Most of you might be familiar with the term SEO?
SEO is a practice for optimizing your website for search engines. This is a very important process, all website owners and bloggers will do to popularize their website.
There are many practices you have to do in order to optimize your website. There are two types of SEO. One is on-screen SEO which deals with your website content and optimization of that content. Off-screen SEO deals with link building from other websites.
Technical SEO is a different term compared to SEO. It is very essential to upgrade your website quality.
It deals with all technical aspect that is needed to make a good website so that it will get a good ranking. Now let’s check what the term actually refers to
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO means optimizing your website for crawling and indexing site for search engine.
Search engine algorithms change more frequently. So, it is essential to optimize your site according to the change. This is what technical SEO does.
It changes the site specifications and helps the search engine crawl, index and interpret your website. Content optimization and link building don’t come under this category.
In short, technical SEO is like the foundation of your website. You need to change it according to search engine modification so that your website will get noted by search engines.
For newbies, this is a difficult process. Content optimization is easy but to do technical things a little technical knowledge is required. If you cannot handle this, it is better to hire someone who can deal with it.
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is very important to a website. Here are some important aspects which affect your website technical SEO
- It improves your website reachability
- Helps to attract more traffic by improving technical aspects such as speed, architecture, visibility, etc.
- Helps to increase your income by promoting marketing aspects.
- Will improve your site ranking and help to reach the targeted traffic
Technical SEO Elements:
1. Speed optimization:
Speed optimization is very important for a site. If your site has a slow loading speed then it will negatively affect your site performance.
From a recent survey, it shows that more than 40% of people close the site which takes more than 3 minutes to load.
Most of the people prefer a fast loading site. If it loads very slow they will close and go to another site no matter what the quality of the site and its content is.
This is not applicable for search engines. But loading speed is important if you want more users to your site.
Improve your site speed by optimizing your site. The reason behind low speed could be anything like unoptimized images, content without HTTP compression, etc.
You can use any tools like Google’s page speed Insight tool to check the website speed and optimize the site speed using any content delivery networks, Google’s accelerated mobile pages HTML, modifying codes, etc. Optimize images, keep simple templates, don’t include multiple redirects in a page, clear browser cache, etc are some modifications that improve your site speed.
2. Make your site mobile friendly:
Now a day everyone is addicted to their mobile. So, whenever you want to make a site then it should be mobile friendly also. For that, you need to check your site for mobile friendliness.
You can check it in some tools. Even Google offers you a tool for that. Whenever you enter your site URL you can see the result there. Also, you can search your site for mobile usability in ‘Search Console’. It shows you whether it’s mobile friendly or not.
You can create a responsive design such that the site changes according to the user device.
Another option is to create separate URLs for mobile and PC users. This option is a bit confusing and difficult to work out.
The third approach is to create content based on the user device. That means if a user search from a mobile device, show them a specific site and otherwise show them default page.
Choose your method from any of the above. Not every site is mobile friendly. But, when a site is not mobile friendly it will affect its ranking and users won’t visit it.
They want sites that are easy to load as most people browse from their mobile. So, if you want to improve your site ranking the page should be mobile friendly.
3. Site Architecture:
Site Architecture is important to enabling your site easy to crawl for search spiders. If your site architecture is simple and clear then it will be easy for search spiders to crawl your site.
So, it is better to index your site for a good ranking. There are some main points you need to note while indexing your site
a. HTML or XML:
A site map is very important while constructing a site. It helps the crawler to easily crawl your site completely.
There are HTML and XML sitemaps. HTML sitemaps are for humans but crawlers can also see it and can use it to find the page. XML is a text code that is exclusively for search spiders.
You can create XML sitemaps using tools and submit it. It will help to improve and identify all your site pages and increases your site visibility.
b. Silo contents:
You can make internal links of big content. Make it into different categories and each category page should link to other pages in the same category.
Like this, you can make the search engine job easy. The easier your site architecture is, the more you have a chance to get noted.
c. URL:
URL represents the page address of the content. While creating a URL make sure to optimize it. This will help to improve your page popularity.
While creating a URL, it should be easy to identify by the user and by reading it user should understand what the content is about. You can also optimize your content URL with keywords and it will improve the popularity of your site.
d. Add the breadcrumb menu:
This is a set of links that you can add at the top or bottom of a page to navigate the user.
It can help the user to navigate to the home page without pressing the back button and helps the search engine to know the structure of your site. This is very good to make your site architecture easy.
4. Avoid Duplicate content:
Duplicate content is very bad for your website. it also creates confusion for search engines also. You can search the Siteline tool to check for any duplicate content.
By finding them get rid of those contents from your site. If there are more duplicate contents then other options that you can do are creating a canonical URL to each version or reduce duplicate contents in your site.
5. Structured Data:
This is a code that you can add to your website to improve its visibility to search engine crawlers. This code helps to understand the context of your content to the search engine.
This helps to improve your site’s search engine ranking. You can use this in any article categories such as local business, recipes, food, job posting and many more.
6. Avoid error pages:
404 pages are there on all websites. It shows that a particular page is not existing in that site. Maybe the content doesn’t exist or removed to any other URL etc. But 404 error pages are not recommended for your site.
You can remove it anyhow or navigate the users to the page where the content exists. Inform the users the reason for content unavailability.
No need to optimize your 404 error pages. It is a wastage of time. just get rid of them anyway and make a quality website.
7. Consider adding SSL to your HTTP:
SSL means secure sockets layer and it is very good to add an SSL to get trust from users.
Adding SSL will also help to improve your site ranking. This indicates that the information transferring between server and website is encrypted and safe also.
SSL was essential for e-commerce sites but now it is very good for every site to improve its ranking. So, if SSL is not enabled in your site, contact your service provider and enable it on your site.
8. Add AMP:
AMP is Accelerated mobile pages and you can add this to your mobile site. This is a cut down version of HTML.
Once you completed creating AMP pages for your site, it will be stored in Google cache and helps to load the pages faster. This cannot be used everywhere.
It is only accessible through Google search results. As the page loading time decreases your CTR will increase and hence your page ranking. But is not easy to implement everywhere and needs a good technical knowledge to create it. So, you may need to hire somebody who can do this for you.
These are some technical SEO elements that you need to optimize to upgrade your site quality.
Advanced SEO elements:
In addition to these elements, there are some Advanced SEO techniques you can include into your audit list.
Pagination:
Pagination means breaking a long content into different short pages. It helps the spider to easily crawl into your site. To avoid duplicate issues, you can do some settings.
The code is rel=”next’ and rel=”pre”. When the search engine sees this code, the search engine understands the upcoming pages are a continuation of the main page.
Multi-Lingual websites:
If your site is in another language then you should inform Google. You can use hreflang to inform it to Google. It tells the search engine about your site structure and content type.
It also helps you in indexing your site by optimization and will not have any duplicate issue. This is very important if you handle sites in multiple languages.
Now you got an idea about the term technical SEO and its important elements. It is very important to audit your site often because a technical issue can happen anytime. Here is a quick technical SEO checklist for you.
Technical SEO checklist:
- Check website for robort.txt optimization
- Optimize your site URL
- Design your site with a simple and clear architecture
- Add breadcrumb menu to your website
- Check your site speed and improve it by optimizing various elements
- Optimize your page 404 errors
- Enable site HTTP and SSL
- Check whether your site works well in mobile
- Try AMP on your site
- Check site Pagination and multilingual settings
- Verify your site for any duplicate content and avoid it if any.
- Add structured data to your content
- Try adding Silo contents to your site
Final words:
These are some important technical SEO you should consider. They are essential to help the spider to crawl into your site. like normal optimization technical optimization is also important that decides your website future.
In most of the cases, you have to set these once and then it won’t cause any issues again. But low speed and error pages can happen at any time. so, it is better to do an audit on your site frequently to make sure everything is ok. Follow those properly to promote your site well.
Technical SEO needs some technical knowledge. If you want to do it alone then take some time and understand how it works. You can get help from others who do the same. Some of the terms are a bit complicated and to understand that well you need to have some experience. But you need to put some real effort to understand them and implement it on your site. Then only you can take your site to the level you expected.
This guide gives you a very good idea on how to implement those elements on your website. So, try them and get rid of all technical issues so that the search spiders will easily crawl into your site and you will get a good search ranking. Have you tried all the technical SEO elements above? If not, try them immediately.