Technical SEO

31 Jan., 2023

Search Engine optimization

Technical SEO

Under Technical SEO This refers to the process of technically optimizing your website so that search engines can find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. The goal is to be found and improve your search engine ranking.

What is Technical SEO?

This is the part of search engine optimization that deals with making it as easy as possible for the search engine bot to crawl and index your website, and focuses on improving the rendering phase.

Technical SEO is the foundation for all other SEO activities and absolutely necessary if you want to ensure optimal performance of your website.

It includes:

  • Website performance
  • Image optimization
  • structure of the website
  • Responsiveness

How does technical search engine optimization work?

SEO is about understanding the ranking factors that search engines like Google use to evaluate your website, and then optimizing your website to perform well based on those ranking factors.

Search engine ranking factors can be roughly divided into four categories (with some overlap):

  • Off-page ranking factors – Measured on other websites, including links, local citations, directory listings, social media mentions, and much more.
  • Ranking factors for user experience – Google measures the user experience on your website by collecting data on the user behavior of users who interact with your website via the Chrome browser.
  • On-page ranking factors – These are measured on your website at the page level, including factors such as content length, title, keyword targeting, authorship, and much more.
  • Technical ranking factors – are measured on your website, sometimes at the page level, but often at the domain level. This includes factors such as page load speed, website security, link functionality, and much more.

When you work to improve the performance of your on-page ranking factors, you are doing on-page SEO.

Working to improve your off-page ranking factors is called off-page SEO.

Technical SEO: Why is it so important?

This is why: Even if you have designed your website for human users, web robots and computerized algorithms determine how your website performs in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engines like Google use web robots, called crawlers, to crawl and index every new page on the internet and to monitor changes to already known pages.

Crawlers on your website analyze both on-page and technical ranking factors to help Google decide whether to rank your website and for which keywords you should rank.

Poor technical SEO can mean that your website performs poorly in this ranking, or it can mean that search engines have difficulty crawling your website.

In both cases, the result is the same: no rankings in search engines, no organic traffic, and no revenue growth.

Effective technical SEO makes your website as easy as possible for crawlers to access and analyze your most important content. It also addresses a number of well-known ranking factors that search engines consider when technically reviewing your website.

When you combine these optimizations, Google recognizes the professional implementation of your website and rewards you with higher rankings in the SERPs.

Next, we'll review some of the most important ranking factors you'll address as part of your technical SEO efforts. We'll provide a basic overview of each, explain why it's important, and show the easiest ways to get started.

SEO tools for technical adjustments

There are useful tools for performing technical SEO. You can easily get a first overview of the technical elements of a website via the... Google Search Console or a Bing Webmaster Tools obtain them. A wide variety of useful tools are available on the internet.

An overview of 100 different SEO tools can be found, for example, in Moz-BlogGoogle offers two tools, the Page Speed A testing tool and a tool for checking mobile device friendliness that can be used without signing in to a Google account.

Technical SEO and its benefits

The ultimate advantage of technical SEO is that you will likely generate more organic traffic if you have a fully optimized website, but there are countless individual benefits to implementing technical SEO.

All these advantages are related to the fact that your website is easier to crawl, index, and navigate, so you can get more website visitors from search engines.

The advantages of technical SEO include, among others:

  • Adherence to Google's best practices for website optimization
  • A mobile-friendly website that users can access from any device.
  • Ensure your website loads quickly for all users.
  • Facilitation of Crawlings, the indexing and ranking of your website by search engines
  • Removing pop-ups and other intrusive elements that impair usability.
  • Your website must be easy for users to navigate so they can find the information they need.
  • Keeping your website safe and secure
  • Building a search engine-friendly URL structure
  • Removal of broken links and 404 pages on your website
  • Adding structured data to improve how your pages appear in search results.
  • Inserting a robots.txt file to show search engines what to crawl (and what not to crawl)
  • Creating a sitemap as a "roadmap" to your website to improve indexing.

In summary, technical SEO helps search engines to crawl and index your website, so you can bring more traffic to your website.

Furthermore, a technically sound website is easy to navigate and loads quickly, which encourages users to stay on your site longer. This is the goal, as you want to convert this traffic into leads and customers.

Technical SEO: A checklist with six key factors

Crawlability

Overview: Before potential customers can find your website in the SERPs, search engines need to be able to crawl and index your web pages. Crawlers use the links on your website to navigate between pages and send additional data to Google's databases with each new URL they encounter.

Crawlability problems occur when crawlers cannot efficiently navigate your website or cannot access parts of it. Pages that are overlooked by crawlers do not appear in search engine results.

What do you need to do?

  • Configure robots.txt
  • Create an XML sitemap
  • Submit your sitemap to Google

Page Speed

Overview: Google has indicated in the past that the Page speed is one of the ranking factors. are used in its search algorithm.

Google uses measurements from its own test servers (lab data) and user behavior data from the Chrome User Experience Report(Field data) to evaluate the speed and performance of each website in the index and adjust its search rankings accordingly.

Page speed can also significantly impact the user experience of your website visitors. Faster page load times have been experimentally linked to a lower bounce rate, longer time spent on the page, more conversions, and higher revenue.

What do you need to do?

Use thatGoogle PageSpeed ​​Insights tool, to analyze your website, find out how fast your pages load, and identify technical optimization opportunities to improve page speed.

Security

Overview: Search engines want to avoid sending their users to websites where their personal data could be at risk due to a lack of data security. Users also expect security and data protection when browsing your website or conducting online transactions.

The standard technology for securing data transfer between your website and a client browser is called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Google strongly favors ranking websites with a valid SSL certificate. Even websites with a valid security certificate can have configuration errors that lead to crawling/indexing problems and ranking penalties.

What do you need to do?

  • Implement SSL on your website
  • In the Google's HTTPS policies You can find more information on implementing SSL as part of technical SEO here.

Page & Content Issues

Overview: Problems with the organization, navigation, internal linking, and duplication of web pages and content can significantly and negatively impact your search rankings. Some websites generate multiple versions of the same page and fail to indicate to crawlers which version should be indexed.

Search engines also dislike duplicate content (it is perceived as spam), so any duplication of pages will likely negatively impact your search rankings.

Duplicate headers and title tags across multiple pages are another problem that can be overlooked during page analysis but should be checked in a technical analysis.

What do you need to do?

  • Use canonical tags to tell search engines which page to index when multiple copies of a page exist.
  • Avoid duplicating the same content on multiple pages of your website.
  • Optimize each page of your website for a single keyword and avoid keyword cannibalization.

URL Structure & Internal Linking

Overview: The URL structure and internal linking influence how quickly and thoroughly search engines can crawl and index the content. The URL of each page should be carefully optimized to reflect the content of that page.

This URL optimization is part of off-page optimization and contributes to online marketing. Checking the URL structure and linking is an important part of search engine optimization to achieve good visibility.

The content on your website should be organized in a pyramid-shaped hierarchy. Your homepage is at the top, the most important core documents are on the next level, and a broad base of supporting content lies below.

Your website's internal linking structure should contradict this hierarchical content structure. Both human and robotic users should be able to navigate the content hierarchy and find all your content via internal links.

Every piece of content on your website should be accessible from your homepage in no more than 3-4 clicks. This contributes to better user-friendliness and navigation. It also supports your online marketing, as search engines favor easily accessible content.

What do you need to do?

  • Optimizing the URL structure
  • Reduce the average crawl depth for all content
  • Fix or remove faulty 301 redirects
  • Correct or remove broken internal links (404 and 5xx error pages)

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