Technical SEO Guide - My Checklist And Useful Tips

Hi BHW Members

Most of the time we mainly focus on link building and content writing (Offsite SEO and Onsite SEO), i think we must give equal importance for Technical SEO too.

Here is my small basic guide for technical SEO. Hope it will be useful for at least newbies and beginners in SEO.


What Is Technical SEO?

In simple terms, Technical SEO is focussing on the technical part of the website. It's all about optimizing your website for crawling and indexing.






What Are All The Important Parts Of Technical SEO?

1. Website Speed
2. XML Sitemaps
3. Architecture Of The Site
4. Security
5. User Experience
6. Clean Code
7. AMP - Mobile Friendly Website
8. SSL Certification
9. Handling Redirects
10. Schema Markup

And Much More. Let's see the 5 most important elements of Technical SEO that are very important.


1. Site Speed

A Slow site will kill your sales and conversion. If your site takes more time to load, you will lose your visitors even before they come to your site.

Here is a step by step procedure to improve the site speed:

A. First check your site speed. You can check it from websites like gtmetrix.com, https://pagespeed.web.dev/.
B. If you are in A, then your site is already good (skip the next following tips)
C. Analyse the top issues one by one. Use google to understand what is the issue and how you can fix them. If it is too technical you can hire a technical SEO expert.
D. If your site is on WordPress you can definitely use plugins like Rocket SEO to increase the site speed (I will add another step by step tutorial on how to do it with required plugins if needed by next week).




FREE PLUGINS: WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache

PAID PLUGINS: Rocket SEO





2. XML Sitemap


XML Sitemaps are maps that help google to discover the important posts/pages of your website. It also helps Google to see how often they are updated.

Many underestimate the power of XML Sitemaps on their website, but it plays a major role in indexing your new and old posts. It helps Googlebot to crawl your site very easily.


A. Every site should have an XML Sitemap.
B. For WordPress, you can install a good sitemap plugin and it will take care of the rest. (Yoast SEO Or Google XML Sitemap Plugin)
C. If you are using HTML/asp sites, you need to create a script manually.




FREE PLUGINS: Google XML Sitemap Plugin, Yoast SEO FREE

PAID PLUGINS: Yoast SEO Premium



3. Security

Security of your website is something which you need to focus on from Day 1. If you are setting up a weak password or have no proper security layer for your website, your website will be hacked one day. On average every day minimum of 30,000 sites are being hacked.

Here are a few tips to keep your site completely secured:

A. Choose a good hosting provider. Even if your website is secured, poor hosting gets easily hacked and your site will also be in trouble.
B. Always install a good security plugin if you are using WordPress. I will suggest Wordfence Plugin for this as I use it for all my sites.
C. Use HTTPS to secure your data. This should be your Number 1 priority.
D. Keep your themes and plugins always updated regularly.





FREE PLUGINS: Wordfence FREE Version, All In One WP Security

PAID PLUGINS: Wordfence



4. Schema Markup

Schema markup will help search engines to read your page in a better way. Schema Markup will enhance your rich snippets below your page title which will increase your site visibility.

A. Schema Markups can be used by businesses, reviews, videos, events, and people.
B. Microdata can be used to add schema markup, but you need to mark every individual item which is very time-consuming.
C. I suggest using Schema Pro And WP Review PRO plugin for schema markup
D. I will write a detailed tutorial of what I know with Schema Markup if many are interested in this.



FREE PLUGINS: Ultimate Blocks
PAID PLUGINS: Schema PRO


5. Site Architecture

There are a lot of in-depth guides in BHW on this topic. I basically learned everything from the existing tutorials that our previous BHW members shared in the past few years. Basically, Site Architecture means building a proper website structure for your audience and also search engines.

I always go with SILO Structure - I plan and arrange my content logically by hierarchical groups.

Here is how I try to do it for all my websites:

A. I first plan for my categories (Example For Pet Site: Cat, Dogs, Tiger)
B. Then I plan for subcategories on each category (For Example Cat Category: Cat Food, Cat Training etc)
C. By doing this from the beginning I can easily understand where to link each article and what topic to write each week, how many categories are being covered/
D. This improves my ease of interlinking, topic ideas, and also keyword relevancy




Plugins: Although there is no plugin for following 100% SILO Structure, you can use plugins like the internal link juicer SEO Plugin, Breadcrumb plugins to create a proper hierarchy.

I hope this short tutorial will be useful for beginners and newbies. I will write PART 2 with a detailed explanation with a step-by-step guide if it is useful for any BHW members.

Keep Rocking BHW

For the Schema Markups, Rankmath will be okay?

Also, what is the best option for a blog post with images and a video?

1) you did not act perfmatters? 2) Yikes no Yoast mate opt for TSF and 3) it’s 2022 you no longer need schema pro (it’s a great plugin but now all seo plugins have schema inbuilt no need for additional plugin) but those who see the need can definitely use it

Good guide mate i learned something new now time to apply

really a good one.

FIREBOSS said:

For the Schema Markups, Rankmath will be okay?

Also, what is the best option for a blog post with images and a video?

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If you want to focus on specifically on schemas, then go for schema markups.

If you are not focussing much on snippets (all seo plugins have them)

I would suggest schema markup though as I use it on all my sites.

Mr Positive said:

1) you did not act perfmatters? 2) Yikes no Yoast mate opt for TSF and 3) it’s 2022 you no longer need schema pro (it’s a great plugin but now all seo plugins have schema inbuilt no need for additional plugin) but those who see the need can definitely use it

Click to expand...

Will check the options you have provided for my next project

Thanks for your suggestion bro

Site speed is very important , one of the tricks to ensure good site speed is choosing good hosting.

Covers all fundamentals
Nice one

seomaster5 said:

Site speed is very important , one of the tricks to ensure good site speed is choosing good hosting.

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Completely agree. Site speed is the most important part.

HustleTong said:

Covers all fundamentals
Nice one

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Cheers Guys!!

Hi,

Nice share!

Lets say you sell a service, would you include a CTA on every page with the silo structure? So for A silo structure, would you include CTA in the inner pages, or just let the customers find the way back?

And, if you implement a blog with interlinking to each post. Would you have internal linking from the blogpost, do your silo pages? Or just focus alone on internal link on the blog posts?

Arditkallaba said:

Hi,

Nice share!

Lets say you sell a service, would you include a CTA on every page with the silo structure? So for A silo structure, would you include CTA in the inner pages, or just let the customers find the way back?

And, if you implement a blog with interlinking to each post. Would you have internal linking from the blogpost, do your silo pages? Or just focus alone on internal link on the blog posts?

Click to expand...

Apologize for late reply. I just now saw your question.

I got good response when added a popup kind of thing instead of adding it on all pages.

For the second question, i would add internal linking to silo pages but not much. I would focus mainly on linking to relevant blog posts.

Nice guide here, man. Site speed is as important as optimized content, in my opinion. Google put weight on the value of an optimized website recently as well.

I enjoy seeing members come in & discuss the technical aspects of SEO.

Appreciate the detailed guide - cheers!

Very helpful!

snoopyJames said:

Appreciate the detailed guide - cheers!

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GeorgeDer said:

Very helpful!

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Thanks a lot. Its all about testing. Checked through a lot of factors and I will update that soon here.

Nice Checklist there. Good work.

seostylish said:

Nice Checklist there. Good work.

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Cheers Buddy..

PRO TIP:

Consider enabling AMP

One Important Technical SEO IS To Enable AMP For Your Site:

If you want to speed up your website, you can do it using AMP Html.

You can load it extremely faster on mobile devices. How it is done? It will strip your content - leaving video, images and text intact but will disable all the other unimportant elements likes, comments, scripts, and forms.

They load very fast which is very good for SEO. Google also shows AMP in carousels sometimes, giving it more importance

AMP is total bullsh*t, better drop it.

Good info about technical SEO but there are just the very (very) basics.

There's much more you can do to improve website performance beyond installing plugins, like tuning your MySQL and eliminating slow queries. Reducing the latency between redirects and improving the loaded resource by cutting as many requests as you can also drastically improve website speed. Blocking useless crawlers can also help since those can overload your server.

EMAOneBillion said:

AMP is total bullsh*t, better drop it.

Good info about technical SEO but there are just the very (very) basics.

There's much more you can do to improve website performance beyond installing plugins, like tuning your MySQL and eliminating slow queries. Reducing the latency between redirects and improving the loaded resource by cutting as many requests as you can also drastically improve website speed. Blocking useless crawlers can also help since those can overload your server.

Click to expand...

I agree. But installing it is an easy work. I will check and update this thread with improving website speed.