Achieving prominent rankings on search engines such as Google requires more than publishing excellent content. While high-quality, engaging articles are undoubtedly essential for attracting an audience, neglecting the technical optimisation of your website can render such substantial efforts ineffective. Technical search engine optimisation (SEO) is the critical foundation, enabling search engines to crawl efficiently, index, and accurately rank your site. A technically sound website within the highly competitive online marketplace often distinguishes successful businesses, ensuring their valuable content effectively reaches its intended audience. The following sections detail common technical SEO issues and provide actionable solutions to enhance your website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Technical SEO is an ongoing discipline that requires regular attention; however, the results are well worth the commitment. By rectifying common technical issues concerning aspects like crawlability, page speed, and mobile optimisation, you can significantly improve your website’s ability to rank on search engines, boost user experience (UX), and ultimately drive more organic traffic to your site.
What is Technical SEO, and Why Does It Matter?
Technical SEO refers to the diverse processes that ensure a website meets the stringent technical requirements of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It encompasses a variety of critical aspects, including crawlability, site speed, mobile optimisation, and secure connection protocols (such as HTTPS). If your site is not properly optimised from a technical SEO standpoint, search engines may encounter difficulties crawling and indexing your pages. Consequently, these pages may not rank well, or in some cases, not at all. This foundational work is a core component of the comprehensive SEO Services Philippines we provide, designed to build a robust online presence for businesses.
Consider this analogy: constructing an aesthetically pleasing brick-and-mortar store without clear signage or an easily accessible entrance would make it challenging for customers to find, irrespective of its internal appeal. The same principle applies directly to your website. Technical SEO helps to guide search engines, ensuring your valuable content receives the attention it rightfully deserves. Ultimately, strong technical SEO translates into tangible business benefits: increased organic traffic, higher conversion rates due to an enhanced user experience, improved brand credibility, and a more substantial return on your overall digital marketing investment. Furthermore, a technically sound website is often perceived as more professional and trustworthy by potential customers, an invaluable asset in today’s digital landscape.
1. Crawlability and Indexability Issues
One of the most fundamental aspects of technical SEO involves ensuring that search engines can crawl your site effectively and index its content properly. Many businesses encounter significant yet often avoidable issues in this area.
Robots.txt Misconfigurations
The robots.txt file is a crucial element of your website’s SEO infrastructure. It instructs search engines on which pages or sections of your site they should and shouldnot crawl. If this file is configured incorrectly, search engines might inadvertently be blocked from indexing important pages. For instance, if a noindex directive is mistakenly applied to a key product page, that page will not appear in search results, leading to lost opportunities.
How to fix it: Regularly audit your robots.txt file to confirm it is not unintentionally blocking important pages or site resources. Tools such as Google Search Console and the Screaming Frog SEO Spider can assist you in identifying crawl errors and issues related to your robots.txt configuration. When auditing, pay specific attention to overly broad Disallow: directives (e.g., Disallow: /blog/ if your blog contains vital content) or missing Allow: directives for critical subfolders if a parent directory is disallowed. Also, ensure your User-agent: * rules are as intended and carefully consider if specific rules for bots like Googlebot are necessary. A frequent mistake is accidentally disallowing CSS or JavaScript files, which can prevent Google from correctly rendering your pages and understanding their full context.
XML Sitemaps: Your Website’s Roadmap
An XML sitemap functions like a detailed roadmap for your website, listing all your meaningful URLs to make it easier for search engines to discover and crawl them. While search engines can often discover pages through internal and external links, sitemaps are particularly beneficial for larger websites, new websites with few inbound links, or sites with a complex architecture or rich media content that might otherwise be less discoverable through crawling alone.
How to fix it: Ensure you have an accurate and up-to-date XML sitemap. Most modern content management systems (CMS) can generate one automatically, or you can utilise online sitemap generator tools. Your sitemap should exclusively include URLs that you intend for search engines to index: these should be the canonical versions of your pages that return a 200 (OK) HTTP status code. Avoid including noindexed URLs, redirected URLs (301s or 302s), or error pages (404s) in your sitemap. Once created and verified, submit your sitemap URL to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. It is also crucial to ensure it is regularly updated as you add, remove, or modify content on your site.
Orphan Pages and Broken Links
Orphan pages are URLs on your site that have no internal links pointing to them. This lack of internal linkage means that search engines may struggle to find them, and consequently, they may not be crawled or indexed. Broken links, those leading to 404 error pages, also create a detrimental user experience and can negatively impact your rankings by signalling a poorly maintained site. A business with no clear signposting is unlikely to attract customers; similarly, unlinked or broken-linked pages are difficult for both search engines and users to discover and access.
How to fix it: Employ a website crawler, such as Screaming Frog, to detect orphaned pages and identify broken internal and external links. Promptly fix any broken links. When addressing these, prioritise links on high-traffic pages or those pointing to important conversion-focused pages. It is best practice to redirect broken links to the most relevant live page using a 301 (permanent) redirect. For orphaned pages, identify relevant existing content where you can naturally incorporate contextual internal links to these isolated pages. If they are essential pages but are challenging to link to internally, consider adding them to your XML sitemap. However, direct internal links are always preferable for distributing link equity and aiding discoverability.
Noindex and Canonical Tags Conflicts
A delicate balance exists between instructing search engines which pages to index and which ones to disregard. The incorrect use of the noindex meta tag or canonical tags (rel=”canonical”) can lead to serious indexation issues. For instance, if a canonical tag points to an incorrect URL, or if it contradicts a noindex directive on the same page, it sends confusing and conflicting signals to search engines like Google.
How to fix it: Meticulously review your noindex and canonical tags across your website to ensure they are correctly implemented and logically consistent. Tools like the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console can help you identify pages with conflicting or problematic tag implementations. A common conflict arises when a page is marked with a noindex tag but is simultaneously included in your XML sitemap, thereby sending mixed signals. Another frequent issue occurs when a page has a canonical tag pointing to a different URL, yet it is not 301 redirected to that canonical URL; this can potentially split link equity and confuse search engines about the preferred version. Ensure that noindex tags are only used for pages you genuinely wish to exclude from search results, such as internal search result pages, non-essential thank you pages, or administrative login pages.
2. Website Structure and URL Optimisation
Your website’s architectural structure and URL formatting are pivotal in its ability to rank effectively. A well-organised site allows users and search engines to navigate its content easily, ensuring that all valuable information is accessible and indexable.
Flat vs. Deep Site Structure
A deep site structure, where important content is buried several clicks away from the homepage, can significantly limit search engines’ ability to crawl and index your pages efficiently. Conversely, a flat site structure, where key pages are accessible only a few clicks from the homepage, is generally considered ideal for optimising search engine and user experience.
How to fix it: Re-evaluate and, if necessary, reorganise your website’s architecture to ensure that important pages are accessible within a maximum of three to four clicks from the homepage. Create clear, logical categories and subcategories for your content, ensuring they are organised intuitively. Implementing breadcrumb navigation is an excellent method to support a flatter structure and improve navigability. Breadcrumbs clearly show users their current location within the site’s hierarchy and provide straightforward, clickable paths back to parent categories or the homepage, thereby enhancing both user experience and the internal linking profile of your site.
SEO-Friendly URL Structure
URLs should be descriptive, concise, and devoid of unnecessary parameters or cryptic characters. Long, convoluted URLs can confuse both search engines and users, negatively affecting user experience and your site’s SEO performance.
How to fix it: Utilise clean, descriptive URLs that accurately reflect the page’s content. For example, instead of a URL such as yourwebsite.com/page?id=12345, a more SEO-friendly alternative would be yourwebsite.com/services/technical-seo-audit. Always use hyphens (-) to separate words within URLs, as search engines interpret these as spaces, aiding in keyword recognition. Avoid using underscores (_) or other special characters. Maintain consistency by keeping URLs in lowercase to prevent duplicate content issues arising from case sensitivity on some web servers. Strive to keep URLs as short as reasonably possible while ensuring they remain descriptive; remove superfluous stop words (e.g., ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘and’) if doing so does not compromise readability or clarity.
3. Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Page speed, often referred to as page load speed, is a direct ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. With the introduction and continued emphasis on Core Web Vitals, its importance has become even more pronounced. Slow-loading pages can lead to a poor user experience, resulting in higher bounce rates and, consequently, lower search engine rankings.
How to Improve Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a specific set of metrics that Google uses to measure the user experience on your website, focusing on three key aspects of page performance: how quickly it loads, how rapidly it responds to user interactions, and whether the layout remains stable or shifts unexpectedly during loading. The three main Core Web Vitals are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how quickly the main, or largest, content element on a page loads and becomes visible to the user.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time from when a user first interacts with your page (e.g., clicks a link or taps a button) to when the browser can actually respond to that interaction. (Note: FID is being replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in March 2024, which assesses overall responsiveness).
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how much the page content unexpectedly shifts or moves around as it loads, which can be a frustrating experience for users.
How to fix it:
- Optimise your images: This is a multifaceted process. It includes compressing images before uploading using tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel, choosing the correct image format for the job (JPEGs for photographs, PNGs for graphics requiring transparency, and modern formats like WebP or AVIF for superior compression and quality where browser support allows), and implementing responsive images. Responsive images can be achieved using the <picture> element or the srcset attribute within the <img> tag, ensuring that appropriately sized images are served to different devices, thereby saving bandwidth and improving load times.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files: Minification removes all unnecessary characters from source code (such as comments, whitespace, and line breaks) without altering its functionality. This reduces file sizes, leading to faster browser parsing and execution.
- Leverage browser caching: By setting appropriate cache-control headers for your static assets (like images, CSS, and JavaScript files), you instruct users’ browsers to store these files locally. When they revisit your site, these assets are loaded from their local cache instead of being re-downloaded from your server, significantly speeding up page load times for returning visitors.
- Implement lazy loading: Implement lazy loading for images and videos that are not immediately visible when a page first loads (i.e., content that is ‘below the fold’). This technique defers the loading of these resources until they are about to scroll into the user’s viewport, improving initial page load time and conserving bandwidth.
- Reduce server response time (TTFB): Your server’s Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a crucial metric. Improve it by choosing a reputable and high-performance hosting provider, optimising your server configuration (e.g., using up-to-date PHP versions, enabling Gzip compression), utilising a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve assets from geographically closer locations to users, and optimising database queries if your website is database-driven.
Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse can provide detailed reports and actionable recommendations for improving your Core Web Vitals. Enhancing these metrics can sometimes be complex, and for businesses seeking expert guidance, the technical SEO expertise offered by BrightForgeSEO can be invaluable in navigating these optimisations.
4. Mobile Optimisation and Mobile-First Indexing
With Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing, the search engine now predominantly uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking purposes. If your site is not optimised for mobile devices, your search engine rankings could be negatively affected, even for desktop searches.
Mobile Usability Errors
Common mobile usability errors that can hinder user experience and SEO include text that is too small to read on mobile screens, clickable elements (like buttons or links) that are positioned too close together making them difficult to tap accurately, and page content that does not fit within the screen width, requiring users to zoom or scroll horizontally.
How to fix it: Regularly use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to identify any mobile usability issues on your site. Based on the results, make the necessary adjustments to improve the mobile experience. Ensure that your website design is responsive, meaning it automatically adapts its layout and content to various screen sizes and orientations without compromising usability or functionality. Beyond a responsive design, pay close attention to tap target sizes: buttons and links should be sufficiently large and spaced apart to be easily and accurately tapped on a touchscreen. Ensure that font sizes are legible on small screens without requiring users to zoom in. It is also highly recommended that you test your site on a variety of actual mobile devices and different screen resolutions, not just relying on emulators, to identify and rectify any device-specific quirks or rendering issues.
5. Secure Your Website with HTTPS
Website security is a top priority for both users and search engines. Google has explicitly stated that HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a ranking signal. Therefore, having a secure site over HTTPS is critical for modern SEO success and building user trust.
Mixed Content Issues
Mixed content occurs when an HTTPS page includes elements, such as images, scripts, or stylesheets, that are loaded over an insecure HTTP connection. This situation can trigger security warnings in users’ browsers, potentially deterring them from interacting with your site. It can also negatively impact your site’s SEO performance by undermining its perceived security.
How to fix it: Ensure that all resources on your website are loaded exclusively over HTTPS. You can easily spot mixed content using online tools like WhyNoPadlock, or by inspecting your pages using your browser’s built-in developer tools (often found in the ‘Console’ or ‘Security’ tabs). Regularly crawl your site with tools like Screaming Frog (specifically configured to identify insecure content) to proactively catch any new instances of mixed content, especially after site updates or when adding new third-party scripts or plugins. For an enhanced layer of security, implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This web security policy mechanism helps to protect websites against protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking by forcing browsers to only use HTTPS connections for your site. Additionally, ensure your SSL certificate is always up-to-date, correctly configured on your server, and that all HTTP traffic is permanently (301) redirected to the corresponding HTTPS version of your URLs.
6. Structured Data and Schema Markup
Implementing structured data, often referred to as schema markup, can significantly help search engines understand your site’s content and context more effectively. This improved understanding can make your pages eligible for rich snippets (also known as rich results) in the SERPs. Rich snippets are visually enhanced search results that are more likely to attract user attention and can substantially improve click-through rates (CTR).
How to Implement Schema Markup
Numerous types of schema markup are available, corresponding to different types of content. Common examples include Product schema (for e-commerce pages), FAQPage schema (for frequently asked questions), Article schema (for blog posts and news articles), and Review schema (for pages containing reviews). Proper and accurate implementation of these relevant schemas can enhance your visibility in the search results, making your listings stand out from standard blue links.
How to fix it: Utilise structured data to mark up the various types of content across your website. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is Google’s recommended format for implementing structured data, primarily because it can be easily injected into the <head> or <body> section of your HTML without intermingling directly with the user-visible text, making it cleaner to manage. For instance, a simple Article schema might include headline, image, author, datePublished, and publisher properties. This structured information can help your content qualify for various rich results, such as an article in a “Top Stories” carousel or a product listing displaying price and availability directly in the SERPs. This level of content enhancement and semantic markup is a key area we focus on within our Content SEO Services Philippines, helping search engines better understand your content. Tools like Google’s Rich Results Test are invaluable for testing your markup code and ensuring it’s correctly implemented and eligible for rich results.
7. Duplicate Content and Canonical Tags
Duplicate content can occur when the same, or substantially similar, content appears on multiple URLs, either within your own website or across different domains. This can confuse search engines, dilute link equity, and potentially lead to ranking issues as search engines struggle to determine which version is the original or most authoritative. Duplicate content often arises from technical reasons such as URL parameters (e.g., for session IDs or tracking), printer-friendly versions of pages, or having different versions of the same page (e.g., www vs. non-www, or HTTP vs. HTTPS if not properly redirected).
Avoid Duplicate Content with Canonical Tags
Canonical tags (specified using the <link rel=”canonical” href=”your-preferred-url”> HTML element) tell search engines which version of a page is the primary, or “canonical,” one that you want to be indexed. This helps to consolidate ranking signals (like link equity) to a single preferred URL and avoids potential penalties or ranking demotions associated with duplicate content.
How to fix it: Consistently use the <link rel=”canonical”> tag on all page versions to point to the main, preferred version. This is particularly important for pages that inherently have duplicate or near-duplicate content, such as e-commerce product pages with multiple variants (e.g., different colours or sizes accessed via distinct URLs with parameters) or category pages that might be accessible via various paths or sorting/filtering options. Other common causes of duplicate content that canonical tags can address include having separate versions for print (e.g., ?print=true URLs) or URLs with tracking parameters from email marketing campaigns or advertisements that do not fundamentally change the core content of the page. While canonical tags are the primary solution for indicating the preferred URL, it is also crucial to ensure that your internal links consistently point to the canonical version of a URL. For sitewide duplicate versions, such as www versus non-www or HTTP versus HTTPS (if not comprehensively handled by HTTPS enforcement and redirects), implement site-wide 301 (permanent) redirects to the single, preferred version to consolidate authority.
8. Monitoring and Maintenance
Technical SEO is not a “set it and forget it” task. Websites are dynamic entities that evolve with new content and features, and search engine algorithms and best practices also change over time. To ensure your site performs optimally in search results, you must regularly monitor its technical health and undertake ongoing maintenance.
Regular Audits and Monitoring
Utilising a suite of tools such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Sitebulb, you can perform regular, comprehensive technical SEO audits to detect and rectify any emerging technical issues as they arise. It is also advisable to set up alerts for critical issues, such as a sudden increase in crawl errors, manual actions from Google, or significant drops in organic search traffic.
How to fix it: Establish a consistent routine for conducting technical SEO audits and meticulously reviewing website analytics data. A comprehensive technical SEO audit should typically include, but not be limited to: checking Google Search Console for any manual actions, security issues, or coverage problems; monitoring crawl errors and server log files; analysing XML sitemap health and submission status; reviewing the robots.txt file for correctness; testing site speed and Core Web Vitals performance; checking mobile-friendliness and usability across various devices; verifying correct HTTPS implementation and identifying any mixed content issues; and proactively identifying and fixing any new broken links or orphan pages. Setting up automated alerts where possible (e.g., through Google Search Console or third-party monitoring tools) can also help quickly identify and address potential problems before they negatively impact your rankings or user experience. BrightForgeSEO offers continuous monitoring and maintenance as an integral part of our SEO Services Philippines for businesses that prefer a dedicated team to manage these ongoing tasks. We also extend this expertise to support agencies through our specialised White Label SEO Services Philippines. You can find more general information and insights on various SEO topics on our Tag SEO resource page.
Conclusion: The Road to Technical SEO Success
Mastering technical SEO is an ongoing journey that requires consistent attention and adaptation, but the rewards for website performance and online visibility are substantial. By systematically addressing common technical issues related to crawlability, page speed, mobile optimisation, and site security, you can significantly improve your website’s ability to rank prominently in search engine results, enhance the overall user experience, and drive more qualified organic traffic to your digital doorstep.
At BrightForgeSEO, we offer comprehensive SEO services Philippines that meticulously address all facets of search engine optimisation, with a strong emphasis on robust technical SEO. Suppose you currently face challenges with your website’s technical performance or require expert assistance to optimise your site for better search engine rankings and a superior user experience. In that case, we encourage you to reach out to us. You can connect with our team through our Contact Page. We are here to help you navigate the complexities of SEO every step of the way!
Investing in technical SEO is a strategic investment in your online presence’s long-term success and sustained visibility. While some aspects may initially seem complex, systematically addressing these common issues will pave the way for improved search engine rankings, a more positive user experience, and, ultimately, achieving your core business objectives. For further insights, practical tips, and expert guidance on all things related to search engine optimisation, feel free to explore the valuable resources on our blog or learn more about our holistic and results-driven approach on our Home Page.
