Technical SEO definitely isn’t easy, and it often befuddles us; but it’s just as important as the more creative elements of optimization for search engines. Check out this video, so you can “get techy with it” in 2019.

Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car. When trying to get the most out of SEO for your site, it’s easy to focus on optimizing the more creatively fluid elements; such as on-page copy and social media strategy. Truth is, technical elements are just as crucial, but possibly more misunderstood. Today we’re going to give you a crash course in Technical SEO best practices for 2019.

First of all, it’s important to remember that internal links drive a lot of traffic deeper into your site from the initial page users land on. It’s important to have these links within your content, not just in your navigation. Google has said that internal links help search engines, “crawl the rest of the website, and help to spread signals like PageRank throughout the site.” So, make sure every page has a link pointing to it from somewhere on your site, and drive additional content-based links to your most important pages.

Another thing to pay attention to is how your website’s URL structure employs trailing slashes. Do you have some pages on your site that use a slash at the end of the URL, and others that don’t? Google has said that it’s a best practice to remain consistent as to whether you use them or not. While Google will set an implied canonical on your home page, don’t make Google guess about your internal pages. Just remember this: keep it consistent. Pick a style and then link to it, redirect to it, use it in sitemaps, and use it in your relcanonical tags.

Now, it’s time to do some myth-busting. It has long been said in the SEO community that the age of your domain name is counted as one of more than 200 ranking factors in the organic search algorithm; and many disagree on whether newer or older is better. However, Google has said outright that this is not true. So, whether your domain name is 10 years old or 10 minutes old, there is no advantage awarded to your site based on age.

Finally, starting September 1st, Google will no longer support robots.txt files that contain noindex directives, in order to standardize the protocol and support a cleaner ecosystem for future open source releases; Don’t worry, there are still better ways to remove URLs from the index; things like including noindex in robots meta tags, implementing 404 and 410 status codes, and using the removal tool in Google Search Console.

That’s all the time we have left for today’s workshop. We covered a lot of information today, so if you have comments or questions, leave ‘em down below, and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next week with another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

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Kelcey Drapp is an SEO Manager working at Happy Hao Car since 2015, and in the digital space for nearly a decade. Kelcey enjoys digging deep into SEO research to discover the 'why,' and helping clients realize their potential for success online. In addition to her work in local SEO, Kelcey also likes to volunteer her digital marketing skills for non-profits in need. When Kelcey is not working, she enjoys cooking, traveling, and spending time with her husband, son, & three dogs.

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