SEO – because you think of screen-lit faces, late at night in front of open pizza boxes gathering incoming links, webmasters write, Pagetitel supplement to a word.
And even though that may be important, meaningful work (even during the day) – there is much more that hides behind these 3 letters! Little notice of most bloggers and yet the basis for everything: The web server.
Investing a lot in link building for a poorly optimized or overloaded blog … it’s like putting a hobbling horse on the track at the annual Royal Ascot horse race. That’s where the greatest horse food plays no role anymore. Here is trying a seo business.
So before you build any more links, let’s first check the technical SEO basics of your blog together and then tweak them in the second part of this article.
Measure technical SEO factors of your blog and ensure accessibility
This article will help you as a blogger to promote your top ranking as much as possible technically.
In the first part of this article you will learn more about:
- basic considerations for technical SEO factors
- Tools to ensure the accessibility of your blog
- Tools for measuring the technical performance of your blog and creating concrete optimization suggestions
- concrete methods and tools for increasing performance
- Enhancements for Blog CMS to improve performance
Basic considerations for technical SEO factors
In the last few years, Google has paid more attention to how websites are technically organized. The launch of Google Webmaster Tools marked a start in this development, the next step in that direction was Google Page Speed (more on that).
Time
Ideally, the right technical decisions are made BEFORE creating a blog. In addition, it is useful if there are 1-2 optimization rounds right after the project starts. Then it can be optimized in the specific server and software environment in which your blog actually runs.
Is your blog already existing? No worries, everything can be optimized even now: some things are easy, but some things will be more time-consuming in retrospect.
Server Location
Your visitors will be able to see the content faster if they do not even have to be sent halfway around the globe. So it makes sense to have a web server where the visitors are predominantly physical. Is your blog mainly for German audience, then best host on a server that is physically located in Germany. A blog that has the most readers in the US, you better host there.
Google recognizes the country where a server physically stands. Therefore, a search for “web design” on Google Austria brings quite different results than on Google Germany, although both are in German. Even .com or .eu domains can be clearly identified as Austrian websites by the IP geolocation. Do you want to rank well in Germany, you therefore also host in Germany.
Find out where the server of your blog physically stands: www.ipligence.com/geolocation
Ideally, you should therefore inform yourself BEFORE ordering with a web hosting provider, where their data centers are. Is your server in the wrong country, this can be a real problem, which may require an extensive project relocation afterwards.
Tools to ensure the accessibility of your blog
Monitoring
The most important technical criterion of any website is that it is available at all. It should be reliable online and without dropouts.
We ensure this by tools that regularly surf the site and inform us immediately if unavailable. This process is called “monitoring”, or in English “monitoring”.
A good site monitoring service is www.montastic.com . You can create a free account here and check up to 3 websites every 30 minutes. For a small fee, more websites can be monitored every 5 minutes.
As soon as one of your blogs is not available, you will receive an eMail. Is he back online, you will receive another email with the all clear.
To stay up-to-date on the status of your blog, Montastic offers apps and widgets for Iphone, Android and Windows Phone.
Error diagnosis and logging
To track accessibility and automatically diagnose errors, we use the free Google Webmaster Tools . If there is no account, I advise you to create one in each case.
This collection of statistics and tools shows you the technical view of your blog that Google has. And that’s critical to your success with Google’s over 90% market share in Germany.
The webmaster tools show various errors, ex:”dead links”, i.e links without an existing target page. In addition, the status of domain availability (DNS), as well as the server connection is displayed and logged over time.
Another useful statistic is the time it takes to download a page (see screenshot below). Should your blog be slow, you can see that from this graphic. Monitoring as with Montastic shows you when your blog is offline. Not if it’s slow.
But a very slow blog can be viewed by Google as negatively as an unreachable one. Therefore, you best monitor and log your loading times with the webmaster tools.
By the way, even the load times tip of our sample website (1.3 seconds) at the bottom of the graph is comparatively fast. Everything under 1.5 seconds is considered fast.
For serious errors, such as loading and DNS problems, you will receive an email from Google, with a clear problem description. This is a good supplement to the Montastic Monitoring. While not as nimble, it does provide diagnoses and causes, not just online or offline. The combination of both free tools to monitor your blog is ideal.
Tools for measuring your blog performance
Let’s get together to measure the performance of your blog. For this we create a so-called waterfall diagram. Here the individual loading processes are visualized. As a result, it is possible to differentiate what is needed, how long and in which area an optimization has potential.
The homepage of our web agency www.Website-Werkstatt.de serves as an object of intuition . It’s best to do the steps with the web address of your blog in a new browser tab while you continue to read
Loading times overview
The overview (picture below) shows the significant difference in the loading times at the first loading (First View = 10.3 seconds) and a repeated loading (1.6 seconds). Optimally, images and other content on the visitor’s PC are cached and not reloaded.
For example, there are components of a website that are needed again for each new page, such as the background image, the header graphics, etc. This then only needs to be loaded once. If the browser caching is executed correctly, this can relieve the web server considerably. The loading is greatly accelerated.
A website is considered fast if it loads in 1.5 seconds (just the HTML part, not the images, javascript, CSS, etc.). So our example cuts quite well with 1.6 seconds at Repeat View. What is the performance of your blog?
below shows the top part of the results page of the waterfall chart. There are quasi school grades according to the US system (A = best grade, F = worst grade) for the individual optimization topics.
Apparently, our example website still has to sit down in one area, namely caching static content like images. Everything fits in the other areas. How is it with you? How does your blog cut off?
Google Page Speed
To finish measuring your blog performance, we use Google Page Speed. This is crucial for you as a blogger. (xanax) Ultimately, Google’s opinion about your blog is crucial, where you are in the search results.
The technical capacity of your blog is not a nebulous secret, but clearly measurable. That gives you the ability to boost or secure your Google ranking. In any case, you are offering your readers a better user experience.
You can use tools that can be used to create diagnoses. In addition, the continuous accessibility of your website can be ensured (monitoring).
To rank well with Google, hardware and software are the crucial foundation. For satisfied visitors, fast loading times are crucial. On a fast-loading website, we all feel better. Once your blog has been optimized, it can be reached quickly and reliably even with growing success and high performance. Google and your readers will thank you as well. Your success can be much better.
