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With the word “technical” thrown in front of it, technical SEO might sound challenging, but it’s really not too difficult once you get the basics. If you want your site to get more traffic, rank higher, and net more conversions, it’s important to understand technical SEO or hire website design services to help.

Technical SEO is all about fixing errors that can impact all of those elements, like broken links. In fact, one study found that 30 percent of the 100,000 websites that data was collected on had broken links. Few people will continue to search a site filled with 404 errors, which means those broken links are likely to result in a higher bounce rate. But broken links are just one of the important components of technical SEO, there are many others, including these.

Speed

Web pages have to load fast. If a page doesn’t open within a few seconds, people will get impatient and head elsewhere, so you’ll miss out on that traffic. It will also impact your ranking on search engines like Google as they know that slow pages provide a less than optimal user experience. Google offers tools that can test your site speed and offer suggestions to help make your pages load faster.

Don’t forget about mobile devices either. There’s an ever-increasing proportion of traffic that comes from them, so you’ll need to be sure that your site is mobile-friendly with a responsive design that can smoothly adapt to various devices. It will also give your site a boost in search engine rankings.

Broken Images

Like broken links, if users click on an image and it leads to nowhere, it will raise your bounce rate, which negatively affects SEO. They’re common and frequently occur due to domain or site changes or a change in a file after it’s published.

Properly Formatted Sitemap

XML sitemaps are what web crawlers use to find and identify web pages to be indexed. If your sitemap isn’t properly formatted, it will make it harder for the crawlers to reach your pages.

Metadata

You can control how your website is viewed by using metadata, making it clear to crawlers what the content and title of a page is and what description should be displayed next to the link. There are more advanced functions that can be utilized, allowing you to control whether the follower should follow links on the page or whether a particular page is indexed.

Title Tags

There can be various issues with title tags negatively affecting SEO, such as tags that are too long or too short, duplicate tags, and tags with missing titles. Your page title, or title tag, helps search engines and users determine what your page is about, so they’re obviously an important part of SEO. They should be 50 to 60 characters long and include one or two target keywords.

Security

Technical SEO includes security. Your site must be safe for users; in fact, guaranteeing their privacy is safe is a basic requirement. It’s important to take advantage of the more secure HTTPS protocol, or your ranking will suffer, particularly with Google, which has been confirmed as a part of its algorithm. HTTPS will ensure that no one can intercept data sent between the browser and the site. It’s easy to check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers – if you see the words “not secure” on the left-hand side of the browser search bar, that needs to be changed ASAP.