What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is all about making the technical aspects of a website better to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. It makes a website faster, easier to crawl, and understandable for search engines. Technical SEO focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It is the opposite of on-page SEO or off-page SEO, which is all about generating exposure for a website through other channels.
Why?
Search engines want the best possible results for their search results. Hence, search engines crawl and evaluate web pages on many factors. Many of these factors are based on the user’s experience. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, amongst others, structured data does. So, If you improve technical aspects you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If this is done right then your site receives better results.
There is another side to this as well: if you make any serious technical mistakes on your site, they can have negative results. You wouldn’t be the first to block search engines entirely from crawling your site by accidentally adding a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file.
Also, there is a misconception that you should focus on the technical details of a website just to please search engines. Having an overall look firstly a website should work well – be fast, clear, and easy to use – for your users.
Here, are some of the most important characteristics of a technically optimized website.
- SSL
SSL certificate on your site is valuable these days. SSL certificate installed on your website is the new standard. All new websites should be launched with SSL certificates applied. It shows visitors that your site is verified and that it’s safe from hackers. It also improves your SEO rankings. Every user is a smart user and will open only those sites which are verified.
- Mobile Responsive
Many users need fast responses for their search. When users browse online, 80% of the time, most of them are using portable devices to do it. You need to ensure they have a positive experience on your site. If you don’t provide a quick responsive site for mobile users, you risk losing an abundance of leads for your business due to poor mobile experience.
You also need to check whether you have a mobile-friendly site before improving your SOE. There is an easy way to test mobile-friendliness that is to use Google’s mobile page testing tool.
- Site Speed
Users’ time is the most precious one and they need their data quickly. The Search team had announced that speed would be a ranking signal for desktop searches in 2010 and as of this year now page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches too.
It’s beneficial to check for the site performance using speed tools. Think about how performance affects the user experience of your pages and consider measuring a variety of real-world user-centric performance metrics.
- Duplicate / Redundant Contents
Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. That “one place” is defined as a location with a unique website address (URL) – so, if the same content appears at more than one web address, you’ve got duplicate content.
Duplicate content can present three main issues for search engines:
This can affect your site as the user may not be aware of which site to choose. So you also have to keep an eye on this.
- sitemap.xml
XML sitemaps tell search engines about your site structure and what to index in the search engine results page (SERP).
An optimized XML sitemap should include Any new content added to your site (recent blog posts, products, etc.), Only 200-status URLs. If your site has more URLs, you should have multiple XML sitemaps to maximize your crawl budget.
You should exclude the following from the XML sitemap: URLs with parameters, URLs that are 301 redirecting or contain canonical or no-index tags, URLs with 4xx or 5xx status codes, Duplicate content.
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Many years back, Google announced the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages—an open-source, web-based solution designed to revolutionize mobile content consumption. According to a 2020 study, mobile traffic has grown 504% in daily media consumption since 2011. With more and more consumers using their mobile phones to access content, it’s more important than ever to optimize for the mobile experience—not just for your readers, but for your SEO; Google can detect pages that load slowly or that have a high bounce rate and will rank those pages lower in search results.
- Structured Data
Structured data helps by providing information about a page and its content – giving context to Google about the meaning of a page, and helping your organic listings stand out on the SERPs.
One of the most common types of structured data is called schema markup. There are many different kinds of schema markups for structuring data for people, places, organizations, local businesses, reviews, and so much more.
Check out Google’s structured data testing tool: Rich Results Test
- Reduce 404 redirects Links
A 404 error is a code that indicates a requested page cannot be found. Whenever a page loads in a browser, it has a response status code in the HTTP header that usually isn’t visible to viewers. While you’ll have probably come across a hard 404 request when browsing a website at some point, you’re unlikely to see a soft 404 error unless you get notified by Google Search Console.
- Console Errors
Google Search Console is a valuable tool for monitoring website traffic and identifying any issues that might be harmful to SEO. When Google is crawling your site, it means that your pages are being discovered and looked at to determine if their information is worthy of being indexed. Indexing means that those pages have been analyzed by Google’s crawler Googlebot and stored on index servers, making them eligible to come up for search engines queries.
Although some of this isn’t as fun as creating 10x content or watching which of your keywords have jumped in the rankings, this category of SEO is still extremely important.
Conclusion:
Technical SEO is a topic of never-ending discussion. It covers a broad range of subjects concerning the elements needed for optimizing according to the requirements search engines impose. Reading more about this topic can be helpful for your site. This was in brief about SEO.
If you have any doubts, feel free to ask in the comments sections below.
