22 Aug Technical SEO (5 Different Types of SEO Pt 3)
There are 5 major areas of SEO – if you focus on these before anything else, you can get solid results, fast, from your SEO efforts. The third is your Technical SEO.
Hello folks, my name is Paul Barrs from paulbarrs.com. Hello and welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and watch this video. We’re continuing on our series on essential elements that you can apply to your website to improve your SEO. And in this video number three, we’re looking at the technical elements. Let me say right up front, there are a lot of them. I’m not going to be covering them all, just let’s look at three. Three things that you can do to make a big difference.
Number one, HTTPS. Have you secured your site yet with an SSL certificate? It’s a simple yes or it’s a simple no. Couple of things that you want to be aware of when you’re doing that because while this might only be a small ranking signal, we believe it still is and has going for sometime an SEO ranking signal from Google. When you secure your site, I’m not talking about protecting it from hackers. I’m talking about the data transfer between the client’s browser and your website so that whatever forms they might submit or queries through to you, that information is secure.
It doesn’t even need to be for an order online anymore. So, when you grab your certificate, make sure, well I guess first understand what you need. Either a high standard SSL certificate for your top level to domain. Just your www.yourdomain.com or perhaps a wild cat certificate which will also cover sub-directories or sub-domains I should say. Such as in my case audio.paulbarrs.com where I store my audio files. media.paulbarrs.com other files there as well and they become secure also. That’s a wild card certificate.
Choose the appropriate one for you and look around. Costs do vary. Obviously the less you pay, the less you get. I’ve seen SSL certificates range from say $100 a year to $1000 a year depending on what you get and it’s worthwhile looking at some of the different options, that’s number one.
Number two, when you grab it get professionals to install on the server for you, don’t try and do it yourself if you’ve never done this before, pay someone. Classic example recently, I was reviewing a client’s site and they’ve got an SSL certificate installed on here and I didn’t even know.
So, I punched in HTTPS, did that, the green lock, the padlock didn’t show up, instead, the message I got was, “Not all items on this page are secure.” Here’s the thing, installing the SSL certificate to the server doesn’t automatically secure the website. You need to go back and make sure that all elements in the configuration of your site and the redirect from the non SSL to the SSL actually is setup correctly, very, very important to do that. So, that’s the first thing from a technical point of view.
Number two and this is so important, probably should have been number one, and that is your page load speed. The amount of time it takes for your pages to load when a visitor comes along. And there are many different things that you can do this just as there are many different tools you can use to measure it. Most importantly look at optimizing your images.
Look at optimizing your code whether you’re using compression or whether you’re packaging things up in such a way with your JavaScript queries and whether you move things from the header load time to the footer, whether you’re looking at using a content delivery network, whether you’re looking at using a [inaudible 00:04:00] plug-in for example. So many different things. Now if you’re technically minded these will come to you quite easily. If not then you need to get a professional to improve your page load speed.
I was looking at a client’s site recently and it was starting around 21 seconds, and out of the box, a word press theme just thrown up there it could be that bad. We were able to get it done to four and a half seconds using literally every single tool in the box. The only thing that prevented them from going further from there was the mass amount of content and that’s okay. So, we then began to optimize their entry pages and that’s a great strategy.
Using Google analytics to view their most viewed entry pages, we optimized those even further and by reducing the page load speed, have increased their conversions and their visitor time on site. There you go and so very important to do these different types of things.
And then finally I guess number three, again not easy to implement if you’re not technically minded but is your schemer markup.
Now there are many different types of schemer markup that you can use on your side. It really all depends on what your target market is, who they are, where they are, and what they’re looking for. There’s your obviously social media, your open graph tags and so on. There’s personal schemer markups, there’s business or company, there’s local business, there’s a whole range of different things that you could look at to improve how the search engines read your pages and present your pages.
And that’s what it’s all about folks, if someone’s looking for something, you want to come up in search and want to be presented so that you standout above bigger and better than your competition. And that’s where the schemer markup can come to play.
So, those I believe, of all the different options when it comes to on page SEO, are my three favorites. There are things that you need to look at for your site, there are things that you need to consider, have we done these yet? Can I do them myself or should I get a professional to do them, all right? Few things further I got a couple more videos in this particular series, we’ll continue on. I’ll talk to you then.
My name is Paul Barrs from paulbarrs.com signing off. Bye-bye.
