{"id":250,"date":"2016-07-04T04:17:33","date_gmt":"2016-07-04T04:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/?p=250"},"modified":"2016-07-04T04:37:45","modified_gmt":"2016-07-04T04:37:45","slug":"seo-basics-what-is-seo-part-ii-technical-accessibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/seo-basics-what-is-seo-part-ii-technical-accessibility\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO Basics: What is SEO? Part II \u2013 Technical Accessibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Anitra (DSN Content Contributor)<\/p>\n

Technical accessibility refers to the internal structure of your website and how a search engine interacts and “sees” the website. What a search bot \u201csees\u201d is not necessarily what a human sees, so technical SEO are steps to take to give your website a fighting chance that it will be among the relative few websites that appear on page 1 or 2 of search results. There are many opinions on what elements or \u201csignals\u201d should be covered under technical accessibility, but here are a few of the more common measures:<\/p>\n

HTTPS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Google favors sites that take basic security precautions such as using https secured servers<\/p>\n

URL Structure<\/strong><\/p>\n

Best to keep these short and descriptive. And status codes (301\/302 redirects, 404 page not found, etc.) need to be accurate and up-to-date<\/p>\n

Page Load Speed<\/strong><\/p>\n

How fast a web page loads is a ranking factor because neither search bots, nor people, have time to wait for a slow web page to get itself together. There are many tools available to test page load speed. Here\u2019s Google\u2019s https:\/\/developers.google.com\/speed\/pagespeed\/insights\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Crawl<\/strong><\/p>\n

How easy it is for the search engine’s bots to \u201csee\u201d what\u2019s on a web page. Not all elements (images, links, plug-ins) can be seen or followed by the web crawler so running a sitemap test is the best way to find out what is working and what needs work. A sitemap helps bots and humans find other pages on your website. There a many free sitemap generators available online. Here is one that you can use to submit the sitemap directly to Google or Bing after it\u2019s been created https:\/\/freesitemapgenerator.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Mobile Version<\/strong><\/p>\n

People are using mobile devices to access the internet more than desktop these days, so Google is really favoring sites with a mobile version. You can check to see if Google considers your page mobile-friendly here https:\/\/www.google.com\/webmasters\/tools\/mobile-friendly\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Duplicate Content<\/strong><\/p>\n

Search bots don’t like having to decide which web page it should return in search results if they all have the same content, so it downgrades web pages with content that it has seen over and over (I\u2019m talking to you with the celebrity\u2019s picture on your page! You know you didn\u2019t style Rihanna\u2019s hair!) There are programs out there that will check to make sure nothing on your website is duplicate content, but the easiest way to avoid using duplicate content is to just create original content yourself.<\/p>\n

Header Tags<\/strong><\/p>\n

These are descriptive phrases on the page of the website that explain what that specific section of content is about. Basically, it is the title of the paragraph or content. It is backed by HTML header tag code <H1>Section Topic<\/H1>. The search bot uses the coding to figure out how to index the page<\/p>\n

Title Tags<\/strong><\/p>\n

These are brief text description (just a few characters) explaining what the page is about. It will show up on the search results page<\/p>\n

Meta Description<\/strong><\/p>\n

Search engines don’t actually rank this element, but it is used on the search results page. If you don’t include meta description, or it’s not accurate, then you’ll only be hurting yourself because people will scan this paragraph to see if they want to visit your page. You enter this information on the back end of your webpage. There is a character limit, so if you go over it, you\u2019ll see\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"SEO-Basics-2\"<\/p>\n

Next Up: On-page (and some off-page) SEO<\/strong><\/p>\n

All of the effort you put into making sure search bots find and index your site is for naught if a real live human being doesn\u2019t like the content enough to link to it, refer to it, or care about it. What other people think about web page content is a huge factor into whether search engines return your web page on page 1 of search results or page 298. You can start the process of improving ranking with meaningful content. In the next installment of \u201cSEO Basics: What is SEO?\u201d I\u2019ll review what you can do to improve the quality of your web page content for a better chance at creating engagement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Anitra (DSN Content Contributor) Technical accessibility refers to the internal structure of your website and how a search engine interacts and “sees” the website. What a search bot …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7xVXD-42","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digitalsistasnetwork.com\/channels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}