Technical SEO

My MISSION, How to SEO any Website

In-Depth Technical SEO optimization for every website, for a fast loading experience

Like the Greek Titan Prometheus, I will share the fire with you. Firstly, If you expect to talk about me, there's not much to tell. From my childhood I was impressed by the movies showing people who knew how to code. I was generally amazed by the power of computers technology and electronics. I studied electronics just to find that it was not enough for me, so I started learning programming.

I realized that before going further, I should know a little bit of web security and how to hack my own website creations, in case needed (actually, I wanted to bypass my work's internal network security, in order to use my workstation efficiently :-). Anyway, crime is now digital, so I learned a few ways of digital hacking, just to protect myself. In parallel, I studied digital systems and e-services, but never learned SEO tactics in the University, I learned on-the-field-of-action (and this is the reason, why I try to share all my best SEO techniques that I know).

Continue reading this webpage, find below...
"my simple and free Technical SEO checklist"


After years of involvement with SEO strategies & PHP programming, I decided to create this website. If you want to know more, it would be better to take you for a coffee. To continue, this site is "homemade", it is written from scratch, you can call it "handcrafted", started as a blank page in Notepad++ in order to have a live example of what you can also do. Google often changes the algorithm that creates listings, it seems that everyone, someday, will face a your money or your life google update for his/her niche. SeoMyWebsite.net is mostly about Technical SEO and how you can optimize your website, too.

What is a technical SEO?
In general, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for crawling and indexing, however can also include any technical process intended to enhance search visibility. Technical search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern-day search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing with the intention of improved organic rankings.


I firstly took an outdated HTML template (thank God, it used bootstrap) and step by step I made it a WordPress theme.
After this, the main steps I paid attention to improve and you should also take care about, to optimize your site, were/are the following...
technical seo optimization greece

My VISION

Perfect SEO code for excellent Google Search optimization

The metrix of my homepage, is the average score for my website, which is under construction. My goal is to find the optimum solution in order to have a fast website, with all the needed functionality and the minimum amount of plugins. It is not an easy task, but I must say it is an amusing riddle to me. Another thing that has to be mentioned...besides Technical SEO, there's also something else to take care of. This is content optimization and keyword research. After having ideally done all the above, someone should optimize his local visibility (Local SEO). Enjoy!

My free SEO Checklist

From zero to hero, a few guidelines to sky rocket your pages! Make your website technically optimized for search engines. You can bookmark this page, in order to keep it online as a small SEO ckecklist of what to do, during your SEO implementations.

My SEO Checklist
SEO needs meta

Enable/Fill in all metas

We can't talk about advanced Technical SEO methods, without having enabled all basics. Not only my opinion, but also a recommendation of all SEO professionals, add Yoast plugin to your WordPress site or something similar. If you use an HTML template, add to your code all the appropriate metas, like meta title & meta description...meta keywords is no more a ranking factor.
That's a quicky

Optimize images to reduce their size

Reduce the load times of pages by loading appropriately sized images. It is a technical SEO step, so google it for online services. You can use software programs on your computer, but I prefer to downsize images online using one of my two favourites, kraken.io or ShortPixel.
1st Backup imgs

Resize your images

Reduce file sizes based on where images will be displayed, you don't need large photos in MB, if you want to show a small image. Resize image files themselves instead of via CSS. Save files in appropriate format depending on usage, check pagespeed insights to see what Google proposes. What you will get is a benefit ratio of high value. Access to your file system is needed.

If your website is based on WordPress you can use plugins, but that way you will increase your file size, your server requests and you will increase your loading speed, which we don't want to happen! You should also be serving appropriately-sized images through media library, which can save many bytes of data and improve the performance of your web page, especially on low-powered (eg. mobile) devices.

Last but no least, avoid stock photos for SEO purposes.
...Take a breath

Thought Leaders, SEO in Greece the easy way!

My name is Efthimios and I am still developing my site, I usually find time late at night

young seo greece, web seo expert

SEO is the Mission

Do you know what really helps a lot?

It is extremely helpful to have a browser add-on thinking for you. What I mean is, when you are working late at night, as most programmers do, you face the risk of having done spelling mistakes, which you cannot immediately spot among your text lines. If you are a SEO professional, you can understand the difference between two words and the importance of using the right one, as it results to the tomorrow's deriving traffic. Let's say as an example, you want to optimise or optimize a website for USA, which pre-mentioned verb would you choose? Which one is the British or the American version? Well, I use the LanguageTool Firefox add-on, which I find very helpful. Try it for free, this is not an add from me. Send me your feedback, text me on skype!
a jpeg img of my view at Santorini while performing SEO in Greece img

We Are All On Mission

I am a Greek SEO expert and I am still developing my site by the sea, but I can find some time for you, too!

What seems to be an SEO problem for you?
1. Spot your problem
2. Make a coffee
3. Text me on Skype (user: Efthimios) to make a coffee, too!
4. Talk to me about and let's optimize your website together.
If it is time-consuming, send an email at about the URL concerned
and I will tell you in responce, how to SEO your website, blog or business to rank in top of Google results.
More SEO Tips...
Advanced technique

Lazy load images

Reduce the load times of pages by loading lazy loaded images. This is another technical SEO step, so google it for how to lazy load images. You can use wordpress plugins, if you are a wordpress user, but I prefer to lazy load images using javascript code directly at footer with a local call to blazy.min.js
Many thanks to the author at http://dinbror.dk/blog/blazy/ . Before doing anything, Back up EVERYTHING. By telling you this, I mean a filesystem AND a DataBase backup. Afterwards, make a few loading tests, just to see your website loading time, before implementing anything.
Personally, I download the blazy.min.js at my template_directory/assets/js/ and then implement the code. Subsequently, you should also add the 'b-lazy' class to the elements that should be lazy loaded. Check the following link for live examples on how to lazy load images, videos, iframes or scripts!

Still in trouble??? Call me on Skype, user: Efthimios
Of high importance

Minify Html, CSS, JS and defer Javascript

Compacting HTML code, including any inline JavaScript and CSS contained in it, can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time. Moreover, in order to load a page, the browser must parse the contents of all script tags, which adds additional time to the page load.

By minimizing the amount of JavaScript needed to render the page, and deferring parsing of unneeded JavaScript until it needs to be executed, you can reduce the initial load time of your page. After proper minification, you must check your project for external CSS or JavaScript files. Inlining or hosting locally all these small pieces of code, can save the overhead of fetching them. A good alternative to inline CSS or JS is to combine all the external files in one.

By implementing this combination, you lower the number of requests to your server, which is good for SEO.
SEO needs Caching

Enable Leverage browser caching and Compression

Page load times can be significantly improved by asking visitors to save and reuse the files included in your website.

This SEO technique reduces page load time for repeat visitors and is particularly effective on websites, where users regularly re-visit the same areas of the site. You must also reduce the size of files sent from your server to increase the speed to which they are transferred to the browser.

By enabling GZIP or similar mechanism, you gain a significant faster loading speed metrics
Avoid hopping

Fix all landing page redirections

Redirections on landing pages add delays to the page load and while the redirections are occurring, nothing is shown to the client. In many cases, redirections can be eliminated without changing the function of a page.

Simply, by modifying the website's .htaccess file, you fix any errors. So, by fixing this you gain speed and simultaneously you reduce your site loading time.

The following snippet of code solves any recommendation in GTmetrix like "Avoid landing page redirects for the following chain of redirected URLs." 
	 #uncomment if the following line DOES NOT exist in your htaccess file
	 #RewriteEngine on
	 
	 #Redirect non www to https www
	 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
	 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
	 
	 #Enable https to all pages
	 RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
	 RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
Much better now, what do you think?
Also Avoid 301/302

Difference between 301 & 302

There are 2 types of redirection, 301 and 302, each method tells search engines if they should keep a certain page (302) or replace it with a new one (301) at their indexes.

Now you are thinking, "what exactly is a 301 redirect"? Don't worry, even in 2020, some people still get confused.

Please note down that in a 301 redirection, the page is telling i.e. Google, that it has been moved to a new location permanently and the browser tries to fetch the new url, ignoring the old content. When you use a 301, Google removes the old page from their index. Most of the value (link equity or "SEO juice") from the old page is transferred to the new one.

On the other hand, with 302 redirects, the move of the page is temporary. When you choose this type of redirect, the original page remains indexed in Google and no value (link equity) is transferred to the new URL, because Google knows this is just temporary and keeps only the old content "SEO juicy". Thus, by using the new page for only a small period of time and getting back to the old URL as soon as possible, you’ll retain any rankings, traffic value, and authority that page might have.
Yes, you can!

Add structure data (to the body, also!)

JSON structured data can be inserted in the head as well as the body of your pages. This is what Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller explained at the YouTube Channel #AskGoogleWebmasters, on the September 11th, with the video "JSON-LD Structured Data: Where to Insert in a Page?".

John was actually asked a similar question, by the user @largow via Twitter . “Is it possible to insert JSON structured data at the bottom of the <body> instead of the <head>? It seems to work fine for many websites...”
The answer was Yes, you can insert JSON structured data either in the body or the head of your page. John Mueller also explained the three (3) structured data formats that Google supports.

RDFa, “an HTML5 extension that supports link data through additional attributes added to existing HTML tags on the page,” Mueller described.
Microdata, “an open community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML content. Like RDFa, it also uses HTML tag attributes for this.”
JSON-LD, “a JavaScript notation embedded in a script tag in the page head or in the body. The markup is not interleaved with user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express.” Mueller also mentioned that this format can be injected into you pages via JavaScript.
All SEOs should care, because Rich snippet results are a good way to tell Google, what is your page about and also inform your users at their search results page. Structured data implementation is one good thing to do, so learn how search engines support these formats ,as well as how they process your structured data, which in the end may increase your visibility.
Here is a link to understand better, how structured data works for Google → https://goo.gle/2lC3jC0

Tell me your results, was it worth the effort?
Skype, user: Efthimios
Gain some msec

How to avoid showing invisible text & ensure text remains visible during web font load.

According to https://web.dev/font-display/, which is a webpage proposed by Google pagespeed insights, the easiest way to avoid showing invisible text while custom fonts load, is to temporarily show a system font. By including font-display: swap in your @font-face style, you can avoid FOIT in most modern browsers: 
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Pacifico';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: local('Pacifico Regular'), local('Pacifico-Regular'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/pacifico/v12/FwZY7-Qmy14u9lezJ-6H6MmBp0u-.woff2) format('woff2');
  font-display: swap;
}
The font-display API specifies how a font is displayed. swap tells the browser that text using the font should be displayed immediately using a system font. Once the custom font is ready, it replaces the system font.
Avoid CSS @import

How to Fix : Avoid CSS @import on GTmetrix Performance Report

Get the answer on how to fix the Avoid CSS @import recommendation on GTmetrix Performance Report, even if the CSS @import expression is generated by a caching plugin on WordPress or an add-on in PrestaShop.
Find the common suggestion to avoid using @import, learn more and start using the LINK tag for each CSS file. At the end of the post, learn a quick SEO technical tip and apply it on your website.

Here is the link to understand better, how to Avoid CSS @import Rule.

Tell me your results, was it worth the effort?
Skype, user: Efthimios
WP Security

How do I hide (protect) my email address from web crawlers on WordPress?.

For security reasons, in order to protect your WordPress email address from email harvesters, thus getting your mailbox free from spammy emails, you can replace each letter with the respective unicode character. You can use any free online email obfuscator to transform the text to unicode characters.

For our example I use the fake email: myhiddenEmail@myCompany.com.

The anchor should look like this:
< a href="mailto:myhiddenEmail@myCompany.com"> My email text < / a>

Inside the < a href > tag I added javascript to obfuscate the email address, using document.write. The usage of document.write will certainly trigger a warning while scanning the webpage with Pagespeed Insights. 
< a href="javascript:location='mailto:\u006d\u0079\u0068\u0069\u0064\u0064\u0065\u006e\u0045\u006d\u0061\u0069\u006c\u0040\u006d\u0079\u0043\u006f\u006d\u0070\u0061\u006e\u0079\u002e\u0063\u006f\u006d';void 0">< script type="text/javascript">document.write('\u006d\u0079\u0068\u0069\u0064\u0064\u0065\u006e\u0045\u006d\u0061\u0069\u006c\u0040\u006d\u0079\u0043\u006f\u006d\u0070\u0061\u006e\u0079\u002e\u0063\u006f\u006d') < / script > < / a>

To bypass this notification and get a better score for our WordPress page, I use the antispambot function of Wp. (More information at https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/antispambot/)
< a href="javascript:location='mailto:\u006d\u0079\u0068\u0069\u0064\u0064\u0065\u006e\u0045\u006d\u0061\u0069\u006c\u0040\u006d\u0079\u0043\u006f\u006d\u0070\u0061\u006e\u0079\u002e\u0063\u006f\u006d';void 0" rel="nofollow,noindex,noreferrer" target="_blank">< ?php echo antispambot(get_the_author_meta('user_email')); ?>< / a >

Another way to print the admin email only in text format, is the direct use of the antispambot() function built into WordPress, inside PHP opening-closing tags
 echo antispambot(get_the_author_meta('user_email'));

This way, the email is visible to human eyes, but invisible to any email harvester. Enjoy the code!

SEO Implementations on Websites that I helped to get a better Google Ranking

These are a few websites on which I performed SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and of course, they now get traffic from the first page of Google results.