What is technical SEO and how to do it?
What is Technical SEO?
There is more to the world of search engine optimization (SEO) than just good quality content optimization and getting good backlinks, one of which is technical SEO. Technical SEO works mainly on the backend of the website. If a website is technically well optimized, search engines can easily crawl, index and rank the website. Technical SEO basically works as the foundation of a big building. Just as a building can stand well if the foundation is strong, similarly, if a website is technically well optimized, it becomes easier to optimize that website. Now the matter is in your hands, you definitely don’t want to go up by softening the foundation.
Simply put, technical SEO refers to the development of the technical aspects of the website to increase the ranking of a website in search engines. One of the components of technical SEO is website crawling, indexing, website architecture, website loading speed, mobile friendliness and website security.
Importance of Technical SEO in SEO
We have tried to make one thing clear that technical SEO is the basis for ranking a website. Technical SEO plays an important role in evaluating and ranking a website by first-tier search engines like Google. Even sometimes, even if the content of your website (webpage, content, structure) is of good quality, you will not get good results just because of its technical weakness. All search engines rank technically good and secure websites quickly. Therefore, it goes without saying that the importance of technical SEO in SEO is immense.
Main content of technical SEO
Technical SEO basically solves various technical problems of the website and brings transparency to the website. Now we will know about some of the main contents of technical SEO.
Website Crawlability
Crawlability means whether the search engine can access the pages of your website properly or not. If the search engine cannot crawl the webpage properly, then it will not be able to index it and as a result, it will not be displayed on the SERP page or Search Engine Results Page. To check whether the website is being crawled or not, you need to check the robots.txt file and if there is any problem there, it should be resolved quickly.
Website Indexability
Crawlability is whether the search engine can crawl your webpages or not. After crawling the webpage, adding that page to the search engine’s database is called indexability. Many times, when we make a mistake or do on-page, we noindex the webpage, so it is not indexed. When publishing a webpage, we have to check whether it is in the index status or not. Google Search Console can manage things like index/noindex of the webpage.
Site Architecture and Navigation
Many times it has happened that we have visited a new website to do an important work, but the content of that website is so messy that we cannot understand anything. Again, it has happened that when we share the link of a blog post with someone, we see that the length of that link is several km. Long!
A well-organized website is comfortable for both search engines and visitors. Website architecture means the structure of the website, one of the main things being internal linking, URL structure.
Mobile Optimization
With the passing of the day, most of the traffic is now coming from mobile devices, due to which mobile optimization is becoming increasingly important! Currently, search engines like Google, Bing are giving priority to mobile optimization or are being forced to do so. To optimize a website for mobile friendliness, there are a few things to keep in mind, one of which is mobile friendly design, picture optimization, ensuring that the website buttons can be easily used on mobile and that the links of the webpage can be easily clicked and opened.
Site Speed and Performance
You definitely don’t want to wait to click on a link, and if the webpage takes a long time to load, you might close that tab. Basically, the slowness of a website leads to a bounce rate, which has a negative impact on website rankings. You can get an idea about the speed of the website by using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. If you want to reduce the loading speed of your website and increase its performance, you can compress website images, use browser caching, and minify CSS and JavaScript files.
HTTPS and Website Security
Ensuring security is an important aspect for both a visitor and a search engine. Because, if a website is not secure, it will not rank easily and visitors will not want to visit it. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) ensures security by encrypting data between the website and visitors. If your website is not yet using HTTP, then it is important to migrate to HTTPS to improve both security and ranking.
Advanced Technical SEO and Techniques
Technical SEO is a process where you have to solve many advanced problems along with solving common technical problems. We will now discuss important technical issues.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured data or schema markup is basically a coding issue that helps search engines understand the content of a webpage. Through schema markup, images, ratings, product prices can be added to the SERP page, which makes your webpage look different from other results and increases its acceptability. As a result, the click-through rate (CTR) increases.
XML Sitemap
Many times it has happened that we have had to take the help of a map while visiting a new place or have to look at the table of contents of a book to understand and find the contents of the book. The work of XML sitemap is just like the table of contents of a book. An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the webpages on your website and helps search engines crawl them better, which in turn increases page indexability.
Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file tells search engines which webpages on your website can and cannot be crawled. It is a powerful tool for controlling the crawlability of your website.
Canonical tag
The canonical tag helps prevent duplicate content on your website. Sometimes, the same content is published on multiple pages under different URLs. These problems are common on e-commerce sites or large websites. Canonical tags are used to solve these problems.
Pagination and URL Structure
Simply put, pagination means dividing a single content into multiple pages. For example, if we go to the blog section of a website, we can see many blogs but on multiple pages like page 1, 2, 3…. Again, the same situation is seen on the product page of an e-commerce site. Pagination basically separates the pages through rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags and helps the search engine understand that these are all the same page.
Common Mistakes in Technical SEO
