SEO TIP: ELIMINATE TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

One of the steps in basic SEO health is to ensure that your website is free of any technical issues that may be preventing your site from being crawled.

As a disclaimer, I'm going to refer to Google since it's the biggest search engine right now. But everything I say is the same for any other search engine such as Bing or any other search engine that almost nobody uses.

You should know that it is one thing to have indexing problems in Google, and quite another to have positioning problems in Google. I will tell you in a very summarized way so that at least you know the concepts.

Indexing is everything related to Google finding all the URLs of your website.

Positioning is everything related to whether or not the URLs of your website appear on the first page of Google.

It is quite common that google indexes you but you appear on page number 50, and therefore nobody finds you.

Having said all this, several things affect SEO. In this post, I am going to name the typical ones that need to be checked at a technical level.

Sitemap

The sitemap or also known as sitemap.xml

It is a file that helps Google to know which URLs it has not indexed yet.

It does not help in positioning, but it is a great help in indexing and affects how fast Google finds your new pages.

The sitemap is not necessary for all web projects. Although it is advisable to always have it.

It is necessary for websites:

• Where there is constantly new content and you want it to be indexed quickly (news sites).
• Where there is content that is not easily findable/indexable (directories with many levels).

No need for websites:

• Where all pages are indexed (takes a few days but gets indexed).
• You don't care how long it takes to index (you don't care if it takes 1 day or a week).

Websites with very few pages

The typical websites that do not notice having the sitemap are small websites with little content, simple corporate websites.

When in doubt, you should always have an updated sitemap. It will never hurt you to have a sitemap.

Both in Drupal and WordPress, several free modules/plugins create a sitemap automatically.

Robots.txt

This file contains the blocking recommendations that robots have to follow when indexing your pages.

In some cases, I have found that a wrongly configured robots.txt (because I touch it without knowing how it works) was blocking Google and therefore none of the URLs of the web appeared in the search engine.

The sitemap.xml is a list of URLs that we want Google to take into account and index them as soon as possible.

The robots.txt is a list of URLs that we want to block and that Google does not index and therefore we do not want to show in the search results.

Why do we want to block URLs?

• Well, the typical cases are the URLs of /admin, where you can only access if you are registered as a user of the web. People who are not users of the website will only see a 403 error (Access Denied).
• There are also specific cases such as internal URLs that should not be accessible without first going through other specific URLs of the web (we are doing a funnel or similar).
• Or we want to prevent bots from following URLs with specific parameters in the URLs to avoid duplicate content.

Clarify that the robots.txt file is a "recommendation" for the bots. They are not obliged to follow what the file says. This can sometimes be a problem since we have no control over what the bots do on our website.

Page loading speed

Google has been saying for years that it ranks faster loading websites higher.

It is no secret, the problem is to have a website that loads fast and is cheap.

There are several things to take into account, the first to look at are:

• Images optimized to have a decent size
• Optimized js code
• Optimized backend code
• Powerful servers
• php/mysql versions in their latest versions

Let's be clear that not everything is about paying more to have a more powerful or better-configured server.

• Images optimized to have a decent size
• Optimized js code
• Optimized backend code
• Powerful servers
• php/mysql versions in their latest versions

Duplicate pages/content

Duplicate content affects the distribution of the score that would have a single URL well positioned in all its clones or similar pages.

In other words and simplifying a lot, if you have a page that has a URL that comes out in position n1 in google, and you create 4 URLs that allow access to the same page ... surely the score that had will be reduced and therefore will drop positions in Google. This is very relative and depends on the score of your competition.

If you and your competitor have a fierce fight to stay on the first page of Google ... you are not doing yourself any favours by having duplicate content. Your score will go down and your competition will benefit.

On the contrary, if you are very well positioned, and your competition is not even close to the score that you have ... then surely you will not notice much duplicate content. My recommendation is that, even if you don't notice it now, try to fix the duplicate content before your competitors rank better than you.

What can cause duplicate URLs?

• Manually creating pages with identical content. Yes, it's stupid, but I've had clients who had it. (literally, copy/paste and create a new page).
• Do not redirect http URL to httpS. Nowadays you should always have everything with https, or what is the same, have an SSL certificate (there are free ones).
• Do not redirect the domain with or without www. It is not good that any page of your web can be accessed with and without the www. you are duplicating all your web.
• Do not redirect canonical URLs to their aliases with keywords in the URL. These URLs are the internal URLs. For example in drupal it could be /node/1234 -> /alias-url-molona-with-keywords.

Redirect canonical URLs, URLs with SSL and put or remove www ... are things that can affect your website in a very negative way, and that can be fixed very easily (especially in Drupal and wordpress).

SSL

As I said before, there are free SSL certificates.

An SSL certificate is useful to have the URLs of your website with https://.

Google has already said that it positions much better on the webs that have https.

If you use Chrome you will see a padlock icon next to the URL of this website. If it did not have SSL you would see an alert message "This website is not secure".

Rather than giving points to websites with SSL, Google is taking away points (punishing them) to those that do not yet use SSL.

Image SEO

All images on your website should have ALT and TITLE tags, and they should also have a "nice" name.

These tags serve among other things so that blind people can interpret what the image is about, and also serves for Google to know how to interpret it (google is blind, but with artificial intelligence less and less).

By a nice name, I mean for example "house-with-pool.jpg" instead of "13vdfg34.jpg".

This can be very useful if your website is very visual and you have users who find you thanks to the images. It is also supposed to be useful to be able to put keyword phrases to help the page rank for those keywords.

For example:

• Having a website where you sell pictures (they find you directly with watermarked images in google, then you sell them the image without watermark).
• Get links from articles that have put your images (the editors of a news website have found unique images of your website, have created an article and have put your image with a link to your website. This is the GOLD of SEO). In this case, you have to take into account to put a watermark or have some system to constantly check who is using your images to make sure they link to you.

My opinion is that this is a lot of manual work. In many cases, it is not worth renaming existing images. What is worthwhile is having the option to be able to do this from now on, and to take it into account in the new pages you create.

Broken outbound links and 404 errors

When you have broken links from your website to third party websites ... you are indicating to Google that your pages are probably old and are not maintained. Therefore they are not relevant and lose positioning.

Some tools allow you to analyze your content and see when you have broken links so you can edit these pages, put a new link or directly remove the link.

Error 404

404 errors do not directly harm your SEO, but if you take advantage of them, they will benefit you a lot.

The 404 errors occur when some URL of your website has ceased to exist. This can be because you have deleted the page, changed the existing URL, or because you have redone the website and there are URLs that no longer exist.

Ideally, you should redirect 404 pages to pages that talk about the same topic. It is not a good idea to redirect them all to the Home page of your website.

For example, imagine you have an e-commerce and you have a discontinued product that is in position n1 in Google. As it is out of stock you have removed it and you have just lost a URL that was very well positioned in Google.

The solution is simple, you have to make a redirect to another page of an equivalent/similar product. In this example, you should redirect to the page of the new version of the product.

Another example would be when the website has been redirected from Wordpress to Drupal. We have taken the opportunity to change the pattern of the URLs and now they are more SEO friendly, but the old URLs no longer exist.

The solution, in this case, is that at the time of importing the contents also have to import the old URLs as redirects.

Responsive design for mobile/tablets

Having a responsive website means that the web design adapts to the screen size. To do this you have to take into account several things, but I want to focus specifically on the images, as they are the biggest problem in this type of design.

Here the grace is that mobile, tablet and desktop screens do not have to load the same images. Neither the same size nor the same proportion.

For example, on mobile, we want to have images with a more square shape and about 300px wide. On the other hand, on a desktop, we may want to have the most panoramic image and at least 1200px wide. As you can imagine this affects a lot in the final weight of the image.

Drupal by default has a solution to this already included in its core, which allows you to specify different image styles for different screen sizes. This allows optimizing very well the loading of images on mobile devices.

And another thing to keep in mind about responsive design is that old website from 10 years ago are not responsive. Google detects if a website "scales" for different screens, and gives them a higher SEO score.

Meta description and meta title

All the pages of your website should have meta tags. These tags are what google uses to display the info in their search results.

The meta title and meta descriptions are the titles/descriptions that you see on the google page !!!!.

There are other meta tags, but these two are a must-have.

You put them manually or you automate it. For example, in Drupal, you can automate it so that the values of different fields are used in these meta fields.

Conclusions

Some of these problems can be solved simply. If you are using a CMS like Drupal or WordPress, most offer add-ons (plugins or modules) to solve several of these problems.

Duplicate pages and duplicate content can be merged or removed. Broken links can be fixed. And, 404 pages can be redirected or re-added if accidentally deleted.

If you're not a technical person, other issues such as site speed may require the involvement of your website developer to fix. Many of these errors are reported within Google Search Console.

If you are looking for even more in-depth information about "crawlability" and overall SEO status, tools such as Ahrefs and Moz can provide detailed information about your SEO efforts.