The Ultimate Guide To Technical SEO

Technical SEO, a few simple words that may strike terror into the hearts of search engine optimizers and marketers who aren't focused on SEO. That makes sense. Technical SEO encompasses a wide range of factors, including sub domains, crawl budgets, robots.txt files, schema.org markup, and more, all of which are typically the purview of developers.

But after you've gotten a firm grasp on the fundamentals and learned what Google and other search engines are after, you can start to formulate a checklist approach to improving the performance of your website.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical search engine optimization refers to improving a website's crawlability and indexability for search engines like Google and Bing.

Some, but not all, examples of technical SEO improvements are −

• Making an XML sitemap may facilitate indexation by search engines.

• Using meta tags, you can tell Google's bots which sites you want to be indexed and which you don't.

• Redirecting a freshly removed page with a 301 (permanent) redirect

Technical SEO adjustments may enhance user experience, but these variables mostly focus on helping search engine crawl bots execute their work more successfully.

What Role Does Technical SEO Play?

The most useful aspect of Technical SEO is that it immediately provides information about your website to search engines. Web crawling and indexing optimization refers to this technique. When your site is technically optimized, search engines may quickly access, crawl, decipher, and index it.

Nonetheless, bear in mind the following methods in which Technical SEO comes in handy −

Be Careful To Optimize Your Site By Google's Recommendations

Improving server response speed, performing audits, creating robots.txt files, and restoring broken sites and links are all standard operating procedures for Google regarding Technical SEO optimization. We would benefit from adopting such procedures.

Your Site's Loading Time Is Respectable

Technical SEO plays a crucial role in determining how quickly a website loads. Google, for example, uses information about how long it takes a page to load to include it in its algorithm that determines a site's position in search results. As a consequence, they favour referring users to fast-loading websites. Your website's Google page rank might take a nosedive if it takes too long to load.

Eliminates Distracting Pop-Ups

Google started penalizing sites in 2016 for having too many intrusive pop-ups. Technical SEO comes into play here since it improves the user experience over time, making it easier to ignore these interruptions. A website's bounce rate, exit rate, and even average time on site may all be negatively affected by intrusive pop-ups.

Google also announced some additional rules for this situation, which were −

• Pop-ups shouldn't obscure the primary content.

• Pop-up windows shouldn't take up the full screen.

• It is now required that no pop-ups appear atop online pages.

Optimize Your Site For Mobile Use

By February 2021, 56% of all internet traffic will originate from mobile devices. By the end of March 2021, Google plans to roll out mobile-first indexing to all websites. When that day comes, the search engine will prioritize indexing mobile versions of webpages above desktop versions. For this reason, fixing issues with mobile compatibility is essential.

Please Index Using robots.txt

The problem with robot.txt is that it provides crawlers with a tight user manual. Never remove them since doing so will prevent your site from being indexed. Either Bing or Google may be used to provide such directives. In this approach, you may keep your server free of clutter caused by irrelevant pages and requests.

Successful SEO Techniques

Now that we have a shared definition of technical SEO, we can examine industry standards. The following checklist may be used to conduct a self-guided technical SEO assessment.

Chosen Domain Preferences

Choosing a domain name is important in creating a website or blog. This tells search engines which version of the domain they use for your site permanently.

Let's check out the justifications behind it.

A website may be accessed with or without the "www" prefix by default.

If your domain is example.com, then both http://www.example.com and http://example.com will resolve to your website (i.e. without the www).

This is OK for visitors, but it confuses search engines, which see it as two separate websites. This might lead to difficulties with indexing, duplicate material, and a drop in page rank. You may fix this by selecting your desired domain and notifying search engines.

Improve Your Site's URL Architecture

Changing the site's URL structure should be on your next technical SEO evaluation agenda. To clarify, we are referring to the structure of your URLs.

Domains are subject to the following rules according to best SEO practices −

• Lowercase is preferred.

• In a URL, separate words with a hyphen (-)

• Reduce the length of the describing phrases

• Don't use extra spaces or words

• Use keywords relevant to your content in the URL without overusing them.

• After establishing the framework for your permanent link structure, optimising its URLs is the only other consideration when releasing fresh material.

WordPress users will note that the URL is automatically generated from the post's title whenever a new post is made.

Website Structure And Navigation

There are several reasons why a website's structure matters much for search engine optimization. If a website is easy for search engines to crawl and comprehend, visitors will spend more time there and quickly discover the necessary information. Many web admins make the fatal error of focusing only on conversion rate optimization at the expense of SEO best practices like navigation and site layout.

You shouldn't ignore Google's consideration of the site's general structure when analyzing a single page. You must improve your category pages if you want to see any results.

Conclusion

There are several checks and settings you can improve as part of technical SEO that will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. If you complete an SEO audit once a quarter, you won't have to worry about your technical SEO again in most circumstances.

Several of these activities (such as page speed optimization, adding structured data, etc.) may seem technical, and they need some technical know-how. Still, without them, your website will not perform as well as it might.