Having quality content on your website is essential, but it’s only part of the equation. If search engines can’t properly access or interpret your site, your content might never reach its audience. This is where Technical SEO becomes important. It’s all about tuning your site’s framework to make sure it’s accessible, indexable, and understandable to search engine crawlers.
If you’re new to this, it might sound a bit overwhelming. But don’t worry. This guide breaks down the basics into simple and practical steps. You’ll quickly see how these behind-the-scenes improvements can make a big difference in your site’s visibility.
Let’s get into it.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is optimizing your website so that Google, along with other search engines, can easily crawl, index, and render it. It makes the site more discoverable and readable by search engine crawlers in order to increase its chances of getting ranked.
Creating high-quality content that is easily readable by humans is important. However, this content has to be readable by Google as well so that this search engine can index and rank it.
Focusing on the technical aspects of the website helps with it. When the speed, infrastructure, URL, and site architecture of the website are fully optimized, you have a better chance of ranking it higher in search results.
Is Technical SEO That Complicated?
When you first hear of technical site optimization, it sounds like a really complex topic and can even intimidate some people.
But there’s no need to worry about it.
It’s actually not that complicated. Once you understand the basic point, such as how crawlers work and how Google indexes webpages, understanding and conducting this SEO becomes a lot easier.
As we’ll explore its multiple factors in this article, you’ll be fully prepared to handle your website’s overall infrastructure to make it fully optimized for better crawling and indexing.
Why Technical SEO Matters?
You can write the best content in the world, but if it’s not discoverable by Google, there’s no point in writing it in the first place.
This point alone is enough to explain the importance of this SEO type.
To make things clearer for you, the following points will help you understand why it matters for websites:
It Makes the Website Crawlable:
It makes sure that your website’s webpages become discoverable by Google for getting indexed.
By optimizing your website’s technical structure, you make it easier for search engine crawlers to access and understand your content. This allows them to discover new pages faster and index them more efficiently, which can improve your visibility in search results. Without these optimizations, even your best content might remain hidden from your audience.
Better User Experience:
It improves the website’s speed and usability to improve the user experience.
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. This factor focuses on how a website’s webpages perform for users. Faster site speed and smoother navigation lead visitors to spend more time on the website and help increase its dwell time.
It Completes The SEO Strategy:
Improved technical aspects of a website help build a foundation for all the other SEO efforts.
A Search Engine Optimization strategy is a combination of technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Although these factors are important, they can’t perform well unless the site is more usable for visitors and crawlable for search engines.
So, this technical aspect of SEO completes the overall strategy to bring the best results possible.
How Does Site Crawling and Indexing Work?
Before I begin discussing the key components of technical SEO, it’s important to understand how indexing and crawling work.
Indexing is the process by which search engines store and organize content that they have discovered on the Internet. Google uses advanced bots called “crawlers” that analyze a webpage’s content, images, tags, and structure.
If crawlers find the content valuable, they add it to the database, which is known as the search index. These indexed webpages are then eligible to show in the search results and even rank at the highest spots if overall SEO is great.
Main Activities Involved in Technical SEO:
There are several activities, Some of the main ones are given below:
Website Speed Optimization:
Website speed optimization is a fundamental activity involved in SEO. It focuses on improving a website’s speed so that users can quickly open and consume their required content. The faster the site is, the more satisfied users will be.
Mobile Friendliness:
Millions of people prefer using websites over the phone. The technical aspect of SEO makes the site mobile-friendly so that these users can easily consume data and navigate the website without facing any issue.
Creating XML Sitemaps:
An XML sitemap of a website works as a roadmap for google. It is basically designed to guide Google to understand the website structure and find the most important webpages.
Schema Markup:
Structured data is code you add to your website to help search engines understand what your content means By using schema markup, you can highlight specific information like product details, reviews, etc. This can improve how your pages appear in search results through rich snippets.
Canonical Tags:
Using canonical tags is essential for growing websites. It’s especially important for those sites with similar content spread across multiple pages. These tags help search engines identify the primary version of a piece of content. It directly reduces confusion and prevents issues like duplicate content and keyword cannibalization.
Broken Link and Redirect Management:
Broken links can create a very poor user experience, and even can harm a website’s credibility. Technical procedures in SEO makes sure to fix these broken links with the help of proper redirect management in order to improve the site’s user experience and overall credibility.
URL Structure and Site Architecture:
A clean URL structure makes it easier for users to understand where they are on your site. It also makes it easier for search engines to index your pages accurately.
A decent site architecture, on the other hand, keeps the website and content organized. It provides the content a logical hierarchy with clear internal linking. It improves the site’s crawlability and help visitors navigate the site easily.
Technical SEO Best Practices:
Understanding the technicalities isn’t enough. You need to follow some best practices in order to implement it perfectly. I’ve listed some of the main practices below:
- Optimizing the crawl budget.
- Utilizing HTTPs
- Dealing with duplicate content
- Optimizing Core Web Vitals
- Building an audit schedule
Let’s take a look at these practices one by one:
Optimizing the crawl budget:
Your crawl budget is the number of pages Google crawls on your site within a given time. Optimizing it is important to allow Google crawl as many pages as possible. The best way to do this is by:
- Removing low-quality and unnecessary pages.
- Fixing broken links.
- Keeping the site well-structured.
Utilize HTTPs:
As an SEO expert, you shouldn’t sleep on HTTPs. It protects user data, builds trust, and is a confirmed ranking factor.
If your website’s address starts with “http://” instead of “https://”, it is not secure. It doesn’t encrypt data between the user and your site, which can put personal information at risk. o fix this, you should switch to HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate.
Dealing with duplicate content:
Duplicate content is a huge reason for content or keyword cannibalization. It can confuse Google in understanding which page to rank higher in search results.
As a result, all the webpages with similar content end up ranking low. So, it’s important to deal with duplicate content. You can do it by:
- Use canonical tags
- Set preferred URLs
- Delete the content if possible.
Optimizing Core Web Vitals:
Core Web Vitals are important metrics that measure a site’s page speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. Make sure to improve these metrics in order to increase your website’s chances of getting indexed and ranked higher in search engine results.
Building an audit schedule:
The technical side of a website can be unpredictable. Problems can pop up at any time and hurt your SEO. That’s why it’s important to have a solid audit schedule in place.
Stick to it, and keep checking and tuning your site’s technical health from time to time. It will help make sure it keeps running well and ranks better.
Common Technical SEO Mistakes
While improving the site’s technicalities, some SEO experts make mistakes. These mistakes stop them from improving the website properly. I’ve listed these mistakes below so that you can understand and avoid them properly.
- Avoid putting effort into mobile optimization for better responsiveness.
- Not prioritizing site security by using HTTPS.
- Keeping the content as well as the website structure messy.
- Not fixing broken links via proper redirect management.
- Overlooking errors that can cause poor site crawlability.
- Adding too much duplicate content and not using canonical tags for webpage prioritization.
- Avoiding Core Web Vitals entirely.
Conclusion:
Well, there you have it. Technical SEO is all about optimizing the technical aspects of a website to make it more readable and crawlable by search engines like Google. Optimizing these aspects is important since it allows Google’s crawlers to analyze and index web pages easily.
There are different activities involved in this process. These activities are related to things like speed optimization, making the site user-friendly for mobile users, fixing broken links, etc. By following the discussed activities and best practices, you can optimize your website technically and make its webpages index and run faster.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
Is technical SEO difficult?
Yes, and no. It involves different factors that are a bit hard to understand. However, when understood properly, conducting this SEO type becomes easier.
Does this SEO require coding?
Not really. Basic technical tasks, such as fixing broken links, do not require any coding. However, some advanced tasks, such as editing site code, require knowledge of coding.
How long does this SEO take?
Improving the technical aspects of a website can show results in just a few weeks for factors like crawlability and indexing.
How do I master this SEO type?
There are different things you can do to master it. First, learn and get better at the basics, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, etc. Then, start focusing on more advanced factors, such as crawl budget optimization. Take online courses and keep on learning as well as practicing to become good at this SEO type.
