The Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO

Technical SEO optimizes your website and server to help search engine crawlers index the site more effectively. Crawlers visit your website and index the code roughly 2-3 times a month. Any problem the crawlers face in indexing can lead to the pages needing to be indexed and their chances of being found on search engines being reduced. Thus the webmaster must remove these technical SEO issues to help the crawlers in our digital marketing. It would help if you understood digital marketing well to appreciate the importance of technical SEO for your website. Most developers know this side of the website as their sole focus stays on development, and digital marketing is a separate department.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

You might have the world's most beautiful website, but what good will come if people cannot find it? Technical SEO can be the make-or-break part of getting ranked on search engines.

Even with your site being indexed, it has to be optimized for mobile, secure, and fast loading.

It is where technical SEO comes into the picture to ensure that both the users and crawlers have a good experience and help in your digital marketing efforts. You must address it with a win-win situation for everyone, and instead, You must apply a conscious effort.

Characteristics of a Technically Optimized Website

So what does a website that is optimized for technical SEO? On the front, there would be only changes in aesthetics if you make them yourself.

Page Speed

The site will load fast and will reduce your bounce rate. Users would not have to wait patiently and see that boring loading sign.

Search engines keep page speed as one of the factors in their algorithm, as they also prioritize user experience. Improvement in page speed impacts your ranking positively.

Crawlable

The site will have all the pages crawlable and indexed by search engines to present them to users for specific keywords. If the page is not indexed, it's like a deadweight adding no value to your website.

User Experience

The user experience increases with technical SEO not only because of improvement in page speed but also because it becomes mobile-friendly and has good content, among other reasons. Good user experience leads to a low bounce rate, improved SEO ranking, and website credibility.

Components of Technical SEO

We hope you are convinced of the importance of technical SEO for your website. Let's dive into the components of making your website technically optimized.

Robots.txt

It is a small file in your website that directs crawlers to index or not specific pages or patterns. Add/robots.txt after your website URL to see its content.

Check if you have accidentally blocked any URL pattern. If you block a page or a page pattern, the crawler will skip indexing them. It is analogous to shooting yourself in the leg.

Contact your digital marketing agency to sort this out if you see anything doubtful.

Sitemap

Sitemaps are a list of pages on your website and serve as a map for crawlers to index the website. Sitemaps can be for posts, tags, and images and even categorized for custom requirements.

You only need a sitemap if the website has a good site structure and the pages are linked internally well. However, having a sitemap does not hurt, and you should use one. There are many online sitemap generators where you have to feed your website URL, and it generates a sitemap for you.

Do check all your pages are covered in the sitemap.

Structured Data

Structured data, also known as the schema, is equivalent to yellow pages for search engines. It helps search engines identify different website components in the language they understand (JSON). You can read all about schema from their website www.schema.org. It has examples and references for creating structured data for all kinds of information.

The data in the schema is shown in search results and helps users decide whether to click. You can easily submit the schema data through Google tag manager without impacting the website codes.

Use SSL

A secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security technology acting as a middleware between the browser and the server. Google stated that it prioritizes an SSL website over a non-SSL one and wants to see "HTTPS" everywhere.

You should use SSL on the website to avoid browsers warning users that the website may be dangerous. An SSL shows your website with a lock icon and uses "HTTPS" instead of "HTTP."

Content

Content forms the basis of SEO, and one cannot convey its importance.

Make sure your pages do not have thin and duplicate content in them. By thin, one means having little text found on contact pages. It would help if you avoided indexing through no index and no follow tag on these pages. As per Google, a page's minimum content should have 600 words, while we recommend having at least 1000 words to give it a fighting chance.

Duplicate content generally arises when the CMS creates different URLs pointing to the same page. It would help if you used online tools like SEMrush, and screaming frog to identify these pages and make changes accordingly on the site.

You can use the robot's Meta tag to force crawlers not to index them through the no-index tag. Once done, you can individually check these URLs in the google search console and see if the pages are being indexed. Add the UR of the page and click on the Test Live URL button. The result should show not "Excluded by no index tag."

URL Structure

Having the right and consistent URL structure helps search engines categorize pages as per the structure. There are some basic rules or guidelines one should adhere to maintain consistency.

• No Capital Letters: Avoid having capital letters in URLs as much as possible. The site will work even with capital letters in them, but there are better ideas than having a URL like that.
• Keep it Short: The URL should always be as short as possible per google guidelines.
• Keep it meaningful: The URL should make sense and possibly give an idea of the content the user will have
• Keyword in URL: Try to keep the URL in the keyword without stuffing it, as it helps in SEO
• Check the URL list submitted in sitemaps to see their structure and make changes accordingly.

Site Architecture

Site architecture means how the pages are structured on the website. How many clicks a user needs from the home page to go to a particular page gives you an idea of how deep the pages are.

A flat structure helps search engine crawlers to reach these pages quickly and index them. It also ensures that you do not have orphan pages. Orphan pages are those which do not have any internal links to them.

This factor might not be significant for static websites or blogging sites but become essential for eCommerce sites.

Mobile Friendly

More than 80% of searches happen through mobile phones, and being mobile-friendly is one of the basic requirements. Some tools help you check the website's mobile-friendliness, including the google search console. You can easily see how Google sees your website with the list of warnings, notices, and mobile-related issues.

A quick view of your website on mobile will also show how users see the site, and you can make changes accordingly.

Hreflang

Using hreflang becomes essential if you are targeting multiple countries or languages. It is a simple HTML tag that tells search engines the language you use for the page. If the page has versions for different languages, you can show them using this tag itself.

It tells Google which page is for which language and does not allow duplicate content issues.

Canonical Tags

This problem generally arises in eCommerce websites that show the same page for different URLs.

For example, a shop page using filters can show the same product for different filters leading to duplicate content issues.

Using the canonical tag, you can tell Google that the product page is the main page while all other pages are variations. It avoids the duplicate content issue.

Dead Internal Links

Having broken internal links stop crawlers from finding the page and crawling your website correctly. They get stuck as the page needs to be found and impact your crawlability. You should check quarterly to ensure these links are corrected on priority using tools like SEMrush, screaming frog, or dead link checker. I have found a dead link checker to do excellent work for this and highly recommend it.

Low Page Speed

Page speed is an important SEO and user experience factor, and you should focus significantly on it. Run your site through Google's page speed insight tool, which will throw in changes and recommendations to improve them. You will get ideas to improve the page speed on desktop and mobile screens.

Proper sizing and loading of images, minified CSS, and JS files are some of the factors that are often shown among others. A good page speed is essential for the digital marketing of any site, and your digital marketing agency will confirm this.

How to identify Technical Issues on a Website

Technical SEO is a significant factor in SEO. It's time to know how to identify them. Below are some of the tools you can use:

• Google's Page Speed Insight: The tool highlights everything reducing the page speed with recommendations for desktop and mobile. Do all the changes as asked for, and you should be good.
• Google's Search Console: It shows the list of URLs that have been indexed and throws an error for the ones that are not indexed. You can also test your live page to understand the challenge the crawler might be facing to index them.
• SEMrush: It's a perfect tool that analyses the whole website and gives you a list of issues, warnings, and notices. You will be amazed to see the points the tool highlights.
• Screaming Frog: It's a perfect tool that analyses up to 500 pages and does an in-depth analysis from an SEO perspective. You can buy a paid version for more searches, but it's generally a good point to start.

How do we help in Technical SEO?

We have the best team for website development and digital marketing with us. Our developers work with SEO experts and root out any technical SEO challenge the website might have. This cooperation has led to the team always coming out with technically superior and ready-to-go websites.