Normally, I take this work (Technical SEO) entirely off my clients’ hands because for a website to rank well in search engines and AI chatbots, it must be technically sound. Google, for example, considers the following points:
Performance: The loading speed must be lightning fast.
Accessibility: People with low vision must be able to easily read your website with a screen reader.
Best Practices: Security must be in order, etc.
SEO: Meta tags, Structured data must be valid.
Go to the following URL and enter your website domain: developers.google.com/speed/. If you don’t see four green circles as shown below, please contact me if you’d like me to technically optimize your website for SEO, using plugins like Perfmatters. Test not only the homepage, but also blog posts and important pages.
Google Search Console
In addition to Page Speed Insights (see above), I use Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmasters) to technically optimize websites for SEO. You can also see notifications here if there are issues with certain pages that prevent Google from indexing them.
Sitemap
In Google Search Console, you can submit your sitemap to have your site indexed faster. It’s best not to include all pages in the XML sitemap. Unimportant pages like “privacy statement” and “terms and conditions” should be left out. Google has a limited crawl budget, meaning Google has limited time to index your website. That crawl budget should be spent on the most important pages. The sitemap indicates which pages are important. In content management systems, sitemap plugins often create multiple sitemaps. Select only the important ones.
Redirects
If you replace an existing website with a new one with a different structure, or if you change page URLs, the existing URLs will disappear. Links from external sites and Google-indexed URLs will return a 404 error without action, because the page no longer exists. This is obviously not good for the user-friendliness of your website. Therefore, a move message must be placed on the server that points the old URLs to the new one. To do this, 301 redirects must be set up to the new page. You can find the URL errors in Google Search Console, and if you have fixed the broken links, you can report this there.
Preventing Duplicate Content
Duplicate content occurs when two URLs point to the same page. This halves the value Google assigns to the pages. Therefore, it is important that you indicate what the canonical URL is, or that we use a 301 redirect to redirect the URLs to the most important URL.
Other technical SEO techniques
Noindex,follow
For the same reason (limited crawl budget), it’s better to set pages that don’t necessarily need to be found in Google to “noindex,follow,” such as:
/shopping-cart/
/terms-and-conditions/
/disclaimer/
/thanks/
/cookie-and-privacy-statement/
Robots.txt
In this file, you can specify that certain URLs should not be indexed, such as the login page of the WordPress backend.
Disclaimer: This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Information and opinions that require in-depth knowledge should always be verified by the appropriate professional.
With over 25 years of experience in marketing and yachting, I coach sailors across Europe to enhance their skills and provide expert guidance in buying, selling, and chartering sailing yachts. Originally from the Netherlands and now based in Italy, I serve as a bridge between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean. I also support business owners with strategic marketing to help them turn their visions into reality. Please don’t hesitate to call me if I can assist you in any way.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
