Technical optimization of the site - bringing the site to the TOP-10 PS

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Website technical optimization  refers to website and server optimization, which helps search engine spiders crawl and index your site more efficiently (to improve organic rankings).

The content of the article:

• What is Technical Website Optimization or “Technical SEO”?
• Why technical website optimization is important for SEO promotion?
• Technical website optimization main activities
• Use an SSL certificate
• Make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices
• Speed up your site
• Fix duplicate content issues
• Create an XML Sitemap
• Consider enabling AMP
• Add structured data markup to your site
• Register your site in Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster

What is Technical Website Optimization or “Technical SEO”?

Technical search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the tactics of building and optimizing a website so that search engines can easily crawl, index, and display it. Technical SEO is just one part of the whole SEO practice.

Most marketers and business owners use technical SEO to improve their website's chances of ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why technical website optimization is important for SEO promotion?

You can host the most engaging and thoughtful content in the world on your website—the kind of content that converts casual users into customers immediately. But if search engines can't properly crawl and index your site, your efforts will be wasted. This is why technical optimization is so important.

Think of it as trying to sell something of value. To see if your site is well optimized, you need to conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit.

Technical website optimization main activities

Search engines prioritize websites in their search results that exhibit certain technical characteristics — such as a secure connection, responsive design, or fast loading times — website technical optimization is the work you need to do to make your website do that.

Below you will find a checklist of important steps you can take to make sure your technical website optimization is up to par. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that the security and structure of your site matches the expectations of search engine algorithms and is rewarded accordingly in search results.

Use an SSL certificate

Secure Sockets Layer - SSL is a security technology that creates an encrypted connection between a web server and a browser. You can identify a site using SSL quite easily: a website's URL starts with "https://" not "http://".

In 2014, Google announced that they wanted to see "HTTPS everywhere" and that secure HTTPS websites would favor insecure websites in search results.

So it makes sense, where possible, to secure your site - this can be done by installing an SSL certificate on your website, although most of the leading website builders now enable SSL by default.

Make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices

A "responsive" website design adjusts automatically so that it can be easily viewed and read on any device. Google is clearly aware of the fact that having a responsive site is considered by its algorithms as a very important ranking signal. And with Google's introduction of a mobile-first approach to content indexing, a responsive website has become more important than ever.

Therefore, it makes sense to make sure that your website is fully responsive and will display in the best possible format for mobile, tablet or desktop users.

Speed up your site

Search engines prefer fast-loading sites: page speed is considered an important ranking signal.

There are several ways to speed up your website:

• Use fast hosting.
• Use a fast DNS provider ("domain name system")
• Minimize "HTTP Requests" - Minimize the use of scripts and plugins.
• Use a single CSS style sheet (the code that is used to tell the website browser how to display your website) instead of multiple CSS style sheets or inline CSS.
• Make sure your image files are as small as possible (but not too pixelated).
• Compress your web pages (this can be done with a tool called GZIP ).
• Minify your site code - Get rid of unnecessary whitespace, line breaks, or indentation in HTML, CSS, and Javascript (see Google's Minify Resources page for help on this).

Fix duplicate content issues

Duplicate content can confuse users (and search engine algorithms as well); it can also be used to try and manipulate search rankings or get more traffic.

As a result, search engines are not interested in this, and Google and Bing are advising webmasters to fix any duplicate content issues they find.

You can fix duplicate content issues by doing the following:

1. Preventing your CMS from publishing multiple versions of a page or publication (for example, by disabling session IDs when they are not vital to your website's functionality, and getting rid of print versions of your content).
2. Using the canonical link element to let search engines know where the "primary" version of your content is located.

Create an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that helps search engines understand your website as they crawl it - you can think of it as a kind of "search roadmap" telling search engines exactly where each page is located.

It also contains useful information about every page on your site, including:

• when the page was last modified;
• what is its priority on your site;
• how often it is updated.

In Bigcommerce, your XML site is generated automatically; if you are using a different platform, you may need to use a sitemap generator to generate it.

Consider enabling AMP

AMP is a Google-backed project that aims to speed up the delivery of content to mobile devices through the use of custom code known as AMP HTML.

AMP versions of your web pages load very quickly on mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code to the bare bones, leaving text, images, and videos intact but disabling scripts, comments, and forms.

Because they load so quickly, AMP versions of pages are much more likely to be read and shared by your users, which increases wait times and the number of backlinks pointing to your content—all good things from an SEO standpoint. On top of that, Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in prominent carousels in search results, giving you an important advantage in search.

Add structured data markup to your site

Structured data markup is code that you add to your website to help search engines better understand its content. This data can help search engines index your site more efficiently and provide more relevant results.

In addition, structured data improves search results by adding "rich snippets" - for example, you can use structured data to add stars to reviews; product prices; or information about the reviewer (example below).

Because they are more visually appealing and immediately highlight useful information to users, these rich results can increase your click-through rate (CTR) and generate additional traffic to your site. Since sites with higher CTR results are generally considered to be more preferred by search engines, it's worth making the effort to add structured data to your site.

Register your site in Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster

Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster are free tools from Google and Yandex, respectively, that allow you to submit your website to their search engines for indexing.

When you're ready to launch your website, you should submit its XML sitemap (see above) to both Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools so they can crawl your new site and start displaying results from it in the search results.

These services also allow you to monitor your site's overall performance from a search engine perspective - other things you can do with these tools include:

• mobile usability testing of your site;
• the presence of redirects on the site;
• access to search analytics;
• viewing backlinks to your site;
• disavowing spam links;
• Checking AMP and Turbo pages;

and much more besides this.

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