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Here’s our recommendations for making sure your website meets technical SEO best practices so search engines can properly access and index your website.

Mobile Usability

  • Increasingly important as Google is in the process of rolling out their ‘mobile first index’ which means webpages will be crawled and ranked from the perspective of someone on a mobile device rather than a desktop as it has been up until this point
  • Check against Google’s mobile friendly testing tool and analysis in Search Console

Page speed

  • Most important as it relates to mobile usability
  • Less important to rankings overall except if extremely slow
  • Can have a significant impact on conversions
  • Should be in line with or better than competitors (test with https://tools.pingdom.com/ Melbourne server)

Internal Linking

  • Helps search engines to reach and crawl all the pages and understand the relationship between them and overall website structure
  • Breadcrumbs are good for automatic internal links and helpful navigation (use Schema markup on these to have them appear in search results)
  • Contextual (in content) internal links between pages are good for navigation and helping search engines understand the relationship between the pages
  • Contextual links use target keywords (of the page being linked to) 50% of the time, branded and URL anchors 25% and misc. 25%

Schema.org

  • Try to include relevant Schema wherever possible on your pages as it helps search engines understand the pages better and allows them to show information in rich snippets which are more likely to attract the eye and the click of the searcher
  • Reviews and aggregate ratings, in particular, are good to include as you can get the yellow star ratings in search results. Note that this only works on internal pages, not the homepage

Google search console

  • Set the target to Australia if not using a .com.au domain
  • Upload and submit an XML sitemap
  • Check errors/suggestions/warning in Search Console and implement
  • Verify robots.txt isn’t blocking any important pages or resources, including JavaScript that’s required to render the page properly

SSL Certificate

  • Becoming more and more important as Google’s Chrome browser now displays a ‘not secure’ warning on any website with an SSL certificate if it contains web forms

Make sure to also check out our other SEO Best Practices.