have Rank Math installed, you will see these three link icons here under the SEO details of each post. The first and second icons show the number of internal and external links added to the content of this page, but the third icon shows the number of internal links pointing to this particular page.
If this number is zero, it means that this is an orphan page.
You will have to scroll through the list of posts to identify them. However, if you are a Rank Math Pro user, you will have this option to filter out orphan pages or posts. As you hit filter, you will see all the posts with no incoming links, so you can find other relevant pages and add internal links to these orphan pages. Having no orphan posts or pages is part of a good website structure. Other than that, you also need to have a proper hierarchy for your overall content structure.
Now, there are many different hierarchies and organizational structures for a website. There is a silo structure which involves organizing information into distinct self-contained compartments or silo. Each silo typically represents a topic or category. This is Silo one that talks about politics, for example, Silo two talks about business, and Silo 3 discusses entertainment. And information within a silo may not interconnect with information from other silos.
The silo structure is often recommended by SEOs as it gives search engines a clear idea of what the content in the silo is about.
If you want to understand more about silo structure, feel free to check out this video right here. The link is in the description. On top of that, you can also consider other content structures, like the Hub and Spoke model, which involves a central hub page that links out to multiple related spoke pages, which in turn link back to the hub, creating a strong interconnected network of related content, or the Content Library Model that organizes content into comprehensive topic-specific libraries or repositories, where all the related articles, guides, and resources are grouped together for easy access and navigation. Or the topic gateway model that features a main gateway page, typically a category page, that provides an overview of a broad topic, which links to various in-depth subtopic pages that expand on different aspects of the main subject.
As your site grows, you can consider the content database model and the glossary model. We have gone in-depth on each of the content hub models in this video right here. If you’re interested, do check it out. The links are in the description as well. There is no right or wrong way to structure your site, but you should choose one or a combination of the models to make it easier for your site visitors to navigate through your site.
And whether you run a new or an established site, having a clear overview of your content structure, maybe using tools like Canva, Google Sheets or Miro mind mapping will help you avoid keyword cannibalization on multiple pages competing for the same keyword and intent. Whenever you create a new page on Rank Maths tab, if you have added a focus keyword, Rank Math will check if you are targeting the same focus keyword on your other pages. If you see a fail on this SEO check, you shouldn’t start a new page for this targeted keyword. Instead, you should find the existing page that is targeting the same keyword and update it if possible. In other words, Rank Math will help prevent your site from falling into keyword cannibalization.
A good website structure must be accompanied by user-friendly navigation. Otherwise, everything will be in vain.
A well-designed navigation menu is crucial for helping visitors interact and navigate your site effectively. If your site is a huge e-commerce site like H&M, visitors can immediately find what they are looking for through the drop-down menu instead of browsing through every other page. If it is a SaaS company a website like one.
com, where they provide different types of services, visitors can easily navigate to the right services they are looking for.
And even if it is a niche site like Fish Tank World, visitors can easily navigate to the pieces of content or categories they are looking for. Now, these large drop-down menus are typically used when someone visits a website on a desktop, but a large portion of traffic comes from mobile devices, so we should also have the hamburger navigational menus. For example, if you visit H&M on a mobile device, You will see this hamburger menu. When you tap on it, you will have a nice list of product categories.
Tap on one again, and you will have all the same navigational items as the drop-down menu earlier. The same goes for one. com.
Click on the hamburger menu, and you will see the menu items. Tap on it again and the drop-down menu items will be neatly displayed.
Then for every site, there should always be a footer menu that typically contains the important pages, the legal information, contact details, and other relevant sections. Most modern WordPress themes already provide these functionalities, but if yours doesn’t, then you may want to do some research to find some suitable plugins or themes to help you out. Now, on top of just the navigational menu, one thing you should do to improve the navigation of your entire site is to have a search function on your 404 pages.
You see, a typical 404 page will look like this, and there is nothing wrong with it. If we look at the Google Search Quality Rater’s guidelines, the link to this document is in the description.
Now on page 77, a typical 404 page will be classified as a medium rating by the search quality rater. But if your 404 page has a search function, such as the 404 page of Rank Math, it will provide you with navigation or links to its recent post, as well as a search function that helps people find and navigate to other contents of our site. In such a case, the site will be rated as high or highest on the quality guidelines. From what I know, most modern WordPress themes already has a search function on a 404 page, but if yours doesn’t, then you should definitely customize it to improve your site’s quality. Now, one tip for you, if you are switching WordPress themes, never forget to update the links on your full-term menu, especially the social media links, because there is a high likelihood that those social profile links will be wiped off with your old theme.
In technical SEO, indexability and crawling are essential in determining how search engines navigate and index pages of your site. The first step to identifying the crawling and indexability of your pages is to check your Google Search Console. To check for indexing issues on Google Search Console, you should visit the Pages tab under the Indexing category. Here you will find all the different crawling and indexing issues of your site. As you go through these issues, look for pages that are supposed to be indexed but landed here.
For example, this page, you should always click on it and inspect the URL because the error report refreshed slower than the URL inspection results. If the page is definitely not indexed, then you should check out the error category the page belongs to. Ask yourself these questions, has Google caught the page? If not, why? Is it because something is blocking it on the robots.
txt file? Maybe someone has submitted the URL to the page removal tool, or does the page has any other server errors? Then if a page is crawled, is there anything that prevents it from being indexed, such as a noindex meta tag on the page? If this is the case, You should mark it as index, or if there is a noindex meta tag applied to the global meta, under the titles and meta menu item, you should always keep this as index, or if you have accidentally discouraged search engines from indexing the entire site by checking this setting on the WordPress reading settings.
If nothing is blocking the page from being crawled and indexed, then could the page be marked as a duplicate using the canonical URL in Rank Maths advanced settings.
In this case, it is saying that this page is a duplicate of this page. These are the logical thoughts you should have when fixing indexing issues. Now, we have these videos to help you clear out your indexing issues on our channel. The links to these videos are in the description. Also, on top of just the URL inspection report, you should go further to test a live URL, give it a while, and you will have further indexing details of the page.
This doesn’t mean that the page is crawled and indexed, just that it is available for indexing.
Now, it is a good idea to view the test page and check out the screenshot because that’s what Google is seeing. Sometimes it may reveal that your page might have been broken for Google, or maybe it has some specific server errors found when Google is trying to crawl the page. Now, once you have identified and fixed the crawling and indexing issues, always go back to Google Search Console, select the Resolved Issue, and Request for Indexing again. Now, Google will send their robots to crawl your page.
Or if you have installed Rank Math’s Instant Indexing plugin and have configured the Google Indexing API, you should submit the page for Instant Indexing as well as Index Now. In case you want to learn how to set up Instant Indexing and the Google Indexing API on your site, do check out this video right here. The link is in the description.
Search engines do not like duplicated content. Hence, finding and removing duplicated content is part of technical SEO.
To identify duplicate content, what we recommend you do is to visit a tool like siteliner. com. We have placed a link to this page in the description, what you want to do is to add your site URL and analyze it. Give it a while. Once it is analyzed, you can check out the duplicate content and then see which pages have a match percentage of more than 20%.
It is normal if it is a category page, a shop page, or the homepage.
Other than that, if any of the indexable pages, such as those you want to rank for a keyword, have more than 20% match with other pages, you want to click through to see what is duplicated. If, for example, this, it is highlighting grill, which is a rather common word. If you run a BBQ website, you can ignore it. And if you click on this, it is not exactly something important.
So if there are just words or a short sentence that matches other pages of your site, it doesn’t really matter. But if it is an entire paragraph and it matches many other pages of your site, then you should consider doing something about it.
SEO Practices for 2024″ src=”https://images.pexels.com/photos/4050320/pexels-photo-4050320.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&h=650&w=940″>
If it is a legit duplicated page, such as a product variation page or a printer-friendly version of a page, then you can add a canonical URL to those duplicated pages, such as if this is the printer friendly version of this page and you want search engines to know that this is the original page they should index, then what you want to do is to go to the printer friendly page, visit the WordPress editor of the page under Rank Math and its advanced settings, you can add the original page URL in this field.
Let’s go to the main page, copy that URL, and paste it here. This will tell search engines that this page is a duplicated page of this page right here.
If it is a page with little to no content or a poor quality content that could be explained by another page of your site, then you want to add a 301 redirect from the poor quality page to the better quality page. Trimming down on duplicated pages will keep your site in tip top shape for better rankings. Regardless of what some SEO say, you should always have an XML sitemap and submit it to the search engines. Xml sitemap is a file that serves a crucial navigational guide for search engines as it provides a list of all the available URLs of a site, including the date of the last modification. It is like a roadmap for your site.
If you use Rank Math on your site, an XML sitemap is automatically created for you. You can find it by either typing sitemap. xml right behind your domain name, and you will find a sitemap index, or you can hover over Rank Math SEO, go to the sitemap settings, and you will find XML sitemap right here.
This is the sitemap index, and each of these items are separate XML files that lists all the URLs in the category. This is a good SEO practice to have different XML sitemap files for different types of URLs and group them under a site map index.
And this is done for you automatically when you use Rank Math. Plus, Rank Math automatically submits your website to Google Search Console as soon as you have connected with it. Anyway, if you want to understand more about the different site maps we offer, check out this video right here.
The link is in the description. With AI’s growing role and influence in search, it is crucial to make it easy for search engines to consume and understand your content.
And that’s where structured data or in other words, schema markups comes into play. It is not just about getting rich snippets anymore. If you want Google to recommend your content as one of its inferences in the AI overview, Google should first understand your content, and having schema markups on your page would definitely help. Though it may seem complicated and difficult to implement schema markups, Rank Math has made it super easy for you. By default, if you’re writing a blog article, an article schema will be added for you.
However, if you’re writing about a book on the page, you should use the book schema for the page and fill up all the necessary information to the best of your ability. If your page is writing about a course, you should use the course schema and complete the information. If you are reviewing a course as an independent third party, then you use the review rating schema together with the pros and cons schema. As you already saw, there are many different types of predefined schema markups, which makes it super easy for you to implement. Again, we have these videos to help you implement the right schema markups for your pages.
Do check them out if you want to level up your SEO. The links are in the description. According to Statista, mobile internet traffic accounts for almost 60% of total web traffic.
While in mobile-first markets such as Asia and Africa, it accounts for an even larger share of web page views. Not only that, Google prioritizes the mobile version of a page for indexing as well, so neglecting mobile optimization for your site is not an option.
And to be honest, most modern WordPress themes are already mobile optimized by default. So if you run a website that was set up donkey years ago, you should either hire a web developer to revamp your site or move over to a modern WordPress team. Let me share with you how to check if your site is mobile friendly. If you visit any page of your website, right-click and select inspect. You will open up the developer tools.
I like to move these tools to the bottom for this purpose because you can have a full view of the page. What you want to do is to click on this, and I’ll select this layout. And now the tools will be at the bottom. Next, you want to click on this button, and then right here, you want to select responsive so that you’ll be able to toggle the page.
You see, as I shift the screen larger and then smaller towards a mobile view, all the page elements will naturally resize so that they nicely fit the screen.
This makes it easier for your site visitors to view the page. Now, if the page is not mobile-optimized, as you shift it, you will see some elements will be stuck and become so small that no one can view them properly. Now you know what elements on the page you should optimize for mobile.
Now, not only that, Bing has a tool that will help analyze any page of your site for mobile friendliness. This is the tool we are talking about.
We have left the link to this page in the description. Let’s say that we add Rank Math URL here and hit Analyze. Give it a while, and it will tell you if your page is mobile friendly or not.
These are the optimization opportunities. It has suggested that the links or buttons are too close on the mobile device, so we can probably add some padding or margins between them.
Now, if a page is not mobile friendly, it would have failed most of these checks. Page speed optimization is another piece of the puzzle for technical SEO because Google uses page speed as a ranking factor in its algorithm. what they are looking for are the core web vitals. If we analyze WP Rocket’s homepage on Google PageSpeed Insights, as you can see, it has passed the core web vitals, which are these three elements. The largest contentful paint, which is the largest element of the page when it is first loaded, the interaction to next paint, which measures how quickly your website responds to user interactions, and the cumulative layout shift, which measures how much an element shifts after it is being loaded.
If you scroll to the bottom, you will see all the speed optimization opportunities. These are the field or borderline audits, and if we expand this, these are the past audits. If we want to understand how to optimize for an audit, for example, eliminate render blocking resources, you can click on it and it will share some solutions. You see it is recommending WP Rocket to solve this issue, and if you want to solve minify CSS, it is recommending WP Rocket as well, and many other issues and solutions. So using WP Rocket can definitely help with optimizing for page speed.
But I will share with you some basic tips to improve your page speed. The first is to have text detected as the largest contentful pain element because it is the fastest loading element compared to images or videos. Then you want to create a blank page and analyze it with page speed insights because that will reveal the elements that are slowing down your entire site by default. Then in a staging environment, you want to turn on and off the plugins one at a time and test your slowest page.
This will single out the plugins that are slowing down your site.
These are some of the tips we have shared in this video. If you want to understand more about PageSpeed Insights, you can check out this video as well. I hope this helps. In the era of data breaches and cyber attacks, ensuring that your site is secure is super important. One of the most essential site security is to have your site on the HTTPS instead of the HTTP.
Nowadays, HTTPS is a norm for all websites, and if you want your sites to rank on the search engines, it is a requirement. Other than that, site security is mostly to prevent unauthorized access to your site, and Rank Math has some features that will help. If you don’t know, hacker’s primary tool for hacking is information. The more information they can gather about your site, the more vulnerable it will be. So Rank Math has a tool called the SEO Analyzer, which will analyze your site search engine optimization opportunities, as well as discovering security risk.
Let’s start the SEO Analyzer if you haven’t done so before. This is the free tool, by the way, and it will show you every SEO aspect of your site.
And if we scroll to the bottom, here are all the security checks we do. If there is a plugin that is publicly visible, it will show here. The same goes for your theme.
If hackers know what plugins or theme you are using on your site, they will try to find all websites that have the same plugin installed and attempt to hack them immediately. Then Rank Math will also check if the files and folders on your website are hidden from others and if your site is secured with the HTTPs protocol. We have a detailed guide on securing your WordPress website, and if you’re interested in checking it out, this is the link. We have left it in the description. I hope with this, you will have a clear understanding of what technical SEO is and how you can optimize your site for better rankings.
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This is Jack from Rank Math. I’ll see you in the next video..
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