6.4
As a rule of thumb: The larger the website, the more important technical search engine optimization becomes.
However, even with a smaller website, you should ensure that the technical SEO basics are correct.
This includes topics such as page speed or indexing. You will learn more about this in this lesson.
Page speed is a ranking factor and one of the most important components of technical SEO. Additionally, visitors tend to leave if a page is very slow. Thus, page speed is important for various reasons.
Achieving good page speed is more challenging on mobile sites than on desktop PCs.
In the following, I will show you which measures can help improve your loading speed.
Of course, it is desirable to have a very good page speed score in tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. On the other hand, there are also many websites with poor page speed scores that still achieve excellent rankings.
In terms of SEO, there are more important factors to focus on than page speed. However, a very slow site can lead to high bounce rates (and slightly worse SEO results), so improving page speed is generally a good idea.
The term "Core Web Vitals" is often mentioned in connection with page speed. These are metrics from Google related to page speed (e.g., loading time of the largest element on a page) and user experience (e.g., layout shifts during loading).
I won’t go into detail about the individual values of the Core Web Vitals in this course because, on the one hand, the tips mentioned above for page speed can generally help improve these values, and on the other hand, you need to be very tech-savvy to make adjustments yourself.
The topic of “indexing individual pages” is also extremely important. Why? Naturally, pages must first be in the index of Google & Co to achieve good rankings at all.
Often, search engines automatically include new pages in the index after some time.
Sometimes, however, you may need to assist with the indexing of individual pages. Conversely, in certain cases, it can also make sense to exclude specific pages from the index.
You can check which of your pages are indexed on Google using the command “site:your-site.com“.
Simply enter the command into Google’s search field without quotation marks.
When do I use the noindex command?
How do I add the command to the page?
You add the noindex command using the robots meta tag in the header of your page. This is usually not a technical challenge for the webmaster of a site (if you are not doing it yourself).
In most CMS platforms, such as WordPress, Wix, or Jimdo, you can assign a noindex command without writing code, either through plugins or the standard SEO settings for a page.
In WordPress, for example, you always have the option of setting the entire website (homepage + subpages) to noindex with one click.
You can find this option in the dashboard under Settings–>Reading.
SEO plugins like Rank Math also give you the option to set every single page on your website to noindex.
The canonical tag indicates the canonical or original URL for specific content. This makes it easier for search engines to index the correct page for a given piece of content.
(Note: You should not use a canonical tag and a noindex command on the same page, even though both often have similar effects. In this case, doubling up doesn’t work better. Instead, you should always choose one of the two options. The explanation for this can be found in the reading tip.)
When do I use the canonical tag?
When sorting by color or price on a category page in an online shop, many new URLs with nearly identical content to the main category can quickly be created.
In this case, you can use the canonical tag on the filtered page, for example:
beispielshopxy.de/smartphones?f=schwarz
and point it to the main page:
beispielshopxy.de/smartphones
This helps search engines recognize that the page /smartphones (without filtering) is the original page.
Sometimes blog articles or products appear in multiple categories, resulting in duplicate content under different URLs.
For example, the same article about “Sights in Lisbon” on a travel blog might be found under:
reiseblogxy.de/portugal/sehenswürdigkeiten-in-lissabon/
as well as under:
reiseblogxy.de/mittelmeer-schiffreise/sehenswürdigkeiten-in-lissabon/
Here too, using a canonical tag can be helpful to avoid duplicate content.
If you switch your site from http to https, it’s possible that both versions remain accessible.
For smaller sites, it’s better to set up a redirect from the http to the https version and manually adjust internal links to https.
For larger online shops, however, a canonical tag might be useful because redirects can cause loading delays, and it may not be possible to update all internal links to https quickly.
Sometimes, besides the desktop version:
https://beispielseitexy.de
there is a separate URL for the mobile version, such as:
https://m.beispielseitexy.de
Here too, a canonical tag can be used.
The issue of canonical tags for filtered pages in online shops is very complex. It can also make a lot of sense to use these filtered URLs for your own SEO if they match certain keywords.
If you have product filters in your online shop, you should definitely deal with the topic of "Faceted Navigation".
I have also linked two articles below.
Some CMS or plugins automatically add a canonical tag to every page. For example, the Rank Math SEO plugin does this on my website.
The plugin also offers the option of assigning an individual canonical tag. Personally, I rarely or never use this function.
Most website systems also offer the option to easily add redirects. In WordPress, you can once again use plugins to integrate a redirect into the site.
In search engine optimization, 301 redirects are usually used to show search engines that the content is permanently located at a new URL.
But there are also 302 redirects, for example, which only show a time-limited redirect.
