What is Technical SEO? A Guide for Small Business Owners
Are you a small or midsize business looking to generate more leads from your website? As an SMB considering ways to increase traffic to your site, you know you need search engine optimization (SEO).
An SEO effort generally involves Technical SEO, content and keyword development, and link building. There are of course other elements to successful SEO (search engine optimization). These, though, are the core practices. And as an SMB, the first step is to ensure that Google can crawl your website and find your high-value content. To that end, technical SEO is usually the foundation of any search engine strategy.
The goal of a technical SEO campaign is to enable search engines to access, crawl, understand, and index your site. It’s a continuous process of removing impediments to Google’s ability to spider your site. You want to expose your highest-quality content to users and to Google.
What is Technical SEO?
In this competitive market, everyone wants to increase their website ranking on search engines and earn more revenue. Many website owners are utilizing search engine optimization services to improve the visibility of their websites. But, you need to understand that you can have a website with the best content. If your technical SEO is messed up, you are not going to rank on search engines. At the basic level, search engines such as Google need to be able to find, render, crawl, and index the pages on your website.
By focusing on and improving the technical element of your website, you can assist search engines to crawl and comprehend your website. If you will do technical SEO properly, you might be rewarded with rich outcomes and higher rankings. Utilizing technical SEO means you can increase the chances to find your website through search engines.
Importance of Technical SEO
Many website owners understand the value of on-page SEO and a good Content Marketing strategy, but often ignore technical SEO because it appears “complex.” However, technical SEO is required since it helps search engines to crawl your site and rank it first in search results.
All of the elements that make your website quick, mobile-friendly, easy to use, user-friendly, and functional are included in technical SEO. Without it, you may have an appealing site that loads slowly, isn’t usable on mobile devices, doesn’t route customers to the information they want, and glitches out when users try to contact you for purchasing your products.
A Guide for Small Business Owners
Conducting an SEO audit will show you what elements of your website need work, whether you’re targeting an e-commerce SEO strategy or looking to build brand awareness.
Crawlability and Indexability
If your site is having problems, start by checking for crawl ability and indexability issues. If Google is struggling to crawl or index your site, your SEO can significantly suffer.
To display your site in the search engine results pages, bots need to be able to identify your content and organize it accordingly. If they’re unable to do so, even if all of the other elements of your site are optimized for search engines, your website will be invisible.
An all-too-frequent error is a badly-formed robots.txt file. The robots.txt is a text file of directives for the search engines regarding which pages to crawl and which not to. If these are incorrect or malformed, your whole site could be ignored by all search engines. This kind of error sometimes happens following a site migration or the launch of a new site for example.
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.
HTML Tags
HTML tags are bits of HTML code that identify various elements of a document and may also determine the way that a web browser will display that element by default. The primary HTML tags include:
- title tags
- meta descriptions
- header tags (H1, H2, H3)
Proper implementation and optimization of your HTML tags can help improve the organization of your site and make it easier for Google to make sense of a page.
Duplicate Content
The best way to remove identical material from URLs is through canonicalization. This is the procedure for choosing a preferred URL when there are several URL alternatives for a single page. Utilizing redundant content should be avoided. By doing routine technological checks, we can lower the likelihood of the same content.
The search engine will penalize your website if it has the same material on numerous pages. Use heading tags, titles, and meta descriptions to set one page apart from another to avoid repetition.
Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the preferred URL that you want Google to display on the search engine results page when duplicate or near-duplicate pages exist.
For example, if your site has the URLs, yourwebsite.com?item=333 and yourwebsite.com/item/333, Google may arbitrarily choose one to display.
Using canonical links provides information to search engines about which page should be presented should a duplicate issue arise. This makes the life of a crawler easier as it has one less decision to make.
