What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a component of search engine optimization that focuses on the technical elements of your website, “Backend SEO.”
Whether you’re a developer or not, it’s essential to understand this jargon because technical SEO can make or break your site’s ability to rank in Google and other search engines.
Technical SEO isn’t just about ensuring search engines can crawl and index your content correctly; it’s also about ensuring human visitors can easily access the website.
Your site will have better rankings if it ranks for more keywords, but if people don’t stay on your site long enough to click through all those pages, those rankings won’t matter much (and might even hurt).
By focusing on both user experience (UX) and user experience optimization (UXO), you’ll ensure that people enjoy visiting and engaging with your website—which means they’ll keep coming back again and again!
- Optimize your site for mobile
- Speed up your website
- Fix Broken Internal and Outbound links
- Optimize URL structure
- Optimize XML sitemap
- Optimize Robots.txt
- Fix 4xx errors
- Optimize Google Search Console
- Analyze Google Analytics
- Use Breadcrumbs
- Use Pagination
- Implement Structured Data Markup
Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Mobile web browsing is growing rapidly. According to Statista, more than 50% of all Worldwide internet users now use a mobile device to access the web.
If your business has a website, you must optimize it for mobile users so that they can easily navigate and interact with your site on their phones or tablets.
Make sure your site is responsive.
A responsive website adjusts its layout based on the type of device being used to view it.
A mobile-friendly site will display well on smartphones and tablets, but it must also load quickly.
An excellent way to check this is by going to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
Speed Up Your Website
Website page speed is important. This is important to customers and their experience. Google has confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor.
Check your website speed: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Customers may leave your page and find another site if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
A slow website can result in losing visitors, poor conversion rates, and lower search rankings.
This is especially true for mobile users who expect everything to load instantly.
So how do you improve your website page speed?
- Optimize images
- Minimize redirects
- Reduce HTTP requests
- Use CDN (content delivery network)
- Use caching
Fix Broken Internal and Outbound Links
Broken links are the bane of all website experiences. Outbound Broken links will lead affect your website authority and user experience. Internal Broken links will lead to 404 errors, which means lost visitors and a high bounce rate.
Optimise URL Structure
URLs are the primary way search engines index and rank content, so it’s vital to ensure they’re as optimized as possible.
Steps to consider when creating a website’s URL structure:
- Use hyphens instead of underscores between words (e.g., www.example.com/technical-seo).
- Create a short and logical URL that conveys meaning (e.g., www.example.com/what-is-technical-seo instead of www.example.com/news?id=123).
- Use keywords in your URLs. This is one of the most basic ways you can improve your rankings. For example, if your blog post is about “Technical SEO,” then your URL should be https://www.example.com/technical-seo/.
- Avoid using special characters like ampersands (&), exclamation marks (!), or question marks (?).
Optimize XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website, divided into categories that search engines use to determine how to index your site and display results.
The best way to submit an XML sitemap is through Google Search Console by going to Sitemaps and creating a new one.
Remember that each time you create an update or make changes to existing content on your website (or add new pages), you need to re-submit your XML sitemap for those updates too!
Optimize Robots.txt
What is a robots.txt file?
A robots.txt file is a text-based file you can create and upload to your website. It tells search engine crawlers how to crawl your site and controls how they access your pages.
How does a robots.txt file affect SEO?
It allows you to control which parts of your site are indexed by search engines, which parts are not indexed, and what kind of information (textual or otherwise) should appear in search results for keywords associated with those parts of your website.
Fix 4xx Errors
4xx errors are the HTTP status codes that the URL does not exist. We can fix these errors by ensuring your links are working or updating outdated links if you have moved pages around recently.
We can also make 301 redirects to relevant pages.
Optimize Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that allows you to monitor website performance, including any crawl errors or other issues.
It helps you diagnose and fix problems with your site.
Analyze Google Analytics
Next, we can use Google Analytics to identify the bounce rate, average load time, exit pages, user behavior, and more.
You need to know what users find valuable about your website to focus on improving those things.
It would help if you also looked at how much time people spend on each page.
You need to know what users find valuable about your website to focus on improving those things.
Use Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a navigational aid that helps users find their way around a website. They also allow you to improve your search engine results by making it easier for visitors to find pages on your site.
In addition, breadcrumbs can help users find their way back to the home page if they get lost in a complex site structure or deep in content archives.
Use Pagination
Pagination is a list of links that allow users to move through a large set of content. It’s an essential component of any website, especially regarding SEO and user experience.
If you have more than one page of content, you should use pagination on your site. When Google crawls your site, it will not be able to read every single page.
Pagination helps search engines understand the structure of your website – so they can keep their indexing up-to-date and rank pages correctly.
Implement Structured Data Markup
Structured data is the markup of your pages with relevant, structured information that helps search engines understand what’s on your web pages. Structured data is used to increase the amount and quality of traffic from search engines (Google, Bing, etc.).
The most common types of structured data are:
- Schema.org (JSON-LD and Microdata)
- RDFa
Conclusion
As you can see, the technical side of SEO is crucial to ensuring that your website ranks well in search results.
You may have heard of these issues before, but it’s important to understand how they work and how they affect your search engine optimization strategy.
This article will help you do just that.
