Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the final lesson in this module and actually, it's the last lesson in
Ahrefs' SEO course for beginners.
In this lesson, we're going to go through some technical SEO best practices so you
can keep your site in good health.
Let's get started.
So the first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy.
Site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website.
You can think of it like a mindmap.
At the top, you'd have your homepage.
Then you'd probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage like your
services page, your blog, and about page.
Then from these main topics, you'd probably have even more branches to other pages.
These branches represent internal links, which are just links from one page on
your site to another.
And they help search engines understand the relationship between these pages.
Site structure also helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently, which is
why having a logical hierarchy is important.
Now, what we've talked about is pretty basic stuff and you may already be doing this.
But it can get more complex as you add more pages to your site like blog posts,
category pages, or product pages.
We have a full video on how to use internal links to rank higher on Google,
so I'll link that up for you in the description.
Alright, the second thing is to ensure your pages don't load slow.
As you may know, Pagespeed has been a confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010.
And in 2018, Google announced that they'd be using page speed in mobile search rankings.
Now, you don't need to obsess over every millisecond it takes for your page to load.
Google says:
"The "Speed Update," as we're calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest
experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries."
So bottom line: you don't want your pages to load slow.
And there are two very basic things that I think every website should do.
The first is to cache your website's content.
Caching is basically a way to temporarily store copies of files, so it can be delivered
to visitors in a more efficient way.
And most web hosting companies that I've come across have caching features.
And the second thing you can do is compress your images.
Compressing images makes your file sizes smaller and smaller files load faster.
You can use a tool like Shortpixel which has both a web interface and a WordPress plugin.
Now, if you wanted to take page speed a step further, then it can get quite
technical and complex.
So we actually created a full tutorial on how to speed up a WordPress website using
Cloudflare and a WordPress plugin, so I'll leave a link to that in the description.
And the final thing I want to talk about is to do your best to stay on top of around
50 potential SEO errors.
Trust me, it's not as bad as it sounds.
There are potentially hundreds of technical SEO issues that can and some will definitely
happen to your site.
Some of these things include:
Pages becoming broken that still have internal links pointing at them.
Orphan pages, which are pages on your site that have no incoming internal links.
And these aren't great because it can make it tough for search engines to actually
discover them.
Duplicate content issues.
And redirect chains to name a few.
Now, there's no point in me going through 50 different potential issues because it'll only
matter to you if you run into them.
So what I recommend you do is run scheduled website audits on your site.
And a website audit will give you a full analysis of potential issues that could
be harming your website's SEO performance.
If you're an Ahrefs user, you can do that using our Site Audit tool.
And even if you don't have an Ahrefs paid plan, you can sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster
Tools account which will let you crawl up to 10,000 pages on each website you own.
To get started, go to ahrefs.com/awt and sign up for your free Webmaster Tools account.
Then, you'll need to verify your website, meaning, prove that you actually own it.
You can do that using Google Search Console which is the easiest method, or if you don't have
a Search Console account, you can do it manually.
Just enter your domain and click Continue.
Then verify your website using one of these three methods.
And I'll actually just go back and use the Google Search Console method.
Next, you'll need to import your sites.
And I'll choose to run the first audit now, schedule weekly audits, and I'll also enable
the "crawl external links" option to ensure that we catch any broken or redirected outgoing links.
Hit Import, and the crawl should start running.
Now, after the crawl has completed, go to the Overview report in your Site Audit project,
and you'll immediately see things like your Health Score, which is a percentage of URLs on your site
that don't have errors.
You'll also see the top issues we found on your site as well as the number of
URLs that had the issue.
So when you run into an issue, you can click on the caret to see a description of what it means
and also a short snippet of how to fix it.
And once you have an idea of what the issue is and how to fix it, just click on the number under
the "crawled" column to see the affected URLs.
Then it's just a matter of fixing them one by one or hiring someone to help.
And since you set up weekly scheduled audits, you can revisit the Overview report to see if
there's any "SEO maintenance" you can do.
And that wraps up Ahrefs' SEO course for beginners.
Everything you've learned in this course should be enough to get you indexed,
ranking, and to keep your site in good technical health.
And I've linked up a playlist in the description to the entire course with all 14 videos which
will be free forever.
Thank you for joining me and I hope you were able to get a ton of value from the course.
And make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
Feel free to browse around our channel and if you have any questions, leave them in
the comments and we'll do our best to get to each one.
I'll see you in the next tutorial.