When it comes to SEO, the importance of good quality content and relevant, authoritative links is generally recognized. When asked about the three most important ranking factors, Google search quality senior strategist Andrey Lipattsev mentioned three things[1]:
The SEO world went agog with this revelation, and much emphasis has since been focused on these three signals.
However, another equally important factor is technical SEO. If you don’t get it right, even those three most important ranking factors might not make much of a difference in helping you get ranked.
For example, if you have poor technical SEO your website could be uncrawlable, unindexable, and inaccessible. As a result, no matter how great your content is the search engines won’t be able to access or index it. With this understanding, not only is it clear that technical SEO is essential, but also that it is even more important than all the other ranking factors.
The following seven tweaks will give you an edge and help your search rankings when it comes to technical SEO.
Enable HTTPS for your website
Many businesses still do not have HTTPS enabled for their websites. Many of those who advocate enabling HTTPS make a business and conversions case, including arguments that it will show that secure padlock and a green bar in users’ browsers, which makes them trust websites and conversions. While that’s good enough reason to enable HTTPS, SEO is another equally important reason.
Enabling HTTPS is one of the few technical SEO tweaks that will take just a few minutes of your time yet yield significant results for your rankings. Google itself has come out to admit that it uses HTTPS as a ranking signal —