Technical SEO, the term when used together sends a chill down the spine of folks like me who don’t carry a technical background.
The very thought of coding is scary.
But Technical SEO isn’t necessarily coding, you can be a great SEO despite not having programming skills.
SEO is one of the most challenging aspects of Digital Marketing because to be a great SEO you don’t just have to master SEO.
It’s an interconnected world, to be a good SEO you have to know what makes a website responsive, it’s internal workings, you need to have the knowledge of hosting & domain name servers, you need to have insane research skills.
That’s not the case with other aspects of Digital Marketing like Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, or PPC. You have to figure out the platform & audiences.
In this post, you can kiss goodbye to your worries of technical SEO because we are specifically going over aspects of Technical SEO that don’t require any programming skills
1. 301 Redirection
Redirection is an important technical aspect of search engine optimization. If not paid attention or done incorrectly it could put a hole on your website’s rankability & incoming traffic.
Why would you need to set up redirection on a website?
A redirection needs to be set up under mainly two circumstances,
#1. The website has a bunch of 404 broken pages
#2. The page URL was changed
If the website has a bunch of 404 pages, then that needs fixing it can’t just stay like that. 404 pages create a frustrating experience for users when they come across pages like that on Google. Google wants to improve the user experience that has always been their #1 priority. In fact, while crawling your website if the Google Bot encounters a lot of 404 pages then that can gravely affect your website’s crawlability.
A 301 redirect becomes a necessity then. Using htaccess you need to set up the redirection
2. Image Optimization
Image Optimization is an absolute no-brainer technical SEO optimization that needs to be undertaken that a lot of websites fail to do, especially the ones that are not optimizing their sites for search.
Essentially Image Optimization means reducing the size of an image while keeping the visual quality intact. It’s important to do because un-optimized images increase the webpage file size, the browser has to spend more time downloading the image file which reduces the speed of your website, the time it takes to load your website.
There are two easy ways to optimize images of your website.
- Tinyjpg: Tinyjpg is a website where essentially you have to drag and drop images and thus it will reduce the image file size which now you can upload to your website.
- Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin: This plugin will save a ton of time that you will otherwise spend manually resizing every single image, install this plugin and it will automatically resize images and also add lazy loading to it.
3. Leverage Browser Caching
Leverage Browser Caching means exactly what it says, read again “Leverage Browser Caching”
You can leverage browser caching capability that browser has for every visitor that revisits your site.
What it essentially means is that instead of serving a fresh page to the repeating visitor every time you can instead serve the cached page that’s stored in the visitor’s browser cookie that way the page will load instantly for him, offering amazing user experience. Because let’s face it, nobody likes waiting for the page to load.
This functionality is quite useful for all websites because there’s hardly any website whose web page changes everyday a couple of times.
This functionality is prohibited to be used by those whose web pages are being updated every day. Which is rarely the case.
There are 2 ways to implement leverage browser caching in your website.
If you’re a WordPress user then popular WordPress caching plugins like Litespeed Cache, WP Rocket & more will take care of it with just plugin configuration.
If it’s a static website then you simply have to place a code in the htaccess file. Htaccess file can be found in your hosting cpanel.
Here is the code
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
Based on how often or less often your website content gets updated you can reset the access time from 1 year to maybe months.
4. Host Google Fonts Locally
Google Fonts are fonts that pretty much every WordPress website uses as these fonts look more beautiful than those that are already installed.
The downside of using Google Fonts is that these aren’t pre installed fonts; these fonts are hosted on fonts.googleapis.com
As a result, when your website is accessed the browser has to load fonts from an external source this means more time being wasted on DNS Lookup as it looks for in fonts.googleapis.com
There are ways to instead host Google Fonts locally.
There are two ways actually, one is simple.
Using Plugins: There is this plugin called OMGF | Host Google Fonts Locally, using this plugin you can easily host Google Fonts Locally
2nd Way requires a little bit of programming language, nothing too intense. Here is a resource that explains it the best.
So, there it is 4 aspects of technical SEO that doesn’t require programming skills at all, you can do these yourself with ease.
Let us know in the comments any more tech seo hacks that you know which doesn’t require coding.
