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 “sees” 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 “signals” should be covered under technical accessibility, but here are a few of the more common measures:

HTTPS

Google favors sites that take basic security precautions such as using https secured servers

URL Structure

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

Page Load Speed

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’s Google’s https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Crawl

How easy it is for the search engine’s bots to “see” what’s 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’s been created https://freesitemapgenerator.com/

Mobile Version

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/

Duplicate Content

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’m talking to you with the celebrity’s picture on your page! You know you didn’t style Rihanna’s 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.

Header Tags

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

Title Tags

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

Meta Description

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’ll see…

Next Up: On-page (and some off-page) SEO

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’t 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 “SEO Basics: What is SEO?” I’ll review what you can do to improve the quality of your web page content for a better chance at creating engagement.