Technical site optimization involves working on those factors that affect the quality of the site’s interaction with search robots and browsers, the degree of security of working with the site, etc. Such optimization is usually performed very first, and quite often it is included immediately in the work package website creation from scratch.
If the site is not optimized in technical terms, then all further work may be much less effective than expected. After all, if, say, the site is intermittent or takes too long to load from the server, then neither search robots nor live users will be able to see either well-optimized content, attractive design, or convenient structure.
There are a lot of works that can include technical site optimization. The need for a particular type of work depends on the initial characteristics of the site, its current state. To determine what kind of technical optimization work the site needs at the moment, pay attention first of all to several such aspects.
Site Loading Speed.
The longer the site is loaded, the lower its chances of taking high positions on the search results page. Improving the speed of loading a site includes many aspects related to both properly selected and configured hosting, and competently designed design, carefully selected programming technologies. Various online services, such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, allow you to determine that a site needs to optimize its download speed.
All links on the site should be correct because only then will users be able to click on them to get the necessary information. By chance, during regular work with the site, part of the links may stop working correctly, that is, become “broken”. As part of the technical optimization of the site, it is important to regularly check the site for “broken” links and timely correct errors. Service for searching for broken links – W3C Link Checker.
The site will not be ready for further work on optimization and promotion, while on it the same pages or the same information are available at several addresses at once. Indeed, this provokes incorrect indexing of the site by search engines: the wrong page may be taken as relevant. From the very beginning of the creation of the site, it is important to design its structure so that the risk of duplicate pages is minimal. If the site has already been created, it is necessary to optimize its pages using the attribute rel = “canonical”. Programs such as Xenu allow finding duplicate pages on a site.
If the addresses of pages on the site are formed incorrectly, this may be one of the reasons for the low ranking of the site in search engines. Therefore, in the framework of technical optimization, it is customary to create for the site the so-called “CNC” -addresses of pages – addresses that are understandable to humans. Setting URLs for pages is performed differently depending on the CMS (content management system) used on the site.
The robots.txt file contains instructions for search robots that allow you to partially control indexing, for example, by blocking robots from accessing the administrative part of the site. It is important that all instructions in this file are correct because otherwise, you can accidentally “close” the necessary pages from indexing and “open” the service pages. You can find out if the file works correctly using the online robots.txt analysis tool.
In all browsers and on all devices, the site should be displayed correctly, and there should be no syntax errors in its code. The proper layout of the site is responsible for this. Check whether the site has layout errors and display problems on different devices, allow services such as W3C Markup Validation Service, W3C CSS Validation Service, W3C mobileOK Checker.
Technical website optimization includes working not only with the listed but also with many other aspects. As already mentioned, it all depends on the features of a particular site, and it is important to individually select the necessary set of optimization works so that the site is properly prepared for search promotion and able to realize its potential.