Houston SEO Strategic Link Building

Technical SEO is a beast that is best broken down into digestible pieces. Technical SEO refers to activities that directly impact how search engines index and crawl your site. An example would be site speed optimization and structured data. Technical SEO is often forgotten because it’s frightening for non-techy people, but if you want to be at the top, you cannot overlook a single element. The first step to improving your technical SEO is knowing where you stand by performing a site audit. The second step is to create a plan to address the areas where there is room for improvement.

 

Implement SSL: Search engines prioritize secure sites, making it one of Google’s 200 ranking factors. If your site is not secured once you purchase your SSL certificate, you will want to migrate any non-SSL pages from HTTP to HTTPS. You will know if the small lock in the upper corner of your page secures your site.

 

 

Set a URL Structure: The beauty of creating your website is that you can make the rules. What’s important is that those rules follow a unified structure, like a roadmap. For example, give your URL subdirectories that indicate where the URL leads.

•      Use lowercase words

•      Use dashes to separate words.

•      Use keywords

•      Keep them concise

 

Once you complete your URL structure, you’ll submit a list of URLs as an XML sitemap to the search engines. Doing so gives search bots additional context about your site, so they don’t have to figure it out as they crawl.

Create an XML sitemap.

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XML Sitemap:  Much like a blueprint for a house, a sitemap is created to help Google search bots to understand and crawl your web pages. Consider it the blueprint for your website. Once it’s completed, make sure you submit your sitemap to the three major search engines. Many people overlook Bing and Yahoo, but we generated leads for our Houston SEO clients using both, and it’s free to sign up.

 

Crawl Budget: Your crawl budget refers to the pages and resources on your site that search bots will crawl. Because the crawl budget isn’t unlimited, make sure you’re prioritizing your most important pages. Here are five ways to maximize your crawl budget:

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• Keep your sitemap updated and submit it to the appropriate webmaster tools.

• Remove duplicate pages.

• Fix or redirect any broken links.

• Make sure your CSS and JavaScript files are crawlable.

• Check your crawl stats regularly and watch for sudden dips or increases.

• Make sure any bot or page you’ve disallowed from crawling is meant to be blocked.

 

Utilize Robots.txt: When a web robot crawls your site, it will first check the /robot.txt, otherwise known as the Robot Exclusion Protocol. This protocol can allow or disallow specific web robots to crawl your site, including specific sections or even pages of your site. You may want to block specific bots from crawling your site altogether. But, unfortunately, there are some bots out there with malicious intent — bots that will scrape your content or spam your community forums.

 

Regarding indexing, search bots crawl your site to gather clues and find keywords to match your web pages with relevant search queries. But, as we’ll discuss later, you have a crawl budget you don’t want to spend on unnecessary data. So, you may want to exclude pages that don’t help with your local SEO.

 

No matter what, your robot.txt protocol will be unique depending on what you’d like to accomplish.

 

Breadcrumb Menus: Do you remember the childhood fable Hansel and Gretel, where two children dropped breadcrumbs on the ground to find their way back home? Well, they were on to something.

 Breadcrumbs create a trail that guides the journey liens take once they land on your site until they exit. It’s a menu of pages that tells users how their current page relates to the rest of the site.

But this is nit just helpful to your visitors but also search bot. So, breadcrumbs should be visible to users so they can easily navigate your web pages without using the Back button and have structured markup language to give accurate context to search bots crawling your site.

 

 Check your SEO log files: You can think of log files as journal entries. Web servers record and store log data about every action they take on your site in log files (the journal). The data recorded includes the time and date of the request, the content requested, and the requesting IP address. But what does this have to do with SEO in Houston? Well, search bots leave a trail in the form of log files when they crawl your site. So, you can determine if, when, and what was crawled by checking the log files and filtering by the user agent and search engine. This information is helpful because you can determine how your crawl budget is spent and which barriers to indexing or access a bot is experiencing. To access your log files, you can use a free tool. For example, our Houston SEO agency relies on Screaming Frog. Indexability Checklist As search bots crawl your website, they begin indexing pages based on their topic and relevance to that topic. Once indexed, your page is eligible to rank on the SERPs.