Good marketers understand the importance of websites, and they understand the importance of getting that website found by the leading search engines using search engine optimisation, or “SEO” techniques. But the technical aspects of SEO are often overlooked because, if we are honest most marketers are not particularly technically minded, which is why we thought it might be a good idea to introduce the non-technical marketers out there to all of the things that good technical SEO services can do to boost your website’s SEO.
Table of Contents
Formatting your Robots.txt file
You might have never heard of a robots.txt file, which is a small .txt file silling in your root directory helping search engines to index your website. It is important that this file is correctly formatted in order to make sure that the correct parts of your site are noticed by the right kind of search. This is easy for somebody with appropriate technical expertise to take care of, but it is also easy to get wrong, so it is best left to technical experts.
Organising “canonical link elements”
If you do not have a technical background canonical link elements may be something else you have not come across before. Search engines filter out duplicated content on websites which can cause pages to fall down the search engine results pages. Canonical link elements are part of the html coding underpinning a website and are designed to prevent accidental duplications caused by faulty internal links. Ineffective canonical link elements can lead to significantly lower rankings on search engine results pages so getting the help of good technical eCommerce SEO services is always a good idea.
Creating reliable redirects
“Redirects” are used to ensure search engines understand when a webpage has been moved to a new location. For the purposes of technical SEO the best kind of redirect to use is a “301 redirect”, which informs search engines a page has been moved permanently. It is vital to ensure that the redirect points search engines to the relocated web page’s final destination, rather than sending the search engine to a chain of locations.
Eliminating duplicate content
As noted above, content that is repeated on numerous pages within your website, or that can be found on other web domains is filtered out of search results. This to prioritise pages with distinctive and unique content rather than as a punishment for duplicating information, but it has the effect of making your web pages less likely to appear in search results so it does have negative impact. There are a number of technical protocols which can screen your site for unintentional duplication, thus eliminating this issue.
Keeping things mobile friendly
You want to be sure that site visitors have a positive experience, and that means making sure that every page of your website displays well on all devices – especially smart phones, which have become established as the device of choice for searching the internet. This is something that your eCommerce SEO service provider can help with.
Speeding things up
Experts recommended a web page should take no more than one second to load and speed is a function of technical excellence. Large, data heavy pages load slowly not only cause irritation to site users who are likely to simply move without waiting, they will also be incompletely crawled or even completely passed over by search engines. There are several ways to streamline pages to stop this happening, including compressing image files and optimising browser caching. Again, this is technical work best left to people with technical knowledge but it is still vital to the work of marketers.
Get the technical aspects right
Good marketers know when to call in the experts to deal with the technical aspects of a job. Great marketers know to call us. We are only ever an email or a phone call away.
