The top 12 technical SEO fundamentals every website should adopt

Alison
Head of projects
Tuesday, March 12, 2024

In today’s digital landscape, mastering technical SEO is vital for ensuring your website’s visibility and performance. In this article, we’ll be looking at the top 12 technical SEO service fundamentals, from crawling and indexing to video optimisation, mobile optimisation and much more…

1: The Technical SEO Basics

What do I need to check?

Ensure your website is being picked up correctly by search engines like Google, enabling effective crawling and maximum page discovery.

How can I do this?

Ensure analytics is correctly installed and you’re using the latest GA4 version, configure search properties, and verify proper indexing through tools like Google Search Console.

2: Technical SEO Crawling & Indexing

What do I need to check?

Monitor how search engines crawl and index your website’s pages to ensure full coverage.

How can I do this?

Utilise tools like Google Search Console to identify crawl errors, optimise XML sitemaps, and manage robots.txt directives.

3: Technical SEO Meta & Structured Data

What do I need to check?

Ensure meta data is optimised with relevant keywords and structured data is implemented to enhance search engine understanding of your content.

How can I do this?

We recommend regularly reviewing meta titles, descriptions, and headers for keyword relevance, ensuring they are optimised to their full potential. Structured data markups also enhance your website’s visibility and click-through rates, as you’re providing search engines with clear information about your content. This will improve its chances of ranking prominently for relevant queries.

4: Technical SEO Content

What do I need to check?

Assess the quality, relevance, and uniqueness of your website’s content to ensure it meets user intent and search engine guidelines.

How can I do this?

Conduct content audits to identify areas for improvement. You should also look to optimise content for target keywords, and ensure it provides value to your audience and satisfies search engine algorithms. We recommend following Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) when optimising your content. 

5: Technical SEO Links & Navigation

What do I need to check? 

Evaluate the quality and relevance of internal and external links, as well as the navigational structure of your website.

How can I do this?

To effectively link build, it’s important to optimise and audit internal and external links, for relevance and authority. Where internal linking drives association of relationships between pages, external linking drives authority and trust from other places, which tells search engines the content is valuable. You should also ensure your website’s navigation structure is intuitive, seamless and user-friendly to boost overall engagement.

6: Technical SEO Image optimisation

What do I need to check? 

Check that images are optimised for size, format, and descriptive filenames to improve page load times and enhance visual search.

How can I do this?

To follow best practice for image optimisation, you will need to compress images without sacrificing quality, use descriptive alt text, and implement image sitemaps to help search engines understand your image content and in turn attract more organic traffic. There’s plenty of reliable and useful sources you can use to help with image optimisation, including Moz , SEM Rush, and Neil Patel, to name a few.

7: Technical SEO Video optimisation 

What do I need to check?

Ensure videos are properly hosted, optimised for search engines, and embedded using structured data markup where appropriate.

How can I do this?

Host videos on reputable platforms, optimise video titles and descriptions with relevant keywords, and implement video schema markup to enhance visibility in search results. With the rising popularity of video content, optimising your videos for search engines is crucial for maximising their impact. By following best practices for video SEO, you can increase visibility, drive traffic, and engage your audience more effectively.

8: Technical SEO Mobile-friendly website 

What do I need to check?

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, with the majority of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, optimising your website for mobile users is no longer optional; it’s essential. Check your website has responsive design, fast load times, and optimised content for mobile users.

How can I do this?

Start by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to assess your website’s mobile compatibility, optimise page speed, and ensure content is easy to read and interact with on mobile devices.

9: Technical SEO Speed

What do I need to check?

Assess page load times and identify opportunities to improve speed through optimisation techniques such as caching, minification, and content delivery network integration.

How can I do this?

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse page speed performance, manually check for common speed traps and implement recommended optimisations to reduce bounce rates, increase conversions, and improve your overall SEO performance.

10: Technical SEO Security

What do I need to check?

Ensure your website has an SSL certificate installed, uses proper HTTPS encryption, and follows best practices for preventing security vulnerabilities such as malware, hacking and other security issues.

How can I do this?

Website security is paramount for protecting user data, maintaining trust and preserving search engine rankings. This is why we recommended regularly and thoroughly updating software and plugins, implementing strong passwords, and using security monitoring tools to detect and address potential threats.

11: Technical SEO International & Multilingual Sites

What do I need to check?

Firstly, this only applies to websites that are optimised for other countries and languages. Start by ensuring proper implementation of hreflang annotations, optimise content for international audiences, address any potential duplicate content issues and avoid automatic redirection.

How can I do this?

Expanding your website’s reach to international audiences requires careful attention to technical SEO considerations. Use hreflang tag testing tools to indicate language and regional variations of your content, create localised versions of your website, and monitor international search performance, to attract global traffic and improve user experience.

12: Technical SEO Backlinks (Off-Page)

What do I need to check?

Evaluate the quality, relevance, and diversity of backlinks pointing to your website, and identify opportunities for building new backlinks through outreach and content marketing.

How can I do this?

Backlinks remain a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms, signalling trust and authority to search engines. Use tools like Moz to analyse your backlink profile, disavow spammy links, and develop a backlink acquisition strategy. You should also ensure that your backlinks don’t violate Google Guidelines, which can be manually checked.

By checking and maintaining these 12 technical SEO service fundamentals throughout the lifecycle of your website, you can ensure your website is in good health and you’re providing the best user experience possible. From optimising your website for better visibility, a faster user experience to improved search engine rankings, a consistent technical SEO strategy is essential for your business.

Need help implementing these strategies or have questions about technical SEO? Get in touch with us for expert guidance and support.

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Want to know more about the technical SEO fundamentals and how to implement them? Get in touch with us today. 
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