Technical SEO is about making your website easy for search engines to crawl, understand and trust. For a small business site, the essentials fit on one page.
Foundations
- HTTPS everywhere, with HTTP and non-www or www versions redirecting to one address.
- Fast pages on mobile. Speed is a ranking factor and affects every visitor.
- A clean URL structure, readable words rather than ID numbers.
- An XML sitemap listing the pages you want found, submitted to Google and Bing.
- A robots.txt that does not accidentally block important sections.
Each page
- A unique title of roughly 50 to 60 characters that says what the page is about.
- A meta description that makes people want to click.
- One clear H1 heading, and logical H2 and H3 headings below it.
- Descriptive image alt text.
- Internal links to related pages using meaningful link text.
Avoid duplicates
The same content at several addresses dilutes rankings. Use canonical tags, and make sure filters, tracking parameters and printer versions do not create endless copies.
Multilingual sites
Give each language its own URL, link the versions with hreflang tags, and avoid switching language only with cookies, which search engines cannot follow.
Structured data
Schema markup helps search engines understand your business, products, articles and FAQs, and can enable richer results.
Local presence
Keep your business name, address and phone consistent across your website and business profiles, and create a Google Business Profile.
Monitor
Use Search Console to watch indexing and errors; see the five reports that matter.
At IDX
Fast, secure hosting is the foundation. Run our free website analysis to check your site, and keep your domain, hosting and SSL with one provider so redirects and certificates stay consistent.
IDX on digital infrastructure
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