For many SEO learners, sometimes it becomes difficult to handle the technical aspects of SEO. Here, in this blog post from a well known SEO Brisbane, Platinum SEO; we have discussed about the challenges and opportunities that arrive when one handles the advanced technical SEO aspects.
How to Rule out the SEO issues?
When you start to manage the technical aspects of SEO; you will face many challenges. Regarding this, a very useful case study regarding indexation issue was done. Most of the pages were deindexed and as a result, these were not available in search results.
This led to loss in traffic. In order to find the root cause of this issue; a technical study was conducted which consisted of:
- Page/ URL checks
- Proper Working of Redirects
- Verifying canonical tags as well as URLs.
- Verifying if anything is blocked with robot.txt or not
Once the entire sitemap was reviewed, it was seen that only 10% of sitemap URLs were really indexed. To fix such issues; new sitemaps are to be developed. These will enhance the performance of sitemap URL indexation to 60%.
But again, these efforts didn’t show any increase in traffic. So, finally Google was approached with site search ticket. Google then verified the sample of missing URLs and it found that those URLs were the duplicate ones and these were crawled 5 months before the issue was occurred.
Not all affected URLs were revealed by Google and hence another research was done to find the reason for those being duplicated. For this, a reconsideration request was sent to Google Search Console with a request to boost the crawl rate for the domain hoping that the page will be soon be revisited.
Within a month, results were seen and there was increase in traffic. However, the exact solution to the problem was not available but anyhow the problem was resolved. The possible solutions can be as follows:
- Improper redirect or bad site maintenance redirect.
- Server errors: 404 or 500 or 504 HTTP response.
- 302 redirect to maintenance page.
In order to avoid such problems, it is necessary to properly carryout the website maintenance. In case your website is unavailable for any good reason; it is necessary to display a 503 Service unavailable error.
This can be done when you have pre-planned your site maintenance. Avoid using 200 or 301 HTTP response in case your website is down. Such irrelevant issues can actually confuse the crawlers thus leading to deindexation of the pages.
Visualizing SEO:
Suppose, you have a SEO project and while working on it; you found some technical SEO issues in the website. When you discussed these with client; he/she suggested you to use SEO visualization with the help of various things like as Forced Directed Diagrams.
This will be easily understandable by C level stakeholders as well as top level people in any organization. Using such diagrams is an amazing style of presenting unique style SEO data. These diagrams can include pagination, orphaned content as well as canonical issues.
These diagrams can be used as teaching as well as diagnostic tool. Developing such diagrams can sometimes bring strain to your computer. Hence, it is necessary to have a computer with updated systems.
Boosting Indexibility and Relevance:
How can you increase the chances of your website to appear in relevant search results? Basically, when we talk about SEO; we actually are thinking of four major parts of any website: index, , relevance, authority and clickability.
Here, we will discuss about the first two: Indexibility and relevance.
To improve the indexing, the first and foremost thing to keep in mind is that the content must be easily readable by the spiders. They can’t showcase the content in the results until and unless it is understood by them.
Hence, before indexing; crawl efficiency is to be improved so that spiders can easily catch the content and store it to display in search engine results. The errors must be thoroughly checked. When you submit any sitemap to the search engines; identify the errors and try to fix all of those.
According to the second most popular search engine Bing; among all the sites submitted if more than 1% have errors then Bing will stop crawling the URLs in XML sitemaps. It is necessary to keep the website error free as this will make things easier on the search engines. So, it is very important for site owners to identify the errors and resolve them very soon.
Sometimes, search engines also warn you about the problems. So, take notice of that and resolve them as soon as you can. So, what are common issues that hinder the indexibility? These are as follows:
- URLs include both upper and lower case.
- Those pages that lack any offers seem to get 404 error.
- Canonical tags that lead to duplicate pages must be removed.
So, based on the above issues; these things must be borne in mind from SEO view point while developing a website:
- Always keep lower case in URLs.
- Use custom 404
- Create XML based on taxonomy logic
- Add sitemap error review.
Apart from these, using href on global sites is useful as these help to restrict duplicate content from various country pages and also helps search engines to understand the versions for different country and language.
Use original URLs in the href code. It is mandatory. Always prefer to use any href builder to create URLs containing appropriate hrefs. Following these rules will help you to boost the SEO potential of the URLs.
Wind up:
Apart from the ones listed here, there are many more things that are covered under Advanced Technical SEO. We will discuss all of them at regular intervals. So, stay connected with us and let us knows your feedback about today’s post.
Let’s know how this was useful to you in maintaining your site’s SEO and was anything described in this post actually useful to you?