Made by – Vainktesh Navin Sharma

A. When setting up your website or blog, you need to
specify your preferred domain. By doing so you
instruct search engines as to which variation of the
domain you want to use throughout the lifetime of
your website.

1) First you need to register with Google Webmaster tools
and verify all variations of your website i.e. both
http://www and http://
2) Note: If you have https enabled, then you need to add and
verify both https://www and https://
3) Then you need to set your preferred domain in the SITE
SETTINGS option for all variations.
4) Next, you need to do the same on your CMS. If you are
using WordPress you can do this under GENERAL /
SETTINGS.

1) Robots.txt is a text file residing in the root directory of
your website that gives instructions to search engines as
to which pages of your website they can crawl and add to
their index ,or which pages they can’t crawl.
2) The format of this file is very simple and in the majority of
cases, you don’t have to make any changes to it.
3) What is important though is to check and ensure that
there are no false blockings that will discourage search
engines crawlers from indexing your website.

Next item in your technical SEO audit list is to revise the URL
structure of your website. By URL structure we mean the
format of your URLS.
Best SEO practices dictate the following about URLS:
1. Use lowercase characters
2. Use – to separate words in the URL
3. Make them short the descriptive
4. Avoid using unnecessary characters or words
5. Use your target keywords in the URL without keyword
stuffing

For example, if this is your post title “10 Technical SEO Best
Practices For Beginners”, the URL generated by WordPress
will be http://www.example.com/10-technical-seo-best-
practices-for-beginners.
This is not bad, but you can make it shorter like
this http://www.example.com/technical-seo which is more
targeted and easier to remember.

The structure of a website is a very important SEO factor for many
reasons.
1. A big mistake many webmasters make is that in their effort
to optimize their websites for conversions, they forget about
navigation and site structure and they end up damaging their SEO.
2. In the past, it was thought that archive pages or multiple category
pages could hurt your SEO but this is a bad SEO practice.
3. In addition, as stated by Google (see screenshot below from
their guidelines), a well-defined structure helps webmasters pin-point
to Google the important content of a website, something that will
greatly help in pushing higher in rankings the pages that really
matter.

1) A breadcrumb menu is a set of links at the top or bottom
of a page that allows users to navigate to a previous page
(usually the category page) or to the home page of a
website.
2) A breadcrumb menu serves two main purposes: it helps
users navigate a website easily without having to press
the back button on their browsers and it gives another
hint to search engines about the structure of a website.

In simple terms, structured data is code you can add to
your web pages that is visible to search engine crawlers
and helps them understand the context of your content.
It’s a way to describe your data to search engines in a
language they can understand.

What is the benefit of using structured data? It can
help you enhance the presentation of your listings in the
SERPS either through featured snippets, knowledge
graph entries, etc and increase your CTR.
What are the uses of structured data? There are
many ways you can use structured data to describe
your content. The most popular are: articles, recipes,
events, job posting, local business, and more. You can
view the complete list here.

A 404 page is shown to the users when the URL they visited does
not exist on your website. Maybe the page was deleted, the URL
was changed or they mistyped the URL in their browsers.
What is an optimized 404 page? An optimized 404 page should:
1) Have the same structure and navigation menus as your
website
2) Tell visitors in a friendly language that they page they are
looking for is no longer available
3) Give them alternatives (suggest other related pages)
4) Make it easy to go back to the previous page, your homepage
or other important pages.

1) One of the most important elements of technical SEO is
the XML sitemap optimization.
2) An XML Sitemap is an XML file that lists all pages/posts
available on your website. Besides their title it also
includes the published date and last updated date.
3) Search engines can use the XML sitemap as a guide them
when crawling a website.
4) Make sure that your sitemap is automatically updated
when a new page is published or when a page is updated.

1) The latest trend on the Internet is about security. HTTPS is a known
ranking signal and an additional way to establish trust with your
users.
2) When you install an SSL on your server, your website can be
accessed using https and not http. This indicates that any
information transferred between your website and server (such as
usernames, passwords, personal data etc) is encrypted.
3) In the past SSL was important for ecommerce websites but nowadays
any website on the Internet should have an SSL installed.
4) If you don’t have SSL installed the first thing to do is to contact your
hosting provider and ask them to enable SSL on your account and
then you need to follow a migration procedure to activate SSL on
your website without losing your rankings.

Another known ranking signal is website speed. Google is mentioning
the importance of speed in all their SEO recommendations and studies
confirm that faster websites perform better than slower websites.
In general, what you can do to make your website load faster is the
following:
1) Upgrade your server to use 64 bits operating system
2) Upgrade to PHP 7.2 -> this will give you huge improvements in speed
compared to PHP 5.2.
3) Optimize the size of your images. There are tools to help you do this
without losing quality.
4) Minimize the use of plugins
5) Upgrade WordPress and all plugins to the latest versions
6) Don’t use heavy pre-made themes. They add a lot of code that is not
needed, better invest in a custom-made theme.
7) Optimize and minify your CSS and JS Files
8) Using a caching plugin to serve cached pages to users
9) Avoid adding too many scripts in the <head> of your website
10) Use asynchronous JavaScript loading

1) Having a mobile friendly website is not optional. Most probably
the majority of your users are on mobile and with the
introduction of the mobile first index by Google, if you don’t
have a fast, mobile friendly website your rankings will suffer.
2) Mobile friendliness is part of technical SEO because once you
have a mobile friendly theme, that is properly configured, you
don’t have to deal with this again.
3) It’s also a task that requires technical knowledge on how to set
it up.
4) The first thing to do is to check the mobile friendliness of your
website using this tool from Google.
5) If your website doesn’t pass the test, you have a lot of work to
do and this should be your first priority.

1) Pagination is used when you want to break up a
long page into multiple shorter pages and when
you enable paging in your category pages.
2) To avoid duplicate content issues and to
consolidate links and page rank to your main
page, you can make use of rel=”next” and
rel=”prev” links to tell search engines that the
subsequent pages are a continuation of the main
page.

1) If you have content on your website in more than
one languages, then you need to make use of
the hreflang attribute to give Google more
information about your site structure and
content.
2) This will help them serve the right content to
users (i.e. to show Swedish people content in
Swedish) and it will also help you optimize your
SEO by avoiding duplicate content and indexing
issues.

1) Technical SEO consists of a number of checks and
settings you need to optimize to help search engines
crawl and index your website without any problems.
2) In the majority of cases, once you get your technical SEO
right, you won’t have to deal with it again, other than
doing periodical SEO Audits.
3) The word technical implies that you need to have some
technical knowledge to carry out some of the tasks (like
page speed optimization, adding structured data, etc.) but
it’s necessary to do it otherwise your website won’t reach
its full potential.