Reasons why you still can’t rank your website on top of search engines
There is one thing that kills your ranking on search engines. It is something you’ve already heard about, but not giving much attention to that. Let’s see what it is.
On page, off page and technical SEO are the strong pillars of search engine optimization. But due to some reasons, one of them is not getting enough attention as it should, and it is none other than the technical aspects of search engine optimization.
Importance of technical SEO
Unlike on page and off page activities, technical SEO handles things related to crawling, indexing, redirections, page responsiveness, speed, mobile friendliness, etc.. Let’s talk more about it.
- Your website must be crawlable and Indexable
Your great and unique content is useless if a search engine can’t crawl and index the corresponding page. Let’s begin with the robots.txt file, which is the first thing a web-crawler looks for when it comes to a website. Robots.txt tells web-crawler software which parts of the site should or shouldn’t be crawled. A robots.txt file can be checked by adding ‘/robots.txt’ at the end of the domain name.
Next, make sure that those crawled pages are indexed or not. Check this by analyzing coverage report in Google search console.
There we can see the status of all pages on our website. It also provides details such as errors- like redirects or 404s, indexed pages, pages indexed with a warning, excluded pages according to robots.txt, indexability, indexability status, etc.
- Check sitemap
Just like the name suggests, it is a map of the website to Google and other search bots. To make a perfect sitemap
- It must be formatted in an XML document
- Follow XML sitemap protocol
- Include only canonical versions of URLs
- Update sitemap accordingly when updating or creating new pages
- Mobile friendliness of your website
57% of Global Internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. So your website must be mobile friendly to rank high on Google. For this purpose, Google provides a free tool named Mobile-Friendly Test that can be used to check mobile friendliness and responsiveness of the website. You should also check with your smartphone to see if everything works properly.
- Page speed
In 2019, Google gives more importance to page speed and user-friendliness. For this purpose, use PageSpeed Insights which is a free tool by Google. It provides a score on mobile and desktop devices according to page speed and gives suggestions to improve page speed as well.
Google provides another free tool to get an in-depth analysis of your website exclusively on the mobile platform. It is called Test My Site and has features like page loading speed on different network connections such as 3G or 4G, Customized fix for pages, and about the impact on revenue based on site speed.
Technical SEO is a profound topic if you dive deep into it. Above given tips can be used as a basis to start things before moving onto to advanced SEO topics.
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