Top-Rated Technical SEO Agency

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to assess your content. A technically sound website is crawlable, secure, structured, responsive, fast, mobile-friendly, and more. In addition to getting you brownie points from search engines like Google and Bing, the numerous factors contributing to technical SEO create a better experience for your users. The synergy of a robust technological backbone and elevated experience for users leads to better engagement, better conversions, and better ranking of your site on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

How does crawlability across search engines impact technical SEO?

A search engine runs based on a crawler’s continuous, coordinated activity with an index and a complex algorithm. A crawler, also known as a bot or spider, constantly follows links. Once it comes to a website, it follows the links to every page that is not blocked (yes, you can block the crawlers, too) and saves the HTML version of the pages in an enormous database called the index. The index updates itself every time the crawler visits your web pages and finds a revised version. Crawlability refers to how accessible your web pages are for indexing. Crawlability is an essential prerequisite for your site’s existence on SERPs. The crawlability of sites can be improved by the proper use of a robots.txt file and meta robots tags.

Does the robots.txt file impact technical SEO?

Robots.txt is the file that tells search engines which pages to crawl and which pages not to crawl. You can view your robots.txt file by navigating to yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. In the absence of a robots.txt file, search engines can’t find out if your site works properly or not. Even when present, it is often mishandled, thus preventing bots from crawling essential parts of your website. Therefore, it is vital to add a robots.txt file to your site or to verify that your existing robots.txt file works properly.

Can meta-robots tags impact technical SEO?

Meta-robots tags are small pieces of HTML code that instruct crawlers on how to crawl or index web pages. While robots.txt directs bots to which pages of a website should be crawled or not, these meta tags give more specific instructions on how to crawl and index a page’s content. You can use meta-robots tags to allow or disallow crawlers from crawling or indexing any link on your page.

Does speed impact technical SEO?

In today’s world, everything has to work fast — especially websites! Web pages that load slowly are incredibly annoying. If your web page takes more than three seconds to open up, chances are more than 53% of your visitors will leave. That’s why Google made page speed one of the ranking factors in 2010 for desktops and in 2018 for mobile phones. Page speed is affected by a myriad of factors. Some of the ways you can speed up your site are:

1. DNS – Switch to a faster DNS (Domain Name System) Provider
2. Minimize ‘HTTP’ requests – keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum
3. Use web caching – cache files allow your site files to be stored in your visitors’ browser, which increases your site’s loading speed dramatically.
4. Compress your web pages – A page’s total size correlates with load times more than any other factor.
5. Compress your images, but not till they get pixelated – images are the heaviest files on any web page. The smaller the images, the faster the load times.
6. Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript files – Minification removes unnecessary whitespaces and comments from codes, reducing file sizes and improving loading time.
7. Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network) – CDNs store copies of your web pages on servers worldwide. When visitors open your web page, they are connected to the nearest server from their location, resulting in a faster response. CDNs also prevent site crashes in case of traffic surges.

Does duplicate content affect technical SEO?

When the same or similar content appears in more than one place on a single or multiple websites, this content is labeled as duplicate content. As search engines are putting greater emphasis on the quality of site content, they are also getting more and more sophisticated at detecting duplicate content on the internet. Nevertheless, differentiating original content from rip-off content is still a challenge. As a result, search engines receive a bad signal from both sites containing the duplicated content. Even if you have duplicate content within your website, it can negatively hamper visitor engagement on your website. Visitors will not want to waste time on multiple pages that provide the same information. Duplicate content can hamper your rankings due to negative signals to search engines and increased bounce rates. There are a few ways to deal with duplicate content:

• Replacing the duplicate content with unique content
• Getting rid of duplicate content (If the page has already been indexed, you should use permanent 301 redirects. Otherwise, if your page has been linked from other pages across your website or via external backlinks, you’ll create dead links in place of the page.)
• Using Canonical URLs (for example, Say you have an e-commerce site with a product page for a shirt in 5 different colors such that each colored t-shirt gets its own UR. You will also have duplicate content for all those 5 URLs. In this case, you can use the canonical URL to let the search engine know that the black t-shirt’s URL is the “main” one, and the rest are variations.)

How can 404 pages impact technical SEO?

404 error pages increase customer frustration and are undoubtedly a massive blow to your website’s UX. Not only visitors but search engine crawlers avoid these dead-end pages. Therefore, you shouldn’t have any 404 errors on your website, but that is easier said than done. Every website is evolving — pages get deleted, URLs get changed, and even visitors end up making small errors while typing the URL. So, the smarter choice is to optimize the 404 pages. You should add a friendly note that the page they’re looking for is not available and redirect them to frequently navigated pages, the homepage, and other important pages.

Does URL structure affect technical SEO?

The format of your URLs, if well written, gives searchers a quick indication of what the destination page is about. Well-structured URLs that follow a consistent and logical structure help visitors understand where they are on your site. For example, the current page’s URL is outpaceseo.com/services/technical-seo, which gives you an indication that Technical SEO is one of the services we offer. At the same time, it indicates to Google that technical-seo falls under our “services” category. Strategic use of keywords in URLs adds to your page relevancy and can be a page-boosting factor. Some other practices that help optimize URLs are avoiding upper-case letters, making URLs concise and readable, and using a hyphen (-) to separate the words.

Will an SSL certificate help my SEO?

Making your website safe for users is more of an essential requirement rather than an SEO tactic nowadays. It is a no-brainer that Google prefers secure sites over non-secure ones and has made site security a ranking signal. While many things can be done to elevate your site’s security, implementing HTTPS is the first crucial step. Having an HTTPS site ensures that any information transferred between your site and your visitors (such as usernames, passwords, personal data, etc.) is encrypted and safe. You’ll need an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to implement HTTPS on your site.

Is it important to have an XML sitemap?

A sitemap is a roadmap to your site’s structure for the search engines, which helps search engines find, crawl, and index all your website’s content. It also carries other useful information about each page on your website, including when a page was last modified, what priority it has on your site, and how frequently it is updated. Sitemaps are a huge help if your site is brand new and lacks external backlinks, as they help search engines find your website. If you have a website with thousands of pages, search engines have difficulty finding all the pages unless you have impeccable internal linking and a ton of external links. Sitemaps are your effortless resolution to such trouble. That’s why, for any website, sitemaps are a must. You must add sitemaps to your sites and submit them to Google and Bing via Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters Tool.

Does it help my SEO to have a mobile-friendly website?

Mobile devices (excluding tablets) accounted for 51.53% of global website traffic in the second quarter of 2020. Thus, having a mobile-friendly website is not optional. There’s a high chance that most of your visitors come from mobile devices. Therefore, having a responsive website that works fast on mobile devices is absolutely essential. In addition to that, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are also being increasingly used for speeding up the webpage loading on mobile phones. AMPs are stripped-down HTML copies of web pages that load faster than HTML5 pages. However, just activating AMP on your website doesn’t ensure a mobile-friendly website. Other factors, such as mobile-optimized UI/UX, avoiding pop-up ads, etc. also improve the mobile-friendliness of your website.

How does structured data affect SEO?

Structured data markup is the code with a fixed format (described on schema.org) added to websites to help search engines better understand the on-site content. This data results in better indexing and relevant results on SERPs. Structured data can communicate different information about the company, its products, and services, pricing, etc. to the search bots. Structured data also makes your content eligible for ‘rich snippets’; those highlighted results with stars, prices, or reviewer information. Rich snippets are visually appealing and stand out amidst other search results. That is why they improve your click-through rate (CTR) and help drive more traffic to your website.

Do site structure and page depth have an effect on SEO?

Google’s John Mueller once revealed that more weight is given to how many clicks it takes to get from a site’s homepage to the destination page versus the number of slashes in the page’s URL. Page depth is defined as the number of clicks it takes to get to the destination page from the website’s home page. Hence, the higher the page depth, the less likely search engines are to crawl it, especially on larger websites. Googlebot crawls billions of web pages day-in and day-out, so with the limited time to crawl your site, Google tends to prioritize crawling URLs with a lower page depth. That’s why you should always structure your websites such that the critical web pages are only a few clicks away from your home page.

Will breadcrumbs increase the authority of my SEO?

Breadcrumbs are a trail of website links that allow visitors to track where they are on a website and how far they are from the home page. Usually, they are visible at the top of a website or just under the navigation bar. Even Google uses breadcrumb-style navigation in the SERPs. Breadcrumbs are incredibly SEO-friendly; they add internal links to your site, improve your site architecture, and encourage people to visit more pages on your website. Usually, web designers prefer not to add breadcrumbs to the site as they think breadcrumbs disrupt the page design. However, well-placed breadcrumbs can do much more good than harm. You should add breadcrumbs to your website where they are visible to the users. Also, breadcrumbs should be mobile-friendly. If they are visible on mobile devices, you should make sure they are big enough or button-like to be clickable.

How do 301 redirects contribute to SEO?

301 redirects denote that the page requested has been redirected to another page. They should be used when a page is no longer relevant, useful, or permanently deleted. They are valuable for site rebuilds, where URLs are tidied up and updated contents are added. 301 is preferred over other redirects because of its ability to pass on about 90% of link equity from the redirected pages. If a search engine bot encounters a 301 redirect when crawling your website, they remove the old URL from their index and replace it with the new one. In the meantime, visitors are also redirected to the new URL with improved infrastructure/content. If 301 redirects aren’t used when pages are permanently deleted, 404 errors are shown to the search engines and visitors. However, using an excessive number of 301 redirects when not required is not recommended.

What does the HREF Lang attribute do for SEO?

The hreflang attribute tells search engines which language and country audience you are trying to reach for a particular page. This attribute allows the search engine to serve the pages to users searching in that specific language or country. If your site targets more than one state or users who speak different languages, you need to use the hreflang attribute to target your intended country and demographic. In addition to this, hreflang also solves a possible duplicate content problem.

How do Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters Tools help my business with SEO?

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools from Google and Microsoft, respectively, that allow you to track, monitor, and improve your website’s performance on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Before launching your website, you should submit its XML sitemap to both console and webmaster tools to help Google, Bing, and Yahoo find, crawl and index your site. Additionally, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tool can notify you of any penalties on your site, show external backlinks, give you an insight on search terms that people use to find you, track technical errors that crawlers detect, etc. When Search Console is paired with Google Analytics, you can even set your sales goals, track conversion, monitor bounce rates, analyze your visitor region, language, age, gender, device, etc., find your most viewed pages, and average session durations, and much more.

What is Outpace’s competitive advantage?

Outpace SEO is a technical SEO firm for businesses and partnerships with long-term vision. We are a company that focuses on technical strategies, calculated moves, and result-oriented practices. We are run by computer scientists and technical professionals whose most significant strength is understanding and writing codes. Not just that, we are committed to learning, understanding, and adapting to the ever-changing SEO algorithms.

Technical SEO is challenging to understand — let alone optimize for people who lack technical knowledge and skills. At Outpace SEO, we are a team of specialists who can assess your website from multiple dimensions of technical efficiency. We know exactly what to keep, what to remove, what to change, what to prioritize, and what to create.

Unlike other SEO firms filled with marketing gurus, we understand your website’s code, design as well as business goals. Outpace SEO, therefore, is the best choice for tracking, monitoring, and improving your website’s technical SEO.

What does it look like to start SEO?

• SEO Audit – Outpace SEO finds, reads, and assesses your existing website structure and content. A 360-degree overview of your website versus our Technical SEO checklist helps us determine what needs change, what needs to be gotten rid of, and what needs to be created.
• Strategy – From then on, Outpace SEO recommends the changes to be made to your website structure and infrastructure for strengthening your Technical SEO.
• Execution – Outpace SEO works through your website through a systematic Technical SEO checklist we have developed after working with thousands of clients across multiple verticals. We prioritize tasks in an order that delivers your expected result as soon as possible.
• Reporting – Despite technical SEO being complicated and difficult to understand for non-practitioners, Outpace SEO prioritizes customer collaboration over communication barriers. Hence, we depict our activities and achievements in words and numbers that you can understand and quantify against your expected ROI.