MOST IMPORTANT SEO TIPS IN THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY

Guide to Seo Optimized Development

Our tips for the various optimization areas should enable you to identify and eliminate serious SEO errors in advance. Of course, these rules are no substitute for thorough and sustainable optimization. But they help to put the “foundation” on a solid footing.

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Technical factors

The loading time, domain, and indexability are important SEO factors that need to be optimized in the technical area.

• The loading times of your most important pages (start page and important subpages) should be kept within a reasonable range (around 1.5 seconds), as even slightly longer loading times affect the bounce and conversion rate.
• Check for yourself regularly how the loading times can be improved. A useful tool for this is gtmetrix.com or the OSG’s Speed ​​Test website
• You can also optimize your site on the go by adapting the display accordingly using responsive design

Domain

• Cloaking, i.e., the delivery of other content to the search engine crawlers than to the visitors (e.g., due to the user agent or the IP address) on your website, must be prevented in any case. Otherwise, a penalty up to and including Google threatens to deindex the website completely. Use a suitable browser plug-in that simulates the retrieval as a Google bot to check whether there is cloaking.

Indexability

• Inaccessibility is a severe ranking problem. A short failure does not immediately lead to complete deindexing. Still, in the course of the initiative to increase the speed of the Internet, frequent and more prolonged failures already have a noticeable impact on the rankings. Tip: Always check the status in the Google Search Console. Google will let you know how things can be improved here. The technicians responsible should check the Google Search Console regularly. your site should be index like union complex.

It is, therefore, advisable to carry out a technical analysis regularly. Tools such as the OSG SEO Check are suitable for this, which provides results on backlinks, domain pop, loading time, and other relevant data.

You can also set up a continuous, automatic control for your website. Shops and websites often develop a so-called “life of their own,” especially at night and on weekends, which causes 404 errors and longer loading times.

IMPORTANT TIPS FOR CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND SHOPS

With CMS systems, there are several things to consider in the domain, URL, robots.txt, and navigation.

Domains

• CM systems do not always produce clean and valid code. You should therefore check your source code for compliance with the W3C standard with the following tool: validator.w3.org
• You should switch your website from HTTP to https, as this guarantees encrypted data transmission and improves or worsens the Google ranking if the pages are not converted.
• HTML code should always be designed to be as effective and lean as possible. If possible, store scripts in external files.
• Don’t forget to keep your XML sitemap up to date. Especially when the website is expanded, search engines can usually find and index the new content via the sitemap.xml much faster than via the normal crawl process.
• Our tests have shown that, especially for smaller projects and websites, pages that are not in the sitemap are indexed much later.
• Internal links are just as crucial for Link juice as external ones. Therefore you should always try to link your pages strongly internally.
• Do not simply delete old product pages from the server, but forward them via 301 to the corresponding next higher category or the start page.
• The canonical tag should be used with extreme caution, as incorrect use can cause important pages to disappear from the index. Nevertheless, it can be very important to avoid duplicate content.
• A fundamental issue that is still often overlooked: If a website or important content pages are not accessible due to incorrect links, 404 errors, (unnecessarily) password-protected areas, or other reasons, they cannot be indexed either.
• Check the Google Search Console regularly for broken links (404 errors) and forward them via 301 to relevant and existing pages. You will not lose any link power or rankings.
• Also, optimize the metadata. These are excerpts from your website that are displayed in the search results. They serve as a preview for the page and can contain a call-to-action.

Robots.txt

• Don’t forget to include a reference to the sitemap XML file in the robots.txt file as Google will look at the robots.txt file first when visiting a website.
• Make sure that you do not inadvertently lock important subpages or directories in the robots.txt file.
• The robots.txt file is publicly viewable. Sensitive data must, therefore, be protected differently from indexing (e.g., password protection). Also, be aware that not all crawlers may adhere to the directives in the file.
• If a page is blocked in the robots.txt file, it will still appear in the search results. If a page is not to be indexed and not crawled, this can be solved using a “no index, follow” Meta tag. When using the “no index” Meta tag locally, make sure that other pages are not affected by the deindexing due to an incorrect programming routine!
• Changes to the robots.txt are monitored in the OSG Performance Suite. The on-page crawler also takes into account robots.txt disallow instructions.
• navigation
• Avoid navigation that is implemented with the help of images, as search engines do not understand image content. From an SEO perspective, pure text navigation is always preferable to image navigation.

Content

• Important page components such as page titles and Meta descriptions should always be designed as individually as possible and not be too long or too short. A length between 55 and 70 characters is recommended for the page title; the Meta description should not be longer than 160 characters.
• It will be perfect if you maintain the Meta tags individually for each page. In the case of very extensive projects, you can, for example, use the heading as the title by default. Details are to be determined individually for each project. We recommend: configure your CMS system in such a way that an alternative descriptive text (alt attribute) can be added to images.
• Integrate your most important keywords in the directories or categories. To identify the most important keywords, you should determine the search volume, e.g., using the Google Keyword Tool or the OSG Keyword Planner, and take the current position into account. Tip: Since the categories should be changed as rarely as possible, we recommend creating a proper keyword concept.

Advantages and disadvantages

Depending on the content management system, this contains some functions for SEO optimization. This can simplify the work in SEO, but it also has some disadvantages.