Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide
Technical SEO covers all of the technical aspects of your website that affect SEO, from hosting and site speed to XML sitemaps and meta robot tags. Dozens of search strategies involve refining and perfecting your technical SEO implementation.
Search Engine Journal’s ebook, Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide, covers the most important technical SEO strategies every practitioner needs to know. They will allow you to make it easier for search engines to discover and understand your website.
We created this detailed guide for SEO professionals who want to take a deeper dive into the more complex facets of SEO. If you have high-quality content on your website, help search engines index it by going beyond HTML tags and attributes.
The more reliance sites have on JavaScript and other new web technologies, the more technical SEOs need to be able to handle the technical intricacies of search.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines, but it can also include activities meant to improve user experience.
Common tasks associated with technical SEO include the following:
- Submitting your sitemap to Google
- Creating an SEO-friendly site structure
- Improving your website’s speed
- Making your website mobile-friendly
- Finding and fixing duplicate content issues
- Much more
In this post, you’ll learn the fundamentals and best practices to optimize your website for technical SEO.
Benefits of performing technical SEO on websites
Technical SEO is the foundation of a site. The goal of technical SEO is to improve the infrastructure of your website and enable search engines to crawl and index your web pages. There are various benefits of using technical SEO and some of them are given below:
- Technical SEO provides faster web page loading.
- Technical SEO enhances the website’s position with semantic optimization.
- Technical SEO prevents duplicate content.
- Technical SEO offers XML sitemaps for easy access.
- Technical SEO increases a website’s security.
- It examines backlinks to increase the website’s ranking.
- It utilizes an internal linking structure to promote web pages.
- It makes it easy to crawl for search engine bots.
- It helps search engines crawl, index, interpret and access the website.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO can greatly impact a website’s performance on Google.
If pages on your site are not accessible to search engines, they won’t appear or rank in search results—no matter how valuable your content is.
This results in a loss of traffic to your website and potential revenue to your business.
Plus, the page speed and mobile-friendliness of a website are Google-confirmed ranking factors.
If your pages load slowly, users may get annoyed and leave your site. User behaviors like this may signal that your site doesn’t create a positive user experience. As a result, Google may not rank your site well.
Benefits of Technical SEO
Let’s discuss some key elements of technical SEO and why they are important:
It Helps in Achieving Better Rankings
By raising your website’s ranking for specific search terms, technical SEO enables you to drive more traffic to your landing pages. With a clear website structure, Google can index and show content efficiently, supporting and enhancing your organic results.
Google strongly supports increasing page speed. By making sure that online pages load quickly, those web pages will be preferred significantly more than rival sites that have not handled page speed as a key ranking factor. Overall, technical SEO may assist you in identifying and removing any barriers that prevent consumers from navigating the site, enhancing CRO results.
You can Set Up Structured Data
Every website needs structured data to function properly, especially in terms of efficiency.
Structured data markup, to put it simply, is the coding you add to your website to assist search engines in understanding the content. Search engines may better index your website and deliver more pertinent results with the use of this information.
Additionally, “rich snippets” provided by structured data, such as the addition of star ratings to reviews, enhance search results. Since they are more visually pleasing and immediately highlight important information for searchers, these better results can raise CTR and bring more people to your site.
Improves Page Speed
Technical SEO is crucial for enhancing page speed, which Google views as a key ranking factor. A website that loads quickly will most likely rank higher in searches, whereas one that takes longer to load will just increase bounce rates and provide fewer conversions.
You may speed up the loading of your website by doing a few things. Using multiple CSS style sheets, limited HTTP queries, and quick hosting are all necessary for this. Make every attempt to reduce the size of your image files and compress your web pages by removing unnecessary spaces, line breaks, and indentations from your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
What Is Technical SEO? Basics and 10 Best Practices
Helps Locate Website Structure Issues
Your website’s pages should ideally just be three clicks away. You must focus on flattening your website’s structure if this is the case.
It’s as simple as the fact that a page’s visibility to users and search engines decreases as it gets deeper. The section of your site audit report that highlights concerns will indicate pages that require more than three clicks to access. Additionally, validating your XML sitemaps is essential. A file called an XML Sitemap contains a list of each page and content on your website. It includes the names as well as the dates of both the most recent update and the release. When crawling a website, search engines could follow the instructions in the XML sitemap.
