Search Engine Ranking goal in the first page is an ultimate plan by most of the SEO marketers. Even serious marketers would love to see their site in the first position in the SERP based on specific search terms. Great expectation obviously!
But how the search rank can sustain in the SERP that can acquire maximum benefits from Search Marketing for a long? In this purpose, here is my tiny effort to clearly inform you of the specific steps.
If you’re not beginner yet in SEO, you might know how to achieve the goal is either a hard work to keep up best practice SEO.
The On-site Technical SEO efforts are very important, but most of the beginners used to overlook this due to a bit of difficulty in the back-end process in the site.
In this post, I’m going to show you a couple of dozen specific TO-Dos to be followed that might prompt your better result for the goal of search engine ranking.
25 Technical SEO tips for Search Engine Ranking
The on-site technical SEO tips are for all about site development and boosting search traffic to your site. The actions to set the things properly within the site are an SEO campaign that starts from beginning the site.
The specific actions are located in the site’s body to systematize the components for better user experience to search engines. Let’s move on the specific things:
1. Determine an SEO worthy domain name
SEO starts from domain selection, while you’re a starter. Domain name matters in SEO. SEO worthy domain name doesn’t mean selecting a name that includes key keywords. Rather, Google prefers brand name in a domain instead of an exact match domain (EMD) or partial match domain (PMD).
In terms of a best SEO worthy site, a domain name should be selected based on:
- Your brand name - based on your product or service
- Geo-target or target location,
- Product industry or niche related and audience-specific
- Top Level Domain (TLD) .com but better avoid .biz and .us (as they associated with spam)
- Relevant content journey
- Equivalent to your reputation
- Better within two words union
- Avoid numbers in the domain
- Better to avoid hyphens
- Avoid misspelling words
- Better as short as possible and,
- Avoid number in the domain
In fact, brand signals are generated from product or service you deal around your brand name. And, the brand is a correlative vibrant to the SEO that mutually boosts the search ranking.
On the above context, the brand name is the best to put in the domain name for boosting your SEO.
2. Use a reputed web hosting service
Web hosting matters in SEO, and influences the overall site ranking as well. If your site is shared with another website on one server, it has some disadvantages, though economical option.
Other options, such as a virtual private server or dedicated server have comparatively much more rich price than the shared plan. A dedicated server is more SEO worthy. As your business is small or blogging business, you might consider the shared hosting.
Then, you can compare the factors below that indicate to select an SEO-friendly hosting company:
- Amount of features included a plan
- Number of IP Address included in the shared server
- The volume of space they offer
- Better speed in the shared plan
- Up-time and downtime factor
- Targeted audience and server location
While your effort is small business or blogging business, initially shared hosting plan from any of the below companies is recommended can consider:
(1) GreenGeeks , (2) NameCheap, (3) A2Hosting
You better to research the hosting companies with the SEO factors whether they could meet your requisites. In my personal experience, I use Namecheap for WordPress that serves better and find a real-time solution in terms of any of the tech issues as well.
3. Design your site with Standard UI & UX
While someone clicks on your site in the search engine result page (SERP), they expect to get your site appeared faster. They want the site navigation is faster too when they click on the internal links.
The visitors also expect to get your site on their mobile faster as well. These are the matters of User Experience (UX). User Interface (UI) comes after User Experience. When your site appears on the visitor's mobile, they expect a professional outlook that fascinates them for further engagement.
Conversion is a core expectation that comes from significant UI & UX. Both of these factors directly effect on SEO. Now in the competitive arena of web marketing, developers and designers know the search engines interest. They align the things with minimal coding and optimal design. Make sure that your site is designed with significant UI and UX.
4. Get Leverage Understanding Google Algorithms Updates
Google is a complex engine of content searching that includes a series of algorithms. Each of the algorithms has a specific duty to contribute to the combined function of the Google brain. Google is continually changing its whole brain subject to achieving a better ability to contribute to the users organizing world information.
In fact, big G is always on a mission to make it more info-rich, worthy, available, and useful. That is the reason you need to know the major algorithm updates of Google:
(a) Caffeine update (June 2010):
First they did for fresher results in the SERP.
(b) Panda update (February 2011):
Providing demotion to the thin content sites or poor quality sites.
(c) Penguin update (April 2012):
Provide penalty to the inorganic link-buying sites and spammers.
(d) The EMD update (Sept 2012):
Google Exact match Domain Algorithm update against low-quality exact match domain sites.
(e) Hummingbird update (August 2013):
Search result to be made based on user’s search intent of the context or latent semantic state instead of literal words.
(f) Pigeon update (July 2014):
Search result to be made integrating Local search result.
(g) Mobile-friendly updates (April 2015):
Boosting rank for the mobile-friendly pages of the sites.
(h) RankBrain (Early 2015):
A set of the algorithm that determines content rank converting content into a mathematical vector for better understanding. RankBrain is considered to be one of the major three ranking factors next to Content and Link.
(i) Intrusive Interstitial Update ( 2015):
Google runs this algorithm against intrusive popup ads that miscalculate the users' destination and deprive of users right to read the right things in the landing page.
(j) Possum (Sept 2016):
It provides search results prioritizing on local businesses. The closer sites will get advantage to appear on the searchers SERP.
(k) Fred (March 2017):
This update is created to protect the ad-weighted sites. Whoever creates thin content that contains purposely heavy ads are in danger from its operation.
(l) Maccabees Update (Dec 2017):
Which is earlier called “Fred” is also called Maccabees, a minor update. Barry Schwartz of SERoundtable named this after informal name Fred. The update refers to how is the relevance of a search query to a web page, site link score, and page content score.
(m) A Broad Core Algorithm Updates (March, April, and August 2018): According to Google Search liaison, Google has done a broad core algorithm update gradually on March, April, and August 2018 which was literally as usual part of their routine work as well.
It doesn’t show you need to bring some specific changes in your site, rather indicates to take care of overall site quality development.
(n) Core Update (March 2019):
This update is also called Florida 2 updates following the Florida conference. Broad core Google algorithm updates do not aim at websites, niches, or qualities. Here is the reason Google said nothing to fix in the webmaster’s side, it is quite Google's side improvement only.
The past broad core updates are involved in the operation of Neural Matching; it didn't target anything but improves the relevance of the WebPages and links in the search results for showing more quality that answered a search quality.
You might get a profound database of the updates in the Moz or SEJ while you Google using ‘Google Algorithm Change History’ search term.
It is commonly recognized in the SEO industry that Google updates are being happened about daily to improve the users' experience for better search. Each of the major updates is a crucial factor for you to keep in mind while you’re on the white hat SEO campaign.
5. Optimize on-site codebase
Let search engine spiders crawl your site's codebase clean, easy, smooth and speedy. Search engine spiders want to move naturally around the site through links. It watches out the difficulties and buggy issues of your site. All of these issues stay around codebase of your site.
The site codebase requires optimization while errors and backdated codes exist on site. Check out the whole code base and repair the things with updated tactics and techniques. The Smoothly crawling results better visibility in the search.
Poor UX is the result of the troublesome, buggy and backdated codebase. The poor UX makes the site laggard and stays far behind of the first page of search result. That is why, get the help of an expert or DIY, and keep up codebase of your site smoothly crawling.
6. Audit your present search ranking
Auditing your site using better tools regularly, at least once a week, is one of the best practices to keep up SEO health fit and feasible for search engines. Whether search spiders are getting obstacles in the site structure, code base, SEO systems, and security systems or not – SEO audit could show you the way to figure out.
Auditing is the best idea to reveal the errors for solving all issues in terms of the natural crawl of spiders that determine the search ranking.
A comprehensive SEO audit could show you the things of search ranking issues are:
- Site performance: Such as analyzing page size, page speed, browser caching, page redirects, and other render blocking issues.
- Mobile Friendliness: Auditing capability of your site how much it performs mobile-friendly in terms of responsiveness and viewport flexibility.
- SEO development: Auditing the capability of understanding the site by human users as well as search bot. By checking out the site page title, headings, metadata, and sitemap, you’ll find the ranking issues or determining factors in the SEO development system.
- Security: Auditing security whether your site consists SSL certificate or not. It shows you how much your practice is trust-worthy and authentic that search engines should accept your status.
A comprehensive audit recommends you to shut the front door of your site using an SSL certificate.
On the basis of your site’s present search ranking status that an audit reveals, you can develop your site’s SEO for best ROI.
7. Optimize website architecture
Make your site structure according to your type of site delivers content. Such as a blog site, an ideal blog forms its structure including the blog posts in different categories under the home page. The home page includes 'about us' and 'Contact us' pages as well.
A natural structure of a site goes with the type of content it provides. A blog site structure looks like as below
Homepage: (1) Category1 (2) Category2 (3) Category3 (4) About Us (5) Contact Us
Let your site be structured with standard flows of its content relevancy hierarchically:
- (i) Decide a structure thinking future progress of your content stream
- (ii) Spit the categories of a group of content
- (iii) Name the categories by actionable words instead of naming words
- (iv) Include the usage of breadcrumb menus
- (v) Apply tagging language for navigation
- (vi) Generate optimized permalink structure
- (vii) Manage internal link structure relating but not overlapping
- (viii) Let your internal linking profile follows a logical hierarchical order
- (ix) Avoid silo site structure that doesn’t bear SEO value
- (x) Generate a user-friendly sitemap
Site structure plays important role behind the showing Sitelinks in the SERP by Google, while the due site gets best practice SEO through out the site.
8. Make sure your site is mobile friendly
As you might know, Google is a little bit aggressive to pay favor to the mobile users to find the websites in their hand devices available. The reasons webmasters got after appearing Google Hummingbird algorithm updates.
Over 50% of traffic now comes from mobile devices, such as tabs and Smartphone. You can check using Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool whether your site goes their favor. The tool will show you a result where is your site stand in terms of mobile-friendliness.
If your site doesn’t perform on all devices smoothly, your site design should be amended by a web designer or appropriate mobile-friendly SEO tools.
And, make sure -
- Your site content is readable without zooming
- Avoid using Flash
- All content is readable vertically
- Use the link as few as possible
- Keep up JS, CSS or Image file unblocked
- Do not use content that is not displayable
- Just make sure there is no 404 being appeared
- Do not push users to download apps
- Your page load speed is normal
- Use mobile-friendly keywords
- Keep up mobile URL to your sitemap
While you find your site fixing the above things, you’ll able to get a better result on mobile.
9. Use AMP of Google if Possible
In fact, Google AMP is not a ranking factor of SEO, but an effective catalyst to get the site better benefit from SEO. A site goes mobile-friendly is not enough, Google imposes AMP to use for paying people more access benefits that Google leverages.
Google AMP is the canonical version on Mobile for site quality and better user experience. It enables the site to get more CTR, better conversion rate, lower bounce rate, and increased dwell time on site. If your site is WordPress, you could able to install WordPress official AMP plugin into your site. Then all you need to configure the tool with Metadata.
10. Optimize site speed and load time
Website load time or speed is not a ranking factor and the issue of visitor achieving as much as possible.
Website speed and load time can be optimized fixing the issues:
- Reducing HTTP requested pages they appear after load.
- Minimizing file size
- Using asynchronously loading files instead of synchronously as well
- Defining Java Scrip loading to be started after the previous one.
- Choosing a right hosting option with fast DNS
- While the server is shared, but traffic growth is high, you'll need to upgrade your server shared to VPS or VPS to a dedicated server to keep the site speedy.
- Keeping larger files in the external platform you can reduce loading speed, such as video in the YouTube or Vimeo.
- Using GZip format you can enable compression of your files that increases speed. You can test your site here whether your site id GZip friendly or not.
- Using WP Smush you can reduce image sizes rather increasing image quality.
- Using W3Total Cache or Wordfence security plugin you can cache out and increase speed
- If you use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) you can reduce visitors load time.
- Omitting the unnecessary plugin's usage,
- Keep up redirect as minimum as possible
- Monitoring mobile page speed, and so on.
Using two useful tools such as Google Speed Insights and GTmetrix you can diagnose the issues or injuries and take attempt to fix the things that make the site much more speedy.
11. Manage JavaScript & CSS Script properly
You have the chance to boost your page speed and loading time reducing the size of any resources that make obstacle. Using the tools Google recommends you can minify the size for HTML, CSS, and JS.
You might treat the needful things as below:
- Minify JS code to smaller file size
- Use minimizer to avoid dead codes plus removing white spaces, commas, and comments as well.
- Rearrange the load order
- Use async tag to the JavaScript
- Avoid useless component in .JS libraries
- make sure you use http/2 protocol
- Use CDN for prompt content delivery
- Cache your site sometimes
Let you know more details here - an useful write-up to get clarified the treatments over your JS & CSS obstacles.
12. Attempt to fix the server error promptly
How to fix the 503 Service Unavailable Errors? There are much server-side error might be seen while you browse your site. The errors might be 500 Temporary Error, 502 Bad Gateway, 503 Service Unavailable, and 504 Gateway Timeout.
- Reload or refresh the site
- Restart the modem or router
- Delete your browser cache
- Clear your browser cookie
- Try the site opening sometime later
As the problems are at the server site, it will sure revert in normal is just time being. But, you might keep your browser clear using Google Chrome History Cleaner installing in the Chrome browser
13.Understanding your users’ intention
To write your content in the blog post on users’ intention all you need to understand your site visitors what they intend. You have several ways to gather relevant data to blend and find out the users intention:
- Keywords Analysis
- What type of data they gather at the initial stage
- Specifying the buyers' queries
- Understand Behavioral trend of the prospect
- Conducting a survey asking some questions
According to a survey, about 93 percent experience starts with search engines through all keywords in buyers mind do not come online. But the above ways you might gather valuable inference for specific content writing that users find their replies.
Nowadays Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables to find out the significant data that helps to figure out the buyers’ intention to create the content user-friendly for better SEO interest. As much you know the AI of Google, as you could develop your search engine ranking.
14. Footer Optimization
Does Google value footer links? No. As footer, the position matters and gets a lower chance to have crawled. Considering load-time and crawling stuff, over optimized footer harms SEO in two ways. Overlinking and overloading the elements with unnecessary keywords.
You should optimize the footer checking through the goal of its presence rather than stuffing the things thinking garbage. While visitors scroll down at the bottom reading the blog post, they deserve the worthy navigation in optimal organization.
You might keep the simple things on your priority basis. The most common things are such as - copyright, privacy policy, contact, social Icons, latest articles, navigation, and so on. As Google doesn't value the footer links, keep them optimal and just avoid the keyword terms anyhow.
15. Maintain an XML Sitemap
A sitemap is an organized list of your site pages helps Googlebot to crawl your site easily. If any page of the list gets missed to crawl, you have the chance to force Google to crawl the page using a sitemap. Although sitemap is not a ranking factor, it matters for the pages not being crawled. But it has influence over search engine ranking passively due to crawlability.
A sitemap literally doesn’t matter if you’ve good site architecture. But you need to help Google to find the list organized through an XML sitemap. If you change your site architecture you might have to resubmit the sitemap for finding the pages being crawled properly.
Most of the users forget to maintain the sitemap with regular checking out the pages on Google Search Console. If your site is new, you must create and submit a sitemap. If you use Yoast SEO for WordPress, all you need to check the options whether things are in order to maintain your sitemap.
16. Avoid overload on sidebar
What is the purpose of sidebar stuff? Increasing the integrated contribution of the site to the visitors. What are the things you need to keep there? The relevant things that are essential for the site to help visitors. How much you need to stuff in the sidebar? You'll have to optimize the sidebar elements according to site purpose.
In fact, the wrong stuffing comes from the new bloggers who expect too much from a sidebar rather than improving the total performance of the site. Sidebar optimization helps to improve user experience as well as a user interface as well. It helps to promote business for generating leads, and revenue.
The widgets need to be placed priority basis on goal-oriented order. Such as 'about me' widget, opt-in form, social media presence, categories, popular posts widget, and so on. Keep the suitable ads that are quite relevant to the site and users find useful.
17. Make a sure website using .htaccess
The .htaccess file has a technical role to increase your site SEO. It saves site security blocking the unexpected links that suck the site information. It helps against hackers, spyware or malware protecting data privacy as well as the normal speed of the site.
If your site lives with double URLs such as 'with www' and 'without www', then the .htaccess file helps to redirect one towards the rich URL of the site for protecting the division of site's SEO benefits.
So, make sure that your site hosting already provided the .htaccess file in the system works with a single goal of SEO benefits.
18. Optimize your robots.txt file
Robots.txt file is a text file includes a set of access permissions or indications to the search crawlers. The file directs to the Googlebot or crawler which links are to be crawled you allow or not to be crawled you disallow.
Why need to optimize “robots.txt” file in the root level of your domain?
The main reasons are:
(i) Getting crawled and indexed the useful links only instead of useless stuff in the site.
(ii) Increasing the adequate usage of <crawl budget> for getting indexed the targeted links.
(iii) Stopping the crawler to crawl the fault, duplicate, or error pages in the site.
(iv) Quick crawling the pages across the site that save time for site performance and results.
You might check your present status of the file entering “https: //yoursite. com/robots. txt” in the search bar whether your site robots.txt file is optimized properly or not. That means whether the right things are allowed or disallowed in the site. As usually, premium themes are used to pre-optimized by the provider, and that looks like below:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
If you do not find the above codes in the text system file of your site, you’ll need to fix the things using same codes for your site, or something more as per your specific requirement.
19. Conduct internal deep linking SEO
Internal linking is a best practice SEO to keep up the site natural to the search engines. Internal deep linking is a practice that allows linking a page or post with another page or post on the same website rather avoiding home page and contact us page.
This sort of practice needs to be used unbiased rich anchor text excluding keyword on the click-through pathway. It helps to keep the site natural, easy to navigate, creates site architecture, encourages Google to generate site-links in the SERP, increases page authority (PA), and boosts overall site performance.
In terms of successful deep linking, all you need to have sound content around the site. Also, need to have relevant pages or posts arranged hierarchically under the main menu without silo format either. The relevancy is prior to being considered to build an internal deep link from one page to another page or one post of a category to another relevant post in the other category.
While the internal links become amounted a large number, the SEO value will reach at the sound form to create rich appeal to the search engines for boosting the search rank.
20. Allocate internal linking with lower rank pages
Although this point is as same as I stated earlier - just internal linking of SEO practice. But, it deserves a unique one while most of the beginners used to ignore or forget to create an internal link with the rich pages to poor pages.
While an internal link goes to the low-rank pages, it enables the poor page to be important to the search engines to enlist for regular crawling.
21. Detox your broken links
Make sure that your site doesn’t exist any broken links either. Broken links make obstacles to the search engine crawlers to crawl around the site naturally. That’s why you need to audit your site regularly using a free SEO auditing tool which could diagnose the link vulnerabilities.
If your site based on WordPress, you might use an appropriate plugin that alerts you regarding the broken links in real time. Without further taking time, you need to fix the broken link for better SEO practice.
22. Use Schema and Structured Data
Get the help of a webmaster or try out at your own to insert a reliable Schema markup or structured data for achieving the best presentation of your indexed links in the SERP. You might also use an adequate plugin that helps to create Schema markup.
Whether you have an e-commerce site or article, you need a schema markup system tools or code for showing rich snippet in the search page. As usual, it helps to show your product or image with review in the search engine result page that looks fascinating to the users.
Due to the rich snippet in the SERP, it influence over search engine ranking, increases click through rate (CTR) that becomes higher - about 30% more than the as usual search snippet.
23. Keep up an ideal target for Sitelinks
A six-pack site-links is a golden dear for many bloggers. Because it enables to increase much more click-through rate (CTR) from the SERP. In fact, this sort of target is might rise from them who know what is site-links in the SERP.
What is Site-links in the SERP?
Google shows additional 6-links therewith the site snippet in the search engine result page as a result of best practice SEO.
Yes, best practice SEO can enable site links your users could find with the six pack links (or at least four links) including short meta description with each of the links. If your site not yet reworded with this site-links, you might keep up more good works in the site as below:
- Create a clear and logical site's structure and hierarchy.
- Practice internal links with clear and meaningful anchor text
- Make sure the expected pages you want to get shown in the site links are well-linked
- Take care the internal links are highly relevant to each other
- Make sure the visitors love to engage those pages/posts in the categories
- Consider each of the links belongs to a good number of internal and external links
- Make sure Googlebot crawls important posts and pages and index duly
- Practice relevant and clear meta, title and alt text throughout the site
- Keep up the important categories in the main menu you feature
- Anyhow stop using thin, vague, irrelevant, duplicate content including spammy keywords in the site.
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
- Keep your site's loading speed within prompt range.
- Achieve links other than building links following white hat SEO.
- Post content regularly following the clear SEO rules
And so on.
Thus, keep up your ideal efforts of best practice SEO for enabling Google that generates Sitelinks in the SERP and sustain your site's search engine ranking.
24. Control bounce rate
There are some regular to-dos to keep checking over the factors in your site and mitigate the issues for reducing bounce rate. Such as readability development, targeting top-level traffic through rich keywords, creating a compelling CTA, removing popup, presenting the information through the fascinating story instead of only casting information, and keeping up useful content removing unnecessary things in the site.
Also, writing an attention-grabbing Meta description, and mobile-friendly optimization plays an important role in the bounce rate reducing campaign. Better to make your check-list on the game-playing factors you need to eradicate whenever you find any issues either.
25. Follow E-A-T Strategy for Google
EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google EAT strategy allows you to follow the virtues in terms of your reliable presence online for better rank.
Make sure the main content, supplementary content and page quality of your site highly meet the standard that rates might allow a higher score.
And whether quality raters could find your information available in the required pages and your expertise could also avail in the posts adequately.
Google’s Search Quality Guideline to Quality Raters is a great hint for you to pick out the actionable things what to do for your site too. You’ll not want your site fails to meet the average standard of quality. Rather you’d desire to make it worth that fully meets the expected quality for better search engine ranking.
Remarkable that EAT strategy is not for you quality raters would take the measures, this is a sort of clever hints for you and you might apply in your site what Google could love to avail either.
Maintain a GDPR Compliance Privacy policy obviously including Cookie Policy, and disclaimer in the site for trust from Google.
Conclusion
On the context of the above tips, you might have a chance to enhance your SEO acceleration for better search engine ranking through your innovative efforts. The reason, every marker wants to reach out her/his product to the potential buyers first. This increased competitive edge among marketers makes the usage of SEO more prolific and more strategic rather than as usual SEO setup.
Whether you’re a professional marketer or beginner, if you’re facing panic competition to achieve search engine ranking, or hopeless to take your product in the SERP for better CTR, we recommend you an all-rounder toolset here.
If you’re SEO novice, don’t worry - you might quick-learn from online SEO courses here or books here or can know more how to move around the web for learning SEO faster. Subscribe our newsletter for every next latest post into your email box.
Is there any question? Feel free to ask me in the comment part. Appreciate your patient learning!
