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Semalt Tells How To Make Your Website Run Like Clockwork


In 2021, Google will be rolling out some pretty amazing features for website owners. In May 2021, Google plans on rolling out a new ranking signal based on its refurbished Core Web Vitals. We have an article solely dedicated to discussing Core Web Vitals. You can refer to that to get a better understanding of what we are about to discuss.

Google is a user-oriented search engine. That means that their updates are designed to provide a better user experience. Websites, on the other hand, are the entities that try to make their platforms more accommodating to the needs of internet users. Are you ready for the big incoming change?

To answer this question, you first need to audit your website, discover its flaws, and fix them.

The internet is an important aspect of our modern-day society. We all rely on it for information and entertainment. When we use the internet in search of things, we dig through the websites displayed on SERP. As we analyze each website, we ditch those we don't like and use websites that help our needs.

Many of you reading this article have your website, and you want users to have a good time when they click on your link. You want your visitors to come back and recommend your website to people. Of course, you can't please everyone, and not all of your visitors will follow the chain. Some users will see your website as perfect, while other users may find it faulty and move to another website where they feel more comfortable.

However, there are certain traits that seem to impress the majority of internet users. We have realized that internet users generally prefer a website that functions effectively around the clock. This is achievable for every website, which makes it disturbing when yours isn't.

On the technical front of a websites UX, there are three critical areas:

How to make your website run like clockwork

Tend to the technical issues on your website

When you have several technical errors on your website, they have several bad side effects which damage your chances of success. Some of the common technical issues include
  • Poorly displayed content
  • Mal functioning pages, for example, users clicking the subscribe button, but nothing happens.
  • Pages you hope to convert aren't picking up in SERP.
The result of these or any other technical SEO issue is that the website will begin to suffer a reducing amount of user activity. It is important you understand that your website goals are directly tied to users' activity. If your user activity suffers, your goals become more difficult to achieve.
These issues are fond of developing over time, and the best way to stop them from damaging your site is by timely technical audits. These audits need to be performed an average of once every week. You can do them more often or less; however, the closer the intervals, the better. All you need to do is set out time to check up on your audit reports and fix any errors that you find.

Indexing issues 

Have you noticed certain discrepancies in how your site's page appears in search? Using the Google Search Console tool, you can find out exactly what is wrong with your site. In this tool, you can discover your indexing issues in the index> Coverage section.

Tick the error, validate with a warning, exclude checkboxes, and the section below displays every problem with how your website is being indexed. If you are specific about certain pages, click on the entries in Details to generate results on that specific page.

You can fix the issues discovered by re-adding those pages to the index or by removing them. Once you've don't this, click on validate fix. The changes made to improve how your website is indexed can be done in your sitemap. Here are some common problems :
  • You do not have a sitemap.
  • It doesn't work
  • It is outdated 
To solve all of these issues, you should upload an already updated sitemap to your site. to do this, you can 
  • Create your site map. This can be manually or by using the XML-Sitemap Tool.
  • Upload this update to your site
  • Next, visit the index > Sitemaps Section in Google Search Console. Here you will enter your Sitemaps URL and click submits.

If you still have any outdated sitemap in the Submitted sitemap section, ensure that your remove them.

Robot.txt

In many cases, your website can suffer simply because this file is missing from your site. If that is the issue with your site, all you need to do is upload the file and ensure it works properly. The purpose of the robot.txt file is important as it tells the search engine what they should and shouldn't crawl on your site. This constitutes a problem if this file is misused.

You can open it and look for the following problems: 
  • The inability of  search engine bots to crawl your site
This error is easy to occur. When your bots crawl your sites, this line of code is expected to be seen in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
If a slash appears after Disallow: the bots can do nothing. 
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If any directories are denoted after the Disallow: / command, it ensures that search engine bots understand that you do not want them to be crawled. You should be sure that you do not want this information to be indexed; otherwise, the bot will be unable to index some part of your site you need to appear in search.
  • Bots crawl pages and folders that you do not want to be crawled.
This is the direct opposite of the problem described above. Here, the directories you want to block are not denoted in the file. You should make the Disallow: / commands appear in each line for each of those directories before you re-upload the file. 
  • Typos and syntax errors
This error is self-explanatory. Once you've corrected all your typos and syntax errors, re-upload your robots.txt

Duplicate content

Using tools like DeepCrawl and Screamer Frog is excellent in discovering duplicate content scattered around your site. Here are some of the common errors under this category:
  • Page titles and meta descriptions
The page title and Meta description can have the same names and descriptions, which confuses users. Once discovered, you should change all your duplicates to have only unique content on your site.
  • Contents copied from other pages on your site or from other sites.
You must make all your content unique. If that is impossible, you should add a rel="canonical" tag to the URL in the <head> section of the page.
  • Variations in the same URLs index
Google can sometimes index the same page multiple times. This can happen for several reasons, so it is important you get rid of any unwanted copies. Some popular scenarios are when there are parameters after its URL or when a website has both HTTP and HTTPS versions. 

Content displaying issues 

This issue typically occurs as:
  • Damaged images 
  • Damaged anchor texts 
  • Damaged JavaScript files
  • Damaged links (and redirects)
  • Damaged or missing H1-H6 tags
 To find out such issues, you will need to use SEO tools such as WebCEO. All you need to do is create a project for your site and scan it in the Technical Audit Tool.\

Structured data error

Adding structured data to your pages is no walk in the park. With so much effort put into it, it can become a major issue when errors ruin not just the effort that has been put in but also what your site looks like in search. 

You should test the pages you've marked up to find and correct any errors using Google's free Rich Result Test tool.

HTML, CSS, and other code errors

There can be errors in the code on your website, which are easily noticed when your content isn't displaying properly. However, there are situations when the effect of code errors aren't seen. You should run your site through analysis tools like W3C validator to find all your problems. It works for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and many other programming languages. Once you have a result, you can then correct the offending pages.

Minimize your page load time

How fast your pages load on devices is one of the most noticeable aspects of a user's experience. Goggle it is also an important ranking factor for Google. This makes it critical that your website loads as quickly as possible. At its core, a page's speed indicates how easy the website interacts with its server.

How to make your website load faster

  • minimize the number of assets on the page
  • merge assets when possible 
  • optimize your images
  • optimize the page code
  • put JS Script at the end of your page code
  • invest in good hosting services 
  • use good compression software
  • use lazy loading 
  • have few redirects 

Optimize your site for mobile devices

It is no longer news that Google rewards websites that are easy to use on mobile devices and computers. Optimizing your site makes it usable on other devices that can use the internet. When optimizing your site for mobile devices, here are the main goals
  • page load time 
  • responsive design 
  • optimized images 
  • no content obstruction pop-ups
  • no unsupported contents  

Conclusion 

The technical aspects of SEO are usually the most difficult, and they require professional help. Our clients at Semalt do not have to worry about learning all these because we take care of their site on their behalf. This gives our clients more time to develop other aspects of their business that matters while we ensure that their website works like clockwork. Join our platform today, and watch your website grow.