An Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO Facts

If you need some really good help to improve your website rank in the search engines, then you come to the right place. In this post, I’ll be explaining the technical SEO facts and when you read them; you will not only enhance your SEO knowledge but can implement them in your digital marketing campaign and enhance your search results.

1. Page Speed Impacts Search Ranking

• While it’s a great news for the audience, web owners have a quite a huge responsibility in their hands and if they fail in that their website search ranking will go down. Google has made it official, that Page speed will be a ranking factor in its mobile-first index. Mobile is taking over the world, Google wants your websites to be mobile but with no compromise in page loading speed.
• To check the page-load time of your mobile site, you can try using Google’s new page speed tool, which is mobile-focused. Not only the tool checks load time but mobile usability and much more.

2. Robots.txt files should be placed in Site’s main Directory- They are Case-Sensitive

• The first thing, if you are planning using this command, then make sure that file is completely in lower case (robots.txt).
• Now the second and the most important thing, when web crawlers set out for a job, they look for robots.txt only in one place and that is the site’s main directory. Suppose, if they don’t find the file in the main directory, web crawlers will consider it as unavailable and continue to crawl the web page.

3. No Guidelines to Structure your Sitemap

• Structure your Sitemap as you like, these are words from Google. There are no guidelines or restrictions, you have every freedom to work as you like on the most important part of your website as long as it remains XML.

4. Internal and External Links are Scored differently

• An internal link is a hyperlink that directs you to another webpage within your website; external link, on the other hand, directs you to a web page from the external website. Google’s John Mueller officially confirmed that the search giant will score internal and external links separately and be using different formulations and calculations for the same.

5. HTTPS Websites Dominate Half of Google Search Results

• If you need proof that Google favors HTTPS websites then just check the search results, half of the websites come with encryption. If websites are to rise in the top search ranking position, it is necessary they are encrypted. It is essential to protect users from cyber attacks and if you need assistance in that matter, Google has even prepared a guide.

6. Maintain Page Load Time to 2 to 3 Seconds

• How fast is fast? How quickly should your web page load for the users?
• The web page should load under 2 to 3 seconds. Google doesn’t like it if you’re website visitors are kept waiting.
• You can use webpagetest.org tool for measuring page load time. And if you visit Google Webmasters Tool, a new section has been added; the performance of the site is calculated in terms of page load time and reported for your reference.
• ‘Mobile first index’ evolution has already started and it has already been made a ranking factor, so your focus should be only in giving fast desktop and mobile experience for the users.

7. You can analyze your Crawl Budget in Google Search Console

• Based on how fresh or how old your web content is, Google decides how much it wants to crawl your website, this process is referred to as ‘Crawl Demand’.
• The crawl rate limit is designed so Google does not impact your server by crawling too many web pages too fast.
• I explained all these things just to make you easily understand the term crawl budget. According to Google ‘it is the number of URLs Googlebot can and desires to crawl in the given amount of time.’ Crawl budget is together crawl rate and the crawl demand. You can use Google search console to check your crawl budget.

8. Infinite scroll repels Web Crawlers

• Web users don’t have to click multiple times to get towards the information they want to check, web crawlers, on the other hand, cannot access website information on the infinite scroll page and in the process may skip the content without crawling.
• Next time if you are working on your infinite scroll website make sure the code has rel=”next” and rel=”prev“.  It indicates Google about the component URLs in a paginated series.

9. Generally, Website Home Page is Crawled First

• Not always, but generally Google crawls the home page first. Let’s say a new site is up and a specific page (not the home page) has a lot of links, in such scenarios, Google will be crawling that web page first and then work its way back to the homepage.

10. Keep 301 Redirects Active for at least One Year

• A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from current URL to the new one. This type of redirect advice web users and search engines to refer different web URL from what they had originally typed into their search engine.
• Now the burning question, why you have to keep 301 redirects active?
• Because Google takes anywhere between 6 months to a year to completely recognize that a site has been moved.

11.   You have a lot to learn about Sitemaps    

• You should encode your XML documents in UTF-8.
• Including session IDs from URLs is not allowed.
• A sitemap index file is preferred over multiple sitemap submissions.
• URLs must be less than 50,000, no larger than 50 MB.
• For each media type like news, videos, and images different sitemaps can be used.

12. To Avoid Translation in Search, enable the ‘notranslate’ Tag

• ‘Translate this page’, to avoid Google from showing this message you can embed ‘notranslate’ tag in your HTML file.
• Suppose you don’t want a section of your web page to be translated then add ‘class=notranslate’ to any HTML element. Webmaster if he wants the products to appear in only in Spanish then he can easily do so using this option.