Welcome to the final lesson in this module and actually, it’s the last lesson in Ahrefs’ SEO Course for beginners.
in this lesson, we’re going to go through some technical SEO best practices so you can keep your site in good health.
Let’s get started.
So the first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy.
Site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website.
You can think of it like a mindmap.
At the top, you’d have your homepage.
Then you would probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage like your services page, your blog, and about page.
then from these main topics, you would probably have even more branches to other pages.
these branches represent internal links, which are just link from one page on your site to another.
and they help search engines understand the relationship between these pages.
site structure also helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently, which is why having a logical hierarchy is important.
Now, what we’ve talked about is pretty basic stuff and you may already be doing this.
but it can get more complex as you add more pages to your site like blog posts, category pages, or product pages,
we have a full video on how to use internal links to rank higher on google,
so I will link that up for you in the description.
Alright, the second thing to ensure your pages don’t load slow, as you may know, pagespeed has been confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010.
and in 2018, google announces that they would be using page speed in mobile search rankings.
Now, you don’t need to obsess over every millisecond it takes for your page to load.
google says :
The “Speed update”, as we are calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries
so bottom line : you don’t want your pages load slow.
and there are two very basic things that I think every website should do.
the first is to cache your website’s content.
Caching is basically a way temporarily store copies of files, so it can be delivered to visitors in a more efficient way.
and most web hosting companies that I’ve come across have caching features.
and the second thing you can do is compress your images.
Compressing images make your file sizes smaller and smaller files load faster.
you can use a tool like shortpixel which has both a web interface and a WordPress plugin.
Now, if you wanted to take page speed a step further, then it can get quite technical and complex.
so we actually created a full tutorial on how to speed up a WordPress website using
Cloudflare and a WordPress plugin, so I will Leave a link to that in the description.
and the final thing I want to talk about is to do your best to stay on top of around 50 potential SEO errors.
trust me, it’s not as bad as it sounds
There are potentially hundreds of technical SEO issues that can and some will definitely happen to your site
some of these things include :
Pages becoming broken that still have internal links pointing at them
Orphan pages, which are pages on your site that have no incoming internal links.
and these are not great because it can make it tough for search engines to actually discover them
Duplicate content issues
and redirect chains to name a few
now, there’s no point in me going through 50 different potential issues because it’ll only matter to you if you fun into them.
So what I recommend you do is run scheduled website audits on your site.
and a website audit will give you a full analysis of potential issues that could be harming your website’s SEO performance.