7 Technical SEO Tips to Drive Higher Rankings

Technical SEO in 2021 largely revolves around three things: Crawlability, Speed, and User-friendliness. These tips will hopefully help you build a better technical SEO plan for your website and will be a big reason why your rankings skyrocket.

1. Prefetch or Preconnect All Third-Party Content
When you use widgets/apps/plugins, use fonts, place advertising codes, or use any analytics tracking pixels on your website you are pulling content in from third-party domains. Sometimes you won't be aware of how much content this is, how heavy it is in terms of filesize, and how many domains you are actually pulling content from. This can lead to dreadfully slow loading websites and sites that aggrivate users by loading content and shifting the page around.

One of the easiest ways to handle this type of content is to ensure that any third-party domain where content might be pulled from for a page is added as a DNS-prefetch tag or a link rel preconnect tag. While these two tags do things a little differently in short both of them ensure that a user's browser will lookup all necessary DNS information for third-party content (preconnect does DNS-prefetch, TLS negotiation, and TCP handshake). Using at least DNS-prefetch means the percieved load time of your pages is improved which leads to less user bounces, more usage, and often times aids higher rankings.

If you have an SEO consultant make sure you notify them of any changes to your site that might introduce new third-party content and let them determine how to handle it.

2. Compress Images Before or On Upload
Images are another notorious drag on page load speed. Your phone or camera has no problems loading an image to the screen, so why is adding the image to your website such a big deal? In short, because the filesize of the image is much bigger or heavier than you realize and because webpages are designed to be used by more than one user at a time. This combination means that images have to be lightweight so they can download to a browser quickly and so that multiple users calling the same resource at the same time is less likely to overload your hosting system.

There are various ways to do this like Kraken for images you're uploading one by one, Imagify and WP Smush for images on a WordPress website, and Image Recycler for images on Joomla websites.

Find the solution that works best for you. Personally I like the options where the compression is done automatically and I don't have to worry about it much.

3. Write a Great Title Tag
Sure Google and Bing might ignore your title tag and replace it with random words or heading tags, but in most cases a great title tag helps target a page to a search keyword/concept and calls out to web surfers (hang ten bro) to click your link instead of others. Standing out in the otherwise bland search results and stealing clicks from websites or ads above you can be a big win. There's also a chance it impacts rankings in some engines by showing them your content is more popular than others (though most engines deny this).

4. Find Creative Ways to Use Dynamic Features
Search Engines by nature love fresh content, but it can be hard to generate fresh content across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages by hand. Many of today's CMSes have built in dynamic features you can use to make your pages appear more fresh than they really are.

For example you might find a Joomla extension that allows you to insert recent posts from Instagram on a page. On WordPress you can use the 'tag' feature to show related content to a page or document that updates automatically.

The things to remember here is that the dynamic content being pulled in has to closely align with the static content on the page or document. That means you'll need to be extra careful about what you pull in and from where, but when you do get this just right it provides a great way to keep your otherwise stale pages nice and fresh.

5. Make Sure Search Engines Aren't Indexing Junk Content From Your Site
One of the biggest downfalls of a CMS system such as WordPress or Shopify or Wix or Joomla is that there are circumstance where junk pages might get created. Junk pages are thin or useless pages that provide little or no value for users and zero value to search engines. Two of the most common types of junk pages are the pages created by tags on a CMS and the Media Attachment Pages on WordPress.

You can use advanced search operators in various search engines to see if your junk pages are being indexed. If they are you will want to find a permanent solution to keep these pages from that search engines index. The best way to do this is to apply a robots meta noindex tag to the pages or if they serve no purpose to your readers or your system, eliminate the pages altogether and show a 404 or 410 response code.

6. Make Sure to Use Google Search Console
Once a lackluster system filled with mediocre tools and awful data, Google Search Console has become one of the brightest parts of working on a website in Google's index. The data is most often fairly accurate and the system provides a lot of great data about errors Google's crawler has found on a website.

Some of the most important usages here are to find 404 errors that shouldn't be there and to find pages that Google might consider low quality being labeled as "crawled not indexed".

7. Use Autorenewing SSL Certificates
Most web hosts now offer a free SSL option but there is one big thing you need to check for with any SSL you get, free or paid. What you're looking is an autorenewing SSL certificate. Some systems such as WHM cPanel are able to offer SSL certificates via their partners that automatically renew. If you have a current web host ask them if they offer this, if they don't find one that does. Why? Sometimes when an SSL certificate needs to be renewed you might be busy doing other things like running a business. If you're too late the SSL won't renew on time and your website will show as unsafe to users of browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. While this pain will only last a few days, it is still not something you should have to endure, especially considering the solution is often easy to implement today and free.