There’s a number of technical optimisation factors that can be generally grouped into a few sets, with the ones applicable to a wider number of landing pages given consideration first.
At the most basic level, the search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render and index the pages on your website. Generally, there’s also a list of consideration such as the Server-side factors, which affect your website in its entirety; content navigation considerations which deals with the navigational aspects of the website; the use of structured data inluding its eligibility for rich snippets.
Server-side Factors for Technical SEO
The server response time stands for the amount of time it takes the server to respond to a browser request and it’s the first measure to be considered in a sequence because it comes at the very beginning of a page being loaded. It is generally advisable to keep it under 200ms.
There’s a list of factors that directly affect the server response times, namely the server-side ranking factors:
1. Employing the optimal Hosting Plan
So as previously noted, even before getting to install WordPress, one major decision you’ll have to make is choosing a hosting provider and a hosting plan. If cost is an important factor, Hostinger is the value-for-money option. Otherwise, if prefer going for the very high-end of hosting, you should consider Kinsta.
Among the reasons for choosing Hostinger as your hosting provider are the fact that they’re big enough to allow for economies of scale, as a result both offering competitive prices for their plans. Most importantly, they are well-regarded as providing timely and helpful customer service, commited to promptly solving hosting issues and this is imperative for the rare ocassions when you do need support.
Hostinger offers a number of hosting plans and you should read the specifications carefully, paying particular attention to the approximate number of monthly visitors those plans will be able to serve and the storage capacity. You will want to ensure that the hosting plan can accommodate a significantly higher number of monthly visitors than you expect to have to account for traffic fluctuations and has plenty of extra storage to allow you to develop your website moving forward.
If you chose Hostinger, you should also consider if you’ll need:
- A WordPress staging tool: employed to test various website features without publishing them on the website. The primary benefit of this comes in the form of preventing technical errors on the live version of the website which may arise as you add new and more complex features.
- Object Cache: Capable of accelerating page loading speeds, which translate into positive signals to search engines about the perceived quality of a landing page.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): Helpful in accelerating page loading speeds on websites which are accessed by website users across the globe, as opposed to website users within a single country.
- Dedicated IP address: Can be useful for increased control over the hosting environment among other things, which may be important for certain websites. As a general rule, hosting with a dedicated IP address is useful for either large or complex websites.
As a brand grows and with an increase in traffic more server resources need to be allocated, thus naturally the server response times go up, adversely affecting the overall page loading speeds. It’s important to have the right hosting plan in place to allow your website traffic to flow freely, without being hindered by the limits of the allocated resources. The key aspects to ensure are covered are:
- Disk Usage Limit: the storage space neccessary for all of your website-related files
- Files and Directories (inodes) Limit: the total number of files
- CPU Limit: the processing power to execute code, process visitor requests, and run applications
A good hosting plan will provide key security features. Hacking attacks are constantly on the rise, which is why search engines are programmed to favour websites that are well-secured. This is because no search engine wants to recommend potentially dangerous websites to its users.
A good hosting plan maintains faster page loading speeds. The time it takes a website to load can have a strong impact on user experience (UX) as well as organic SERP rankings. Understandably, the search engines don’t want to recommend pages that have the potential to deliver a poor user experience.
As a result, loading speeds and specifically taking steps to speed up your pages can significantly help with organic search rankings. From the hosting side of things this can be achieved through using a Virtual Private Server (VPS) plan instead of shared hosting for high-traffic websites, which allow for pages to run fast, even during spikes in traffic.
Hosting Plan Types
The type of hosting which is right for your can depend first and foremost on the amount of traffic and the traffic spikes you may be receiving. The 4 general options for hosting are:
- Shared hosting is the most basic and cheapest of the hosting tiers which allows you to rent space on a shared hosting server. These servers host other websites on the same server alongside your website and provide the least performace, security and flexibility. This is the reason why it often has trouble keeping up with high levels of traffic, so it isn’t best for high-traffic websites.
- A dedicated server is precisely what the name implies. A single server dedicated to your website, giving you full control over all the hardware that makes up the server. Dedicated server hosting plans tend to be of a significantly higher price compared to shared hosting plans or Virtual Private Servers, but can give better performance, security and flexibility.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting plans are a cross between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting. These hosting plans entail essentially renting a part of a dedicated server. In theory these servers are rented out and operate as virtually independent servers from one another. VPS hosting plans offer affordable prices with scaling, better performance, and better security than shared hosting, but remain inferior to dedicated servers.
- A cloud server also known as Public Cloud Hosting are scalable hosting solutions on an enterprise-grade cloud platform. Cloud hosting can launch in minutes and scales quickly up and down as needed for traffic fluctuations or workload requirements. These servers are highly reliable with redundant hardware and high availability built in, with plans tending to be the most expensive among the 4, but providing the best scalability, flexibility, agility, and cost-efficiency for large-scale websites.
It really depends on the website the kind of hosting that you should choose, starting with shared hosting for small websites, VPS for websites that are growing in traffic, dedicated servers for high-traffic websites and cloud servers for large-scale enterprise websites.
Upgrading your hosting plan is likely to have a favorable effect on your page loading speeds and on the Time to First Byte (TTFB) in particular. Time to First Byte (TTFB) refers to the time between the browser requests a page and when it receives the first byte of information from the server.
This time includes Domain Name System (DNS) lookup and establishing the connection using a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) handshake and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) handshake if the request is made over https. Time to First Byte (TTFB) is of particular importance for SEO as it proved to have positive correlations with rankings in a multitude of SEO studies.
3. Optimising the Use of Images
With the goal of minimising the number of files and images a web page has to load by reducing the number of HTTP requests and thus improving the loading speed of the web page, deleting unneccessary images can go a long way. The idea here is to clean your media library and delete any unnecessary images that you probably don’t even use anymore, as for instance images used to web pages that are no longer present. The next step is to reduce the file size of those images that are left and are to be used on your web pages.
Using Lazy Load also known as Deferring images that allows the webpage to load faster without the need to fully download the image before the page is loaded. In other words, instead of sending unnecessary HTTP requests, this technique only sends server requests when a user scrolls down to an image on the page. A smart utilisation of resources with the lazy loading technique can significantly reduce the number of HTTP requests and improve the page loading speeds of your website.
4. Reducing the Amount of Resources
The amount of resources, including but not limited to stylesheets, scripts and images, that need to be loaded all contribute to page loading speeds. In simple terms the less resources any given page is using the faster the page loading speeds. The number of resources can be reduced significantly through the following:
Minifying and Combining HTML, CSS and JS
Minifying external HTML, CSS and Javascript files: Minification is an important technique used to increase the loading speed of a website. It means removing unnecessary code that is not necessary to execute as for example, unnecessary characters, white space, comments, etc. — from HTML, CSS and Javascript files.
Next, combining all your code files (HTML, CSS and Javascript) into one separate file each. For example, if your website has 3 external CSS files, and 4 Javascript files, it would mean 7 requests. However, if you combine the 3 CSS files into one CSS file, and the 4 Javascript files into 1 file, an action called concatinating, your site will send only 2 requests instead of 7, thus lowering the page loading times by reducing the number of HTTP requests.
5. Using Content Delivery Networks
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are used to store various files around the world, which accelerates the delivery of pages as they are loaded from physical locations that are closer to the end user. CDNs are especially useful for websites that target multiple countries or one website that is spread out geographically. Either way, Content Delivery Networks (also known as Content Distribution Networks, CDNs) can positively affect SEO as they can contribute to lower page loading times.
In more detailed terms, websites that don’t use CDNs rely on a single server to distribute content to all website visitors, whether they’re a km down the road or located across the globe. A CDNs is located at a multiple-path traffic intersection where internet providers and servers connect, called internet exchange points (IXPs), and provide each other with access to the website traffic coming from each source.
These servers hold cached files ready to render when called to decrease page loading times. So when a user requests a page, the content is delivered via the server that’s closest geographically. In turn, CDNs reduce page latency by minimizing the distance a site’s content must travel when requested by an end-user.
Cost-wise, CDNs may not make sense for small websites; it’s easier to manually optimise each image or asset and save the cost. However, for medium to enterprise-level websites, content generation can sprawl quickly making manual optimisation and curation an inefficient way to manage and deliver content across web properties. Although it may be costlier in actual money terms, it doesn’t cost you sales and leads due to slow server response time and a frustrating user experience.
On the bright side, you may find that some hosting providers (such as BlueHost) provide a basic version of content delivery networks for free, so you may as well take advantage of that. Content Delivery networks such as Cloudflare can be set up and configured from within your hosting provider account.
6. Optimising Domain Name Systems
Domain Name Systems (DNS) are what stands between browsers and IP addresses. The DNS request is the first process that happens before a website gets loaded inside the visitors’ browser. Browsers require DNS requests for each domain they need to load resources from, but not necessarily for each http request.
The DNS cache is what allows for some of the page resources to be reloaded straight from the browser, as opposed to the DNS and is determined by time-to-live (TTL). Having high TTL values ensures browsers only make the look-ups when truly necessary, with 30 minutes to an hour being the most commonly used TTL values.
7. Enabling compression
In order to further lower the page loading speeds, one can employ appropriate compression meaures, which come in the form of reducing the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes by Use Gzip, a software application for file compression. It should be noted that you should not use gzip on image files, but compress these in a program like Photoshop where you can retain control over the quality of the image.
8. Leverage browser caching
Browsers cache a lot of information contained on a web page (stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more) so that when a visitor comes back to the website, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page all over again.
9. Mobile optimisation
Mobile optimisation is the process of ensuring that visitors who access your site from mobile devices have an experience optimised for their devices. It takes a look at site design, site structure, page speed, and more to make sure you’re not inadvertently turning mobile visitors away.
Limit the use of pop-ups as it can be difficult and frustrating to try and close these on a mobile device, which might lead to a high bounce rate. Design for touch screen navigation that doesn’t make use of buttons are too big, too small, or in the path of a finger that’s trying to get the page to scroll.
Similarly, follow the Google’s best practice and implement responsive web-design. Responsively-designed sites use CSS3 media queries to serve the same content to mobile and desktop users using a fluid grid and a flexible design to automatically adapt to the size of a user’s screen. It uses media queries to target the layout based on screen width, orientation, and resolution.
10. Implementing hreflang
Another measure is to set up the country-based targeting in Google Search Console. This enables Google to better understand the market your website is oriented towards. Similarly, althuogh not essential, considering best practice another way of letting search engines know about the languages and regions you target is to use appropriate href-lang tags. This lets search engines know when to show your website in SERPs depending on the users’ location and language that the users have set up on their browsers.
11. Structured Data and SERP features
In the context of SEO, structured data comes in the form of the schema.org vocabulary which was developed by major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex, back in 2011. In short structured data stands for any data which is following some form of organisation. Structured data can be used in many different ways, but most commonly it comes in the form of additional code called “mark-up” which desscribes certain aspects of the said data.
Again, in the context of SEO structured data refers to the immplementation of a specific type of mark-up, described at length on schema.org, which provides additional context for search engines about the content on the page. This mark-up improves the search engine’s understanding of that content which may or may not help with relevancy signals in certain contexts as well as enables a website to benefit from enhanced results in SERPs. Enhanced SERP resuts or SERP features reffer to a number of elements on SERPs that are different in the form from the original organic result.
The most common SERP Features are:
- Rich Snippets which add a visual layer to an existing result (i.e. review stars for product ratings)
- Paid Results that are bought by bidding on keywords (i.e. AdWords results)
- Universal Results that appear in addition to organic results (i.e. image results)
- Knowledge Graph data which appears as panels or boxes (i.e. weather results)
Because this type of markup needs to be parsed and understood by search engines, there are standardized implementations (known as syntaxes) and classifications of concepts, relationships, and terms (known as vocabularies) which should be used. There are three syntaxes which search engines will support (JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata) with the Schema.org vocabulary.
Using structured data can help search engines to better understand what your content is about and may therefore contribute to a stronger relevancy signal. In addition, studies have shown that rich snippets can improve click-through rate (CTR), which can lead to better rankings indirectly. However, it must be noted that the use of structured data markup on its own is not a direct ranking signal.
12. Content Navigation Considerations
Content Navigation is another general aspect of technical SEO which can be used to positively affect organic rankings. Firstly, the use of contextual links in the context of internal linking can bring the benefit of the website being crawled better by search engines, contributing to a better engagement of users as well as better discoverability by search engines and better organic search rankings of the pages being linked to for the keywords used in the anchor text.
Internal linking also contributes towards a concept called “search neighbourhoods”. By interlinking pages on a website, you’re creating neighbourhoods or related pages, regardless of wether those pages are internal or external.
Internal linking can also be used to provide wider context to the subject at hand by linking to landing pages that are further back in the subdirectory, thus allowing users to navigate back exploring the topics in a wider context without interrupting their flow. In exactly the same manner, internal contextual linking allows connections further down in the subdirectory to landing pages that explain a concept in more detail.
Similarly, external linking is also seen as a means of fitting in the right search neighbourhood as well as extending gestures of goodwill to the industry players that have come up and are able to show useful information on the topic.
Image links should only be used when appropriate. In fact, try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. If you must use images for textual content, use the alt attribute to include a few words of descriptive text. (webmaster guides)
13. Interactivity and Gamification
One great idea to boost the engagement across the website and thus positively influence the SEO is to give users opportunities for interaction. Onsite interaction leads to higher engagement which in its own time leads to higher search engine results, as users display signals of being more satisfied with their search and this being noted by search engines.
One thing to avoid is content hidden inside navigational elements such as tabs or expanding sections, as this under some circustances can end up not being indexed and thus not being able to compete for your desired keywords. A good point would be making this content available for alternative ways of interaction (PDFs, Kindles, iBooks, Instapaper).
Similarly, another aspect of interactivity is the freshness of dates, as users can be shown additional context through this and are more likely to engage with recently-published rather than old content. The same applies for the accuracy of geo-location signals. Having these written using appropriate schema.org mark-up can go a long way in eliminaing uncertainties around a website’s target regions.
Calls to Action and Advertisements (CRO)
In the specific context of a landing page and website as a whole, the use of calls to action and advertisements are put under the umbrella of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) which is a science of its own. It should be noted that all advertisements should be appropriately marked as not to be confused with the actual content of the website.