Search Engine Optimization is, without any doubt, one of the main pillars of the modern digital marketing arena. Keeping in mind its ongoing and even growing relevancy, this shouldn’t come off as a huge surprise.

According to recent data published by Ahrefs as many as 69% of all online experiences start with some search engine, most probably Google. Only 0.63% of this traffic ever goes to the second page SERP. These numbers give good SEO practices an even greater sense of relevancy and force marketers to look outside of traditional content strategies and fight for every inch of this digital space.

Let us take a look then at some of the suggestions that will help you refine the technical side of SEO and deliver a much better and higher-ranking all-around package.

Get the internal links in order

Getting quality backlinks is probably one of the most important SEO practices in 2023. However, what people often fail to realize is that website crawlers put an equally important emphasis on your website’s internal structure, so take some time to inspect internal links and organize them into a sensible and organized hierarchy.

Broken links should be eliminated, while orphaned pages (the ones having no article to point out to them) and new articles should be properly exposed on the pages packing more traffic. This simple move can drastically change how your site behaves and, ultimately, ranks.

Take care of the website loading speed

Poorly optimized loading speeds can have devastating effects on ranking factors like bounce rate. Do your best then to do everything in your power to make your pages clean, fast, and efficient.

Start by making sure your host provider is up to speed and capable of providing optimal performance. Once you are done, you can proceed to the following interventions:

• Optimize the images, preferably for mobile devices
• Combine multiple JS and CSS scripts to reduce the number of HTTP requests
• Reduce the size of the Document Object Model
• Compress CSS scripts
• Reduce the visual clutter and implement a more minimalistic design

Conduct a thorough SEO audit

Otherwise, your measurers may lack a clear sense of direction and boil down to simply checking boxes. Although everything we are going to cover will improve your technical SEO infrastructure, the issues that are more severe will, naturally, require a greater level of attention.

With that in mind, the SEO companies like For Dots have a lot of experience in discovering and resolving such problems so you shouldn’t have any problem finding a proper service. In the end, you will get transparent and actionable results that will help you refine individual facets and make the website’s performance much snappier.

Utilize sensible and easy-to-navigate website structure

Start by creating a simple, top-down navigation menu that will outline all important resources on the website and deliver on the promise you made here. All types of content should be easy to locate even without the search bar.

Also, be sure to implement the pillar-cluster internal linking model and make all pages on the site available in no more than 3 to 4 clicks from the main menu. Using breadcrumb page paths will make this job much easier. Finally, keep things consistent.

All facets of your website should behave the same, offer the same navigation options, and feature an identical hierarchy structure.

Use canonical links

Duplicate content is sometimes unavoidable. With that in mind, even if your website does have identically titled pages, you should at least prevent them from competing for traffic and ticking your ratings in the wrong direction.

The simplest way to avoid this issue is to choose the page you want to rank and mark it with the canonical tag so Google knows to put exclusive attention to this page.

So, let’s say your website features these two pages:

• http://marketplace.com/best-shoes -for-running
• http://marketplace.com/best-selling/best-shoes-for -running

If you decide to rank the page immediately accessible from top-level navigation menu the canonical link should look like this:

Create your custom 404 page

Although not among the most important SEO things you need to get right, 404 errors are a real reality of life and need to be addressed. Some of the most popular ways for doing that include the strategies like:

• Using redirects that will double the page loading speeds
• Let people go back to Google and find the content they need themselves

Both these usual methods can have a very negative influence on your website’s overall ranking. But, there is a third option as well.

You can simply create a simple and cute 404 page that will inform the users about the error and suggest a couple of links they can follow voluntarily keeping the website performance on track.

Final thoughts

We hope these couple of suggestions gave you a better idea about the strategies you can utilize to keep the technical side of your SEO efforts on the same level as your content strategies. The modern SEO arena is incredibly competitive and the number of pages fighting for good ranking is growing at a staggering exponential rate.

So, even though doing some things as simple as creating customized 404 pages can seem mundane and irrelevant, you shouldn’t leave them unchecked. Even small oversights can condemn your pages to eternal anonymity.