Technical SEO for Educational Websites: A Complete Guide

In the world of digital education, technical SEO has become imperative for a successful educational website. Technical SEO involves minding your website’s technical aspects to make it more search engine-friendly. This is especially helpful if you are looking forward to attracting more students and expanding your online presence in days to come. Let's help you understand how technical SEO can benefit educational websites and provide a complete guide on how to optimize your educational website for search engines. Let’s get started.

Technical SEO and its Importance for Educational Websites

Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a website's technical aspects to improve its search engine visibility. The technical aspects would include factors such as the website's speed, structure, and code. If you’re doing it correctly, search engine crawlers can easily crawl and index your website for higher search engine rankings. This, it's imperative for all kinds of websites, not just for the educational niche.

With the right technical optimization, educational websites can improve their search engine visibility and attract more students. If you’re running an educational website, you need to do the followings −

• Improve website speed and performance

• Increase website security and user privacy

• Improve website accessibility and usability

• Optimize website structure and code for search engines

• Improve website crawlability and indexation

With this basic information in mind, let's dive into some of the most effective technical SEO strategies that can help improve your website's search engine visibility.

Technical SEO Strategies for Educational Websites

1. Improve Website Speed and Performance

A slow-loading website results in a high bounce rate and low search engine rankings. To improve website speed and performance, consider the following strategies −

• Optimize images: large images by compressing them to the appropriate file format (JPEG, PNG, SVG, etc.) without compromising quality.

• Minimize HTTP requests: combining multiple files (CSS, JavaScript, etc.) into a single file, using CSS sprites, and minimizing the use of external scripts.

• Use CDN: helpful for reducing the load time for visitors from different geographic locations.

• Use browser caching: Use caching headers to instruct the browser to cache static resources, such as images and CSS files, to reduce the load time for returning visitors.

2. Use HTTPS to Improve Website Security and User Privacy

It's imperative for educational websites to offer paid courses and study materials for profit. That said, buyers have to buy through their cards, internet banking, or any other online payment systems available these days. In this regard, if the website is not secured, hackers can access the payment details of your customers and hack money from their accounts with ease.

In this regard, HTTPS (a secure protocol) fully encrypts data between a browser and the website server. It makes data more secure and protects sensitive information. It could be login credentials, credit card details, and personal information from hackers.

Things to do −

• Install an SSL certificate on your website

• Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

• Use HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) to enforce HTTPS

3. Improve Website Accessibility and Usability

If you’re targeting education for disabled children as well, this part of technical SEO holds primary importance. Website accessibility and usability are important for users with disabilities and can also improve search engine rankings. To improve website accessibility and usability, consider the following strategies −

• Use alt tags for images

• Provide text alternatives for non-text content

• Use descriptive anchor text

• Use heading tags correctly

• Ensure the website is mobile-friendly

4. Optimize Website Structure and Code for Search Engines

The ideal website structure should make a visitor understand what your educational website is all about with just a few minute's glance. It involves several small technical steps. But it can improve search engine rankings by making your website super readable to crawlers. To optimize website structure and code, consider the following strategies −

• Use descriptive URLs

• Optimize meta tags (title tags and meta descriptions)

• Use schema markup for rich snippets

• Use XML sitemap for search engines

• Use a robots.txt file to control crawlability

5. Improve Website Crawlability and Indexation

Search engine crawlers should easily crawl and index your website pages. If they can't identify and crawl, you may miss several leads per day to your competitors with ease. To improve website crawlability and indexation, consider the following strategies −

• Use internal linking to connect pages for creating a cluster of content

• Fix broken links to avoid search engines flag red for your website

• Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content

• Use 301 redirects to divert old web pages to new fresh ones

• Monitor crawl errors through Google Search Console and fix them from time to time

Conclusion

In conclusion, technical SEO is essential for an online business, let alone educational websites. By implementing correct technical SEO strategies, educational websites can not only improve their search engine visibility but also attract more students and improve their online presence for a thriving business in the future. But if you're still skeptical about the whole process, it's better to hire an expert and let him do the needful for you.