Where to start on SEO of your website?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of actions for internal and external optimization. The website needs SEO in order to improve it’s position in the search engine results for certain user queries. Good SEO increases traffic, the more traffic you have, the better you can monetize it. So what are the main steps for basic technical SEO?

1. Eliminate duplicates. For example, avoid pages with and without WWW, with and without a slash at the end of the URL, with HTTP and HTTPS  and there should be no pages with similar content. 

2. Fix errors in the code. You can check HTML for errors (validity) using the validator.w3.org  service, and CSS using jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator. Also make sure that everything on the site is working correctly, nothing freezes.

3. Speed ​​up website loading. The optimal page loading speed is up to 200 millisecond. If the download takes 7 seconds, the bounce rate will increase by 30%. In order to check page loading speed use the link (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/). The speed of the site is affected by the number and weight of images, the speed of loading HTML, CSS, JS files, and other factors. In each case, you need to individually analyze the problem. You can find more about image optimization here on DesignRus (https://www.designrush.com/trends/seo-image-optimization).

4. Configure 404 error for non-existent pages. This is necessary so that users stay on your site after clicking on an incorrect URL. Especially here it is important to correctly design the 404 error page. And make it as much friendly to users as possible, so that after visiting 404 they’d be happy to continue surfing on your website.

5. Close technical pages from indexing. It is better to close the engine files using robots.txt. Close the pages with confidential information using meta robots tags with the values ​​”noindex, nofollow”.

6. Configure the Last Modified and If-Modified-Since headers. They will tell search engines the date of the last page change, which will speed up re-indexing.

There are much more tips about SEO from our team. Follow our blog in order to get news faster.