A Technical SEO Checklist for the Bloggers and Other Non-Technical Markete

Author: Gurjeet Singh

A Technical SEO Checklist for the Bloggers and Other Non-Technical Marketer

No matter whether you have quality links or great content on your website, the ranking will not be improved until and unless your site is free from all technical issues. Obviously, these are the vital factors to determine the search ranking but if your website has any technical issue, there is hardly any chance to earn potential traffic. As a blogger or a non-technical marketer, it is really very difficult to analyze and resolve the technical problems. But having at least some knowledge of it could be very fruitful for every marketer. You need not fix those issues, that is the part of the developer’s task but identifying the same is a must. You should have some basic understanding of technical problems that are affecting your work or can harm your website in future. Go through this blog and enhance your technical knowledge or you can connect with the SEO services in South Africa for the same.

1. Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file acts as a directive for search engines. This file should be formatted in an accurate way such that it blocks only those files that you don’t to get indexed. Testing of robots.txt file helps search crawler by specifying that which pages are to be crawled and which need to be avoided. If you find that your website is not getting indexed, don’t delay in checking robots.txt file. This will certainly help you to know the technical issue if caused due to this.

How to Check:

Google Search Console> Crawl> robots.txt Tester

2. Canonical Link Elements

A canonical link element helps webmasters prevent identical content issues by identifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page. It might happen that you may accidentally create different URLs for duplicate or identical content and it becomes a great problem for search engines to find the original source for contents that are presented on multiple URLs. Hence canonical link elements can be used to determine the right page that needs to be indexed.

3. Redirects

Having a proper understanding of redirects is must. You should not get confused especially between 301 and 302. 301 redirect indicates to search engines that the particular page has been moved permanently. 302 is a temporary redirect that specifies search engines that the original page has some issues and will be restored soon.

How to Check:

1. Redirect-checker.org

2. Screaming Frog

4. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is also a great issue that can hurt your website’s search ranking. If search crawlers discover duplicate content that is replicated within your site or on other domains then it will be filtered out. Your pages with duplicate content will not be showed in the search results and you won’t get organic traffic. The duplication of content is not always intentional. At times when a site is migrated from a non-secured domain to a secured domain and proper redirects are not used then both the URLs could end up as copied content for search engines. You should also be familiar with this issue and check whether your page is hurt by any.

How to Check:

1. Siteliner.com

2. Site: domain search

5. Mobile Friendliness

Mobile friendliness is an important thing that every website owner should take care of. It is a great factor to drive a large potential traffic and to enhance the visitors’ engagement. To have a good mobile experience, it is just to check the mobile-friendliness as well. You can also analyze the mobile performance in Google Search Console as well. You can also get in touch with the best SEO services in South Africa and learn more about it.

How to Check:

1. Google Mobile-Friendly Tool

2. Google Search Console

6. Page Speed

Page speed is the important factor not only for search engines but also for users’ experience. Pages which take a huge time to load turn off visitors and hurts the search ranking. Slow-to-load pages often have the risk of being crawled partially or even skipped completely. Hence it is must to speed up the slow loading pages. This can be done by:

Compressing images

Leveraging browser caching

Minifying JavaScript and CSS

How to Check:

  1. GT Metrix
  2. Google Page Speed Insights

These are some important technical SEO checklist that a non-technical marketer should know about. We have collected the necessary information regarding this. We hope you would like the content. If you think there should be some more points in the blog and we have missed any vital detail, please do mention in the comment section given below. We welcome all your queries and suggestions.