What exactly is it that makes a website attractive to Google?

Of course, besides the obvious answer of content—a topic that runs so deep, marketers can pen endless blogs about it (and several do, in fact).

In turning our attention to technical SEO, which fundamentals does Google want to see?

Without further ado, here they are!

1. Speed

Time-saving convenience is the No. 1 concern for practically every business, online and offline. Remember the days of dial-up? Not fun.

Thankfully, no websites out there load that slowly anymore. With today’s broadband speeds, users expect a quick load time of just a few seconds. Google wants to see this from your website, too.

To test your website, go to Google’s Pagespeed.

2. Easy Crawlability

Search engines don’t want to put forth any more effort than they need to. With this in mind, there are many reasons why a search engine spider may be unable to crawl your website.

A few of these include broken links, outdated URLs, server errors, slow loading speeds, and unusual site architecture.

As with business, simple is best when it comes to crawling websites. Make sure every page on your site requires no more than three clicks to return to your home page.

3. A Lack of Broken Web Pages

The last thing users—or a search engine spider—want to experience are links that summon a 404-error saying the page can’t be found!

As your website grows, these errors become more prevalent as a natural byproduct of website growth.

Therefore, your SEO must regularly check for and fix these errors. This is (thankfully) not difficult to do, so your SEO should have no problem making it happen.

4. A Lack of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content issues happen accidentally, as nobody intends to copy and paste an entire page across two different URLs. This problem most frequently occurs with WordPress, which generates URLs dynamically.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution. You can use Plugins to create canonical links, which tell search engine spiders a specific page is a primary page the spider should crawl and index.

5. A Secure Website

Your website must have HTTPS, which encrypts data transferred between your web browser and a website. This means that if users enter login info or a credit card number on your website, that data is encrypted.

Your website may need to implement many other (smaller) security measures, and WordPress offers dozens of plugins that make security easy.

Wrapping Up

Now that you know the five most important technical SEO optimization fundamentals Google wants to see from your website, does your site implement all five?

Contact Us for a discussion and analysis.