Types of SEO
There are 3 ways you can improve your site visibility – off-page, on-page and technical SEO. Off-page SEO Here are the links to your website, that come from other relative and authoritative websites. They help Google trust your website more. On-page SEO This aspect of search engine optimization is focused on your content. How relevant it is, how well it is optimized for keywords and whether it provides a good user experience. Write your articles to serve your readers in first place. Crawlers listen to people to determine what content is valuable and what not. Technical SEO This aspect of SEO is focused on how well search engines can understand and index your content. Here we will focus on the technical aspect of SEO, or how you can help Google understand your content better and index it faster. I have prepared a checklist for you, to help you improve your technical SEO.Download the Technical SEO checklist
Google Search Console
Google Search Console lets you track important aspects of technical SEO. If you don’t have an account yet, go and register one. It will provide you all the technical issues your website has when it comes to search engine optimization. If you own more than one websites, you can make a separate account for each of them. After you register, you will have to Add a Property. Click on the red button and follow the instructions. Once you add your website you will see an overview of the current status and all potential technical SEO issues of your website that you have to solve. On the dashboard screen you see the Crawl Errors, Search Analytics and Sitemaps.

Aspects of technical SEO
Technical SEO includes the following aspects:1. Website Speed
When showing search results, Google considers also the pagespeed of your website. Make sure your webpages load quickly and avoid flash. In Google pagespeed Insights you can test your website pagespeed on mobile and desktop. After the test is done, this tool will show you the issues you have and provide you with information how to fix them. The most important thing here is to optimize your images. Use not too big in size images that have been compressed. In WordPress you can use Smush or Compress JPEG & PNG images to compress your images automatically. Another important step is that your CSS and JavaScript files have been minified. This allows you to speed up your website. You can do it manually via https://cssminifier.com/ for CSS files and http://closure-compiler.appspot.com for JavaScript files or just install W3 Total Cache in WordPress, which will do not only this, but also minify your HTML, set expire headers, caching and many others that will improve your page loading time.2. Website architecture
It has to be easy for a person who sees your website to get oriented fast in it. Same counts for search engine crawlers that examine your website. The most important thing to play attention here is the structure of your website. Simple site architecture Your menu items should be the main topics around which you create content. So you would ideally have 4 levels – the Homepage, then the Category pages. They should lead to the Subcategory pages and finally to the Single posts.
<meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> <meta name="description" content="post description - this has to be unique for each post/page"> <meta name="keywords" content="relevant keywords, separated by comma"> <meta name="author" content="John Doe"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">The keywords meta tag is optional but you can include it and list the post tags in it. Make sure that your meta descriptions are not missing, or you have more pages with the same meta description. Open Graph Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest use Open Graph to display your web pages, when someone is sharing them. You can include the following Open Graph meta tags in your head section:
<meta property="og:url" content="the post url" /> <meta property="og:description" content="post description - this has to be unique for each post/page" /> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_EN" /> <meta property="og:site_name" content="website name" /> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:title" content="the post title" /> <meta property="og:image" content="url path to the post thumbnail" /> <meta property="og:image:width" content="width in px" /> <meta property="og:image:height" content="height in px" /> <meta property="og:video" content="url path to the video" />Twitter cards Here you can find more info about Twitter Cards – https://dev.twitter.com/cards/overview To drive more traffic and engagement to your website, you can include meta tags which will display your posts like cards on Twitter. Here are the meta tags you will have to include in your head section for Summary Card with Large Image:
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@nytimes"> <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@SarahMaslinNir"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Parade of Fans for Houston’s Funeral"> <meta name="twitter:description" content="NEWARK - The guest list and parade of limousines with celebrities emerging from them seemed more suited to a red carpet event in Hollywood or New York than than a gritty stretch of Sussex Avenue near the former site of the James M. Baxter Terrace public housing project here."> <meta name="twitter:image" content="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/02/19/us/19whitney-span/19whitney-span-articleLarge.jpg">And this is how your posts will look on Twitter, after including these meta tags:

- make your URLs human readable, this gives better user experience and leads to higher rankings. Avoid long and ugly URLs.
- use shorter URLs – according to Brian Dean from Backlinko they tend to rank higher on Google first results page.
- include your target keyword in your URL
- use canonical URLs – for example for product variations (color size, etc.). You can have different pages for each size or color, but make sure they are specified as related to the main product via rel=”canonical” link tag in the head section of the webpage.
- use HTTPS if possible – Google has confirmed, that they use this as positive ranking signal – https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
3. Link equity

4. Is your website Mobile Friendly?
Increasing the importance of mobile friendliness was one of the biggest changes to the technical SEO recently. Mobile friendly websites rank higher in Google results on mobile devices, especially for local results. And you know that the tendency of using mobile to browse the web is growing. The good news is that even if you lose some rankings, it won’t be permanent if you fix it.“But have no fear, once your site becomes mobile-friendly, we will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages.”If you don’t know whether your website is mobile fiendly, you can test it here: https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly In the Search Console, under Search Traffic -> Mobile Usability you can also see whether your site has any issues with mobile friendliness.


@media(max-width:480px) { CSS styles for mobile devices in portrait orientation } @media(max-width:768px) { CSS styles for mobile devices in landscape and tablets in portrait orientation }Here you can find media queries for all standart devices: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/media-queries-for-standard-devices/.
5. Structured data markup – rich snippets and microformats
Rich snippets Rich snippets are displayed by Google in the search results when a post contains structured data markup. Their inclusion is very important technical SEO aspect.
- Product – Information about a product, including price, availability, and review ratings.
- Recipe – Recipes that are being displayed in web searches as in the picture above.
- Review – A review of an item such as a restaurant, movie, or store.
- Event – An organized event, such as musical concerts or art festivals, that people may attend at a particular time and place.
- Place – A fixed, physical location, such as accommodation, local business, residence, tourist attraction.
- SoftwareApplication – Information about a software application, including its URL, review ratings, and price.
- Video – An online video, including a description and thumbnail.
- News article – A news article, including headline, images, and publisher info.
- Science datasets



6. Thin or Duplicate content
Duplicate content is a serious technical SEO issue. If you have such content, get rid of it. Since 2011 Google has started targeting low quality or duplicate content websites with their Panda update, followed by the Phantom update. These updates filter such websites and punish some of them severely. Duplicate content can confuse the search engines because they don’t know which page is most relevant. How you can find duplicate content? Go to the Search Console and under Search Appearance -> HTML Improvements you can see whether you have any duplicate content. Once you know where are the issues you can easily fix them. Here you have 3 options:- Delete such content
- Rephrase it
- Add “canonical” URLs to the duplicate pages, telling Google which is the preferred page for this content.

7. The role of web design in SEO?
You can have the most in depth article, but if your web design is confusing readers, they will leave your website fast. This user behavior will signal Google that this is not a post that users prefer and it will list it lower in the search engine result pages (SERP). Visiting a page, when you search for information, you scan the content to see whether you will find what you are searching for. If on the page are too many distractions, this can make you leave it and move on to the next result. A good web design should let visitors focus on the content. You can use fancy animations very limited or even better not at all. Cool JavaScript or CSS animations are more appropriate and might be of your favor in a product promotional website. Draw your visitors’ attention to the content and after they have read it (or at least a significant part of it) offer them a possibility to check other articles, they might be interested in. Inclusion of Related Posts can improve noticeably your rankings. If you provide your readers with great content – it will at least double your pageviews. Forget about Pop-ups, they are mostly very irritating to your visitors! Instead, you can ask them to sign up for your newsletter, or like your Facebook page, by offering them extra value. This can be a checklist (like I did in this post), a free mini course or an Ebook. Something that will save them time and they can turn back to anytime. I hope that you have learned valuable information about technical SEO in this article, that will help you improve your website’s visibility in the search results.Download the Technical SEO checklist, that I have prepared for you.
Apply what you have learned and share your results in the comments below. If you have any questions or some experience with technical SEO, leave a comment. Thanks for reading! Irena