Tackle the technical SEO intimidation. Start small

Quick question, Indie Hackers: Did you markup your site with...cue scary music

Google-friendly Schema?

You don’t have to be an expert in technical SEO to start optimizing your site’s backend. Here are 4 technical SEO tips you can audit against right now. Bite-sized chunks synthesized from the Search Engine Journal's excellent Advanced Technical SEO ebook. Check it out for way more details and how-to!

📲 Responsive design is responsible design 📲

• Mobile-first. All the cool kids are doing it. (And by cool kids we mean the Google website crawler).
• If you want to improve everything from your SERP ranking to your page load times, design your pages mobile-first and then make sure your site looks good across a range of devices.

🗺️ Navigation made for people is made for Google 🗺️

• Google takes your site navigation into account while indexing pages. But you don’t have to do anything extra to appease the SEO gods.
• Create functional, logical menus with users in mind. Avoid undue bloat.
• That’s it.

🌐 Set Up SEO-friendly URLs 🌐

• Once again, URLs that are easier for humans to read and navigate are what Google craves.
• Generally speaking, avoid subdomains when possible (they don’t share SEO juice) and use descriptive URL strings.
• FOR EXAMPLE: website dot com/blog/how-to-do-this is much better for SEO and indexing than blog dot website dot com/post-148726-howto

🔗 Clean up redirects and broken links 🔗

• A couple duplicate posts under different URLs or an unnoticed 404 error doesn’t spell search engine death. But it bugs website visitors, and Google, too.

• So be sure to set up page redirects and assign canonical page URLs — the main version of a webpage as far as Google is concerned.

• And add robots.txt to the HTML of pages you don’t want Google indexing at all.