Technical SEO for Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a set of strategies to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index a website or webpage. The first step of technical SEO is to perform a site audit. This tells you where your website stands in the overall SEO factor and comparison to your competitors.

The second step is to plan and address the areas where your website needs improvement. This usually involves optimizing page loading speed, site architecture, and mobile utilization. However, it also includes working in tandem with your content and link-building strategies.

Difference Between On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO

Search Engine Optimization can be broken down into three categories: On-page, Off-page, and technical.

On-Page SEO	Off-Page SEO	Technical SEO
It generally focuses on the contents of your page. It tells search engines and readers about your blog. It involves elements like keyword research & usage, Meta description, H1 tags, alt text, and internal linking. It includes SEO activities within your site.	Off-page SEO is things or votes of confidence from notable links to your site. It involves how many backlinks or links from other sites point to your blog. For example, if you have written an article about the “benefits of Technical SEO” and sites like Ahrefs and Yoast SEO refer to your content and use your page’s link in their article, you will get a backlink from that site. In another way, getting a backlink means the site says they approve and think highly of your content.	Like on-page, Technical SEO is also mostly in your control. However, implementing it is a bit tricky. Most site owners ignore technical SEO. However, it plays a significant role in search engine ranking and getting organic traffic. It is all about getting search engine discovers your site and rank it.

It has five essential steps − Crawling, Indexing, Assessing, Ranking, and Clicking.

Six Essential Factors of Technical SEO to Rank Your Blogs in Search Engine Results Pages

Auditing The Blog Domain

The domain is the URL of your blog. For example, https://www.xyz.com/.

When you select a domain, you tell search engines whether you display your blog with www or without www in the search results. For example, you can choose www.xyz.com over xyz.com.

This directs Google to crawl and index all the www versions of your site. So whenever someone enters your site by clicking a link or manually entering the address, they will redirect to the www version URL.

Otherwise, search engines will treat these two versions as separate sites. This will split the site equity and leads to onsite duplicate content. As a result, your SEO value and search engine rankings will drop.

Add SSL

SSL or Secure Sockets Layer creates a secure layer between the user’s browser and the web server. This is helpful and offers security to users while sending information like contact info or making a payment.

SSL-certified domains start with https instead of HTTP. Search engines prefer secured sites and consider them as a ranking factor.

After setting SSL, you must migrate your HTTP pages to https. For this, you can use a 301 redirect. Update your canonical and hreflang tags accordingly. After that, update your URLs in the CML sitemap and robot.txt.

Go to Google search console and Bing webmaster tools to set up a new instance for https webpages. Track it to ensure all traffic is migrating to the new link.

Optimize Page Speed

Increasing your page speed is a ranking factor. Generally, a user moves to another site if a page doesn’t load within 4-5 seconds. A slow-loading site can make you lose an innumerable number of visitors. When Google sees people are not staying on your site, it will downgrade your search engine rank.

Tips to Improve Your Page Load Time

• Audit your site for at least a week.

• Compress your files.

• Use lighter code.

• Use a content distribution network (CDN).

• Remove outdated plugins, as they could have security vulnerabilities.

• Add cache plugins.

• Use async loading.

Ensure a Seamless Crawlability

Whenever you create a blog post or webpage or update your site, Googlebot crawls your pages to acquire information about the page.

Some technical glitches can block the search bots from crawling your page. As a result, your pages won’t be rendered or indexed in search engines. In short, it won’t rank in the search engine.

Crawlability Checklist

• Set a URL structure.

• Create an XML sitemap and add your site’s URLs.

• Use robot.txt.

• Add breadcrumb menus

• Use pagination.

• Build a solid site architecture.

• Check your SEO log files.

Make Your Website And Webpage Indexable

When search bots crawl your site, they index the web pages according to topic and relevance. After indexing, your pages will be ready for ranking on the SERPs.

Tips To Improve Your Indexability

• Fix HTTP errors through redirects, canonical tags, or robot.txt.

• Fix onsite page duplication.

• Remove duplicate content.

• Check if some important pages are mistakenly blocked from indexing.

• Make sure your site is responsive and mobile-friendly.

Check on SEO Accessibility

SEO and accessibility go hand in hand. Accessibility may not be a direct ranking factor, but it works indirectly. The role of accessibility is to make your content visible to everyone, including visually challenged individuals. It also helps search engines understand your content better. This increases your site’s chance to rank better in SERPs.

Conclusion

From optimizing metadata to creating an optimized mobile-friendly design, it’s essential for bloggers to consider technical aspects of SEO when aiming for their content to reach a large audience. Moreover, by utilizing other optimization strategies such as internal linking and structuring posts into categories or tags, you can ensure that users stay engaged with your content and that search engine bots understand your content. Finally, remember to regularly update your site with fresh content; doing so increases click-through rates and improves overall engagement with blogs. With the right resources in mind and a bit of effort upfront, you can be sure that your blog stands out from the pack and converts readers into loyal followers.