What Is Technical SEO? Basics and 10 Best Practices
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.
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.
Why is technical SEO essential?
In this advanced world, search engines have become very smart, however, they are programmed as robots to complete only prescribed actions. If your website has even a little technical issue, they can’t analyze and understand your website. And your website will not appear in a search query, even if your website includes all the required information and data. An established technical SEO means your website is easy to crawl for web crawlers and will be higher ranked on the search result page. Technical SEO is very essential because it allows search engines to understand that your website has high value. It also promotes the search engine to rank you higher.
You should optimize your website’s technical SEO for some reasons, following:
- It is a digital marketing strategy that increases ROI from SEO.
- It assists your company to compete with competitor that also utilizes search engine optimization.
- You can improve your website’s conversion rate with technical SEO.
- It can increase leads and sales.
- It influences your website’s ranking on search results.
- It impacts your website visitor’s actions and decisions.
10 Best Practices
1. Create SEO-Friendly Site Architecture
Site architecture, also called site structure, is the way pages are linked together within your site.
An effective site structure organizes pages in a way that helps crawlers find your website content quickly and easily.
So when structuring your site, ensure all the pages are just a few clicks away from your homepage.
In the site structure above, all the pages are organized in a logical hierarchy.
The homepage links to category pages. And then, category pages link to individual subpages on the site.
This structure also reduces the number of orphan pages.
Orphan pages are pages with no internal links pointing to them, making it difficult (or sometimes impossible) for crawlers and users to find those pages.
2. XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is similar to path marking for Google or other search engines. It is an essential URL source for Google. XML sitemap includes all details about your site: how often you update it, what priority every page has when you last changed them, and every page of your site. Having an XML sitemap is very important for your website because it allows Google to find your web pages quickly, even if your internal linking is not good. According to Google’s documentation, an XML sitemap is perfect for new websites with few external links, websites with large activities, and large websites.
3. Submit Your Sitemap to Google
Using a sitemap can help Google find your web pages.
A sitemap is typically an XML file containing a list of important pages on your site. It lets search engines know which pages you have and where to find them.
Which is especially important if your site contains a lot of pages. Or if they’re not well-linked together.
4. Mobile-friendly website
If you want to improve your website’s ranking on SERP, you have to focus on the mobile-friendliness of your website. Google has officially announced that those websites that don’t have a full mobile version will be avoided by Google. If your website is working perfectly for the desktop version but it doesn’t have a version for mobile, Google will not display your website on SERP. So your website should be mobile-friendly and fully responsive to rank on the search engine result page. Mobile-friendliness functionality allows the mobile user to access the website on small screens. Mobile users are growing very rapidly so the rates of mobile browsing are also increasing. You can use the following website to check the mobile-friendliness of your website.
5. Understanding Crawling
The first step in optimizing your site for technical SEO is making sure search engines can effectively crawl it.
Crawling is an essential component of how search engines work.
Crawling happens when search engines follow links on pages they already know about to find pages they haven’t seen before.
For example, every time we publish new blog posts, we add them to our blog archive page.
6. Helps Locate Website Structure Issues
Another important factor is internal links that lead to deep pages.
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.
7. Duplicate content
Duplicate content is similar content on different pages of your website. Normal users may not see the difference, but the search engine can detect duplicate content on your website. It can lead to a low ranking on SERP. You need to remove duplicate content from your website or pages to increase the ranking of your website. You can use different online tools to check the originality of content on your website.
8. Understanding Indexing
Once search engines crawl your pages, they then try to analyze and understand the content of those pages.
And then the search engine stores those pieces of content in its search index—a huge database containing billions of web pages.
The pages of your site must be indexed by search engines to appear in search results.
The simplest way to check if your pages are indexed is to perform a “site:” search.
9. Improve Your Page Speed
Page speed is a ranking factor both on mobile and desktop.
So make sure your site loads as fast as possible.
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your website’s current speed.
It gives you a performance score from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the better.
What is Technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
10. 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.
