Top 20 Tips for Technical SEO in 2021
While quality content is key to securing high search engine rankings, content alone isn’t enough to unleash one’s online potential. You also need a solid SEO foundation to help search engines find and understand your site content and assist visitors in navigating your web pages, which is where technical SEO comes into play. As covered over at runrex.com, technical SEO is the process of optimizing your site infrastructure to ensure search engine spiders can properly crawl, index, and interpret your website. The following are the top 20 tips for technical SEO in 2021.
Secure your website
It is important for users to feel like their data is secure when they are on your site in 2021. From discussions over at guttulus.com, Google now favors websites encrypted with HTTPS, which, therefore, means that obtaining an SSL certificate for your website is crucial in 2021. This not only secures your site but also improves your SEO.
Responsiveness
If you want to rank better in 2021, then you must ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. As is revealed in discussions on the same over at runrex.com, more than 56% of users are on mobile devices and, therefore, search engines give it a priority, with Google having transitioned to mobile-first indexing not long ago.
Keep an eye on your loading speeds
In June of 2020, Google officially announced that loading speed is a ranking factor, which means that having a quick site in 2021 is paramount according to the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com. Your users will not stick around if your site is taking forever to load. Remember that, for every extra loading second, you lose 7% of consumers.
Don’t forget about site architecture
Another important tip when it comes to technical SEO in 2021 concerns the architecture of your site. Your site structure is how well all of the pages on your website are organized. A flat structure makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl 100% of your site’s pages and should be your preference.
URL structure
Other than your site structure, your URL structure is another important aspect of technical SEO that you should be on top of. Here, putting your pages under different categories gives Google extra content about each page in that category and it is the URL structure you should aim for.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs, as covered in detail over at runrex.com, automatically add internal links to categories and subpages on your site. Google has turned URLs into breadcrumb-style navigation on the SERPs, hence why this is something that should be top-of-your-mind in 2021 as far as technical SEO is concerned.
Internal linking
You should also not forget about building internal links as far as your site is concerned in 2021. According to the gurus over at guttulus.com, if there is a specific page you want to index, then internal links work best if the page you are linking from has lots of authority and gets crawled all the time.
Fix crawlability and indexing issues
Another important tip as far as technical SEO is concerned in 2021 is the importance of spotting and fixing crawlability and indexing issues on your site. As is revealed in discussions over at runrex.com, you should make sure that your important pages are not being blocked from Google by mistake and that all your pages are being crawled and indexed.
Use HTML and XML sitemap
Having a sitemap for your site is also key and is something you should be on top of in 2021. This is because sitemaps are essential for Google to find and index your webpages, which is why you should make sure that you are using HTML and XML sitemaps for your site.
Limit sitemaps to 10,000
Still on the topic of sitemaps, while you are allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap, it is recommended that you limit your sitemaps to 10,000 URLs, particularly if you have a large site and are having indexing issues. Using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can actually improve your crawlability.
Leverage dynamic sitemaps
Also, it is important to leverage dynamic sitemaps in 2021. A dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based on what you want Google to crawl. Therefore, if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, you should put the high-priority ones in their own special sitemap as articulated over at guttulus.com.
Core Web Vitals
2021 is also the year you should invest in Core Web Vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google is bringing to the forefront in 2021. This means focusing on site speed as already mentioned as well as delivering a great page experience to users as discussed over at runrex.com.
Watch out for thin and duplicate content
As the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com point out, thin and duplicate content can harm your search engine page rankings. Therefore, it is important to find duplicate content using SEO tools and make sure that you no-index the pages that don’t have unique content. You should also make use of canonical URLs to help you avoid the issue of duplicate content going forward.
Use HREFLANG for international websites
HREFLANG is an attribute used to clarify the lingual and geographical targeting of a website. Search engines use HREFLANG tags to serve correct language URLs in search results based on the online user’s country and language preference. You should use HREFLANG to inform search engines that sections of your website are intended for different countries and languages.
Use Google AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is designed to load pages faster on mobile devices, and it is something that should be at the top of your thoughts in 2021 with most people using mobile devices to search the internet. Google has been pushing publishers to use AMP and you should take it on this year.
Find and fix broken links
As is revealed in discussions on the same over at runrex.com, broken internal links make it harder for Googlebot to find and crawl your site’s pages. Therefore, you should use tools to find your broken and dead links and have them fixed as soon as possible.
Rich snippets and structured data
According to the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com, using Schema can give your pages Rich Snippets, which is something you should be aiming for in 2021 given that Rich Snippets help to improve organic CTR.
No-index tag and category pages
As is outlined over at runrex.com, category and tag pages can lead to duplicate content issues for those with WordPress websites. Therefore, to avoid such issues, you should look to no-index these pages, which is one of the most helpful technical SEO tips in 2021.
HTTP Status Codes
You also need to keep an eye on the HTTP status codes and know what error they indicate. It could be a server error, client error, or issues with redirection, among others. What is important is for you to determine the HTTP status codes that exist on your website and then solve these errors as soon as possible.
Redirect old URLs to new URLs
Finally, if you redesign or migrate from your site or one of your webpages, then you should make sure that you remember to redirect all the old URLs to the new URLs, which is something you can’t afford to forget this year.
These are just some of the technical SEO tips that we hope will help you get the results you are looking for, with more tips, information, insights, and help on this topic to be found over at the top-rated runrex.com and guttulus.com.