Are you struggling to get Google to crawl and index every page on your website? Need some help with your technical SEO?

We share 15 technical SEO facts you need to know in this infographic.

Here are the key points:

  • Page speed matters
  • txt files are case-sensitive and must be placed in a site’s main directory
  • Crawlers can’t always access infinite scroll
  • Google doesn’t care how you structure your sitemap
  • The noarchive tag will not hurt your google rankings
  • Google usually crawls your home page first
  • Google scores internal and external links differently
  • You can check your crawl budget in google search console
  • Disallowing pages with no SEO value will improve your crawl budget
  • You can check how Google’s mobile crawler ‘sees’ pages of your website
  • Half of page one Google results are now https
  • You can add canonical from new domains to your main domain
  • Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least one year
  • You can control your search box in google
  • You can enable the ‘notranslate’ tag to prevent translation in search

Hope the infographic helps!

Page Speed Matters

Users spend 70% more time on websites that deliver high performance speed.

According to Google themselves, speed equals revenue.

40% of users leave a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

If you aren’t familiar with these statistics, it’s a good idea to start now.

Website speed has become one of the biggest determining factors for how well your website performs on SERPs.

Coupled with mobile-friendly interfaces, having your website optimised for speed means your customers aren’t waiting to access the information they need.

Crawling Homepages

If you could ask Google to crawl only one page, it would be the homepage. Your homepage is the centre of your website, and, by containing helpful navigation links, helps Google to understand your website and its content. And that’s better for your SERP performance.

Crawlers Can’t Always Access Infinite Scroll

Despite their proficiency, web crawlers may not always be able to access infinite scroll, rendering them redundant for content that could have ranked you higher.

If you decide to build infinite scroll into your website – whilst it’s great for your users, you need to consider your SEO. Make sure to include a paginated series of pages as well as the infinite scroll.

Understanding HTTPS

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure is a far more secure version of HTTP that many of your customers will be looking for. Many websites that aren’t fitted with HTTPS will often throw a warning message to users.

Google wants its users to remain safe when they use their service, so it only makes sense that they will favour websites backed by HTTPS.

With over half of websites on page one secure, it’s a no-brainer for your technical SEO.

Next Steps

Understanding technical SEO inside and out isn’t possible in just one infographic. However, the top 15 facts here should give you a great start in encouraging you to think about the more important optimisations going forward in your SEO strategy.

The key to a successful technical SEO strategy is, of course, ensuring the readability of crawlers of your content. If crawlers can’t understand the website of your content, they won’t be able to rank you.

And that will have detrimental consequences for your website’s SERP performances.

Mark Walker-Ford

Director, Red Website Design