Technical SEO is highly significant as it directly affects your website’s performance in the search results. With proper optimization of technical factors, you can make your site more crawlable. It is to be noted that technical SEO should be a part of your on-page SEO campaign. Let us talk more about Technical SEO importance and strategies.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO involves refining technical elements on your website to improve its performance in the organic search results. The main factors related to technical SEO range from website speed to indexation. Technical SEO professionals want to ensure search engines access and understand your web pages.
Benefits of Technical SEO
Technical SEO benefits you in several ways
- Boost your web traffic
- Ensure better user experience
- Refine website performance
- Improve website security
- Control site maintenance costs
Key Elements of Technical SEO
The most significant technical SEO elements are
- Crawlability- Organize your website structure logically, manage redirects, and address server errors.
- Performance- Optimize your website’s speed and streamline codes
- Indexation- Indexation is about helping engines know your site better.
Technical SEO vs. On-Page SEO
On-page and technical SEO are different, although they have a close relation between them. Technical SEO experts ensure that you have clean codes for your website. But, on-page SEO is about formatting the website content and other elements. So, while on-site SEO focuses on content, technical SEO targets your website performance.
Technical SEO Best Practices
You should implement the best practices to get the best technical SEO result.
- Ensure the mobile-friendliness of your website.
- Consider XML sitemap creation and optimize it efficiently.
- Work on the Website speed optimization process, as a slow-loading site can lose its rank.
- Optimizing your website’s internal link is another SEO strategy. It is better to use descriptive keywords for your anchor text. It will be easier to determine keywords to be targeted by the source page.
- URL canonicalization is important for avoiding duplicate content issues.
Let us now talk more about these technical SEO practices.
Crawling and Indexing Explained
To run a technical SEO campaign, you should understand Search Engine Crawling and Indexing. Google downloads images, videos, and text from pages available on the website using crawlers (automated programs). On the other hand, indexing is about analyzing the images, text, or video files. Information is stored in a big database, known as Google Index.
Boost Website Speed and Performance
Website speed determines its performance and user experience. So, technical SEO professionals focus on this factor to ensure better performance of your site.
How Website Speed Impacts SEO
- Optimizing the images is the most important step for technical SEO. Large images take a longer time to load and affect the user experience.
- Restrict the number of HTTPS requests for CSS files, scripts, and images.
- Developers have to direct browsers to cache some web page elements.
Create a Mobile-Friendly Design
Making your site mobile-friendly is another step for technical SEO. It is essential to create a responsive layout for your website. A mobile-responsive website improves your website SEO. Professionals can check the mobile-friendliness of a website using Browser Stack Responsive and other tools. They will see how your site appears on various devices and optimize it accordingly with Mobile SEO best practices.
URL Structure and Canonicalization
With the efficient use of canonical tags, you can help Google learn about the website’s structure. Google will detect the best duplicate page version and make it visible in the search results. Thus, it results in higher CTR, engagement, and conversion rates.
Benefits of Proper URL Structure
If the URL design is correct, it benefits both search engines and users. A semantically accurate website URL displays the destination clearly. The URL needs to be matched with the title for better clarity.
Work on website architecture
Website architecture is significant as it affects both user experience and search engine rankings. An ideal site architecture lets your webpages rank on search engines. SEO professionals understand the importance of site architecture. They refine the architecture to Google to index your pages.
Manage Schema Markup and Structured Data
Both structured data and schema markup for SEO are essential to allow search engines to understand your page information. So, creating the structured data means communicating with Google about your website. Leveraging schema markup helps you improve your SEO results.
Adding XML Sitemaps to your website
XML Sitemap is another significant part of your website to improve SEO. The sitemap lets Google locate your web pages and rank them.
Creating Effective XML Sitemaps
XML sitemap creation involves some steps
- Check whether your website already has the sitemap.
- Plan your website structure.
- Create your sitemap.
- Give importance to high-quality webpages.
HTTPS and Security benefits for a website
HTTPS and SEO are related to each other because HTTPS has a positive effect on SEO rankings, website security, traffic, and user experience.
Ensuring HTTPS Security
HTTPS needs to be enabled on servers. HTTPS relies on encryption protocol for communications encryption. The protocol, Transport Layer Security is referred to as SSL. It keeps your communications safe with an asymmetric public key.
Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content will have an adverse effect on SEO. If you want to deal with duplicate content SEO, you should implement 301 redirects from one URL version (non-preferred) to another (preferred).
Image Optimization tips for SEO
Optimizing images for SEO involves some steps-
- Your image should be relevant to the text of the page.
- Choose responsive images to make the page SEO-friendly
- Select the right file format and name
Pagination and Pagination SEO
Pagination is a way to divide your content across pages. So, one of the best pagination SEO techniques are to divide your products or articles into a comprehensible format.
Monitoring and Analytics
Analytical data and constant monitoring are important for measuring the effectiveness of technical SEO. Technical SEO professionals set metrics like
- Mobile-friendliness
- Crawl errors
- Pages indexed
- Page load speed
So, these are some strategies for technical SEO. The best SEO Consultants use technical SEO tools to analyze the campaign’s effectiveness and optimize your website based on the analytical report.