Top 4 technical SEO tips to grow website traffic

Your website could be pretty and your content may be great, but without technical SEO, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of traffic that you just can’t afford to lose. So what exactly is technical search engine optimisation and how can you do it?

Technical SEO is all about the website improvements and server upgrades that you should make to help search engine spiders crawl the pages of your website and index it effectively. It’s important to understand that major search engines such as Google look for certain technical qualities in websites when ranking them. For example, having characteristics such as a fast loading time, good website structure and a secure connection can make your website look good to Google’s algorithms.

So how can you do technical SEO? We’ve got you covered. Here are the top four tweaks you need to make for better web traffic and a higher ranking.

1. Speed up your website

In a world where time means money, faster load times mean everything. Make sure that you’re using fast hosting and a fast domain name system (DNS) provider. Also try to be sure that your image sizes are not too large and that your website code is perfectly concise with no unwanted indentations or spaces. Another thing you can do is to use only one CSS stylesheet instead of multiple ones which can slow your site down.

2. Design an XML sitemap

A functional XML sitemap works much like a roadmap that allows search engines to find all the pages that you want to be ranked for. Besides helping Google reach and rank all your pages, a sitemap also gives you access to important information such as how important a particular page is, when it was last modified and how often it’s updated.

3. Update your site security

In 2014, Google openly declared that sites with SSL were going to be favoured over unsecured sites. The HTTPS at the beginning of a URL lets you know that a site is secure and safe to visit. To get this for your website, buy a SSL certificate and enjoy improved rankings and more consumer trust.

4. Make your website mobile-friendly

Google considers having a mobile-friendly website to be a powerful ranking signal. And the vast majority of your target audience isn’t going to come from behind a computer screen anyway. With technology so advanced as it is and users so busy, you’re more likely to get more visitors from mobile phones than any other channel. Ensure that your site is responsive and can change itself automatically to be comfortably read on any screen whether it be a desktop, tablet or mobile.