What Is Technical SEO?
Say you’ve set up your website, published engaging content, and invested in digital marketing. You believe your site is now all geared up for a flood of visitors who can become your customers. Because of this, you don’t give much thought about learning what is technical SEO.
But then you notice that your website traffic is going down and your site rank is not as good as you expected it to be. What went wrong?
You may be having some technical SEO issues that are holding your search engine marketing goals at bay. These problems are often not reported as they are not believed to be part of the search marketers’ responsibility.
What many don’t realize is fixing these technical SEO problems is crucial to improving your search visibility score. Failing to fix these issues can result in crawling errors and low audience engagement numbers. This means that you won’t be able to convert website traffic into actual business sales.
In this post, we’ll discuss the nitty-gritty of technical SEO. Plus, we’ll help you come up with a plan to improve the ranking of your website. Before we begin, let’s get our definitions in order.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to a method of guaranteeing that a website conforms to the technical requisites of the latest search engines to enhance organic page rankings. It has to do with website optimizations that aid search engine spiders or internet bots to crawl and index the website with greater efficiency.
To better understand technical SEO, you must keep in mind that modern search engines use various ranking factors. These include site security, site speed, and site architecture. These factors will determine which websites will be at the top of the search results — the websites that are more likely to build a stronger customer base.
Technical SEO is the generic term for components that determine your organic growth engine. These essential components of technical SEO include indexing, rendering, crawling, and more. However, it does not include link building, keyword research, analytics, backlink profile building, content optimization, and social media marketing.
Simply put, technical SEO covers only specific search engine requirements to improve crawling and indexing. Crawling means that the Internet bots dig into all the different content on your web pages and examine them. Indexing refers to storing and organizing the content detected throughout the crawling procedure. If the page were successfully indexed, it would qualify to turn up in search engines.
Keeping Up with Search Engines
Search engines are continually becoming more complex. Their ranking algorithms or search engine requirements are fine-tuned day in and day out. Reports say that Google changes its search engine algorithm about 500 to 600 times each year. And content creators and businesses need to keep up with these changes.
This means that your site’s technical SEO has to be in never-ending refinement to keep up with search engines. Technically optimizing it will provide your website with the best possible business environment. You can be on the first page of search results without all the unnecessary impediments.
While your site’s details may change, the goal stays the same: better search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Making your site easier to crawl and index for web search engine spiders is fundamental to your technical SEO strategy.
The Importance of Technical SEO
You can always have the best website with practicable and well-written content. But you won’t maximize your content if the search engine can’t detect, crawl, and index your web pages. As a result, very few individuals will ever see your website.
This is merely the tip of the iceberg. Even if a search engine does index all the content that you have, it doesn’t mean the job is complete.
Your site will only completely optimize for technical SEO if it follows the requirements of search engines. It has to be mobile-friendly, secure, and free of duplicate content issues. It must also have a fast loading time, among other things. If it is convenient for search engines to access your content, you can have a much better opportunity of ranking higher than usual.
How Is Technical SEO Different from Other Types of SEO?
There are three kinds of Search Engine Optimizations (SEOs). These are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO has to do with the optimization of website content and pages. Meanwhile, off-page SEO refers to the establishment of relationships and links between websites.
Since technical SEO is internal, it is considered a part of on-page SEO. It doesn’t function to render website exposure through external channels.
Let’s quickly cover what each SEO type means before you begin creating a healthy marketing environment.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to elements that are on your site’s leading end to better your search engine rankings. As a website owner, you have control over on-page SEO as all components are on your website. On-page SEO includes internal linking, URL naming, and content formatting. It also covers meta descriptions, keyword usage, and image optimization (image alt text).
Here are a few tips to improve your on-page SEO:
- Write quality content
- Publish consistently
- Use proper URL structures
- Optimize title tags and meta descriptions
Off-Page SEO
In off-page SEO, you have to rely on third parties. You will be using techniques outside of your website to improve your search rankings.
The most common strategy in off-page SEO is quality backlink profiling. If a specific page outside your site links back to your web page, your website can generate more visitors. If you have more quality links that go back to your page, your site can rank higher.
The quality of each backlink is important. Your ranking depends on the popularity of the website that links to your page.
Here are a few tips to improve your off-page SEO:
- Get links through guest posting
- Leverage on social media marketing
- Submit SEO-friendly press releases
- Create share-worthy infographics
Technical SEO
Like on-page SEO, technical SEO is also entirely within your control as a website owner. This type of SEO has to do with the codes within your site.
Let’s take site speed as an example. If your website loads quite sluggishly, your rank will be lower than your competitors with faster pages.
Ways to Improve Technical SEO
Improving your website’s technical SEO doesn’t have to be a daunting task.
In this part, we are sharing a checklist of essential tasks you can carry out to optimize your site correctly. Following these ensures that the site structure satisfies the search engine algorithms to rank better.
Find and Fix Errors
You have to look for existing site errors and fix them. These technical errors can block off crawlers from indexing your web pages.
You can perform a technical SEO audit to do this. It is a process of checking your site’s health and getting a line of the repairs or fixes that may be needed to restructure it.
There are specific tools you can use to carry out SEO audits. These tools identify relevant errors, provide downloadable information, and suggest possible solutions.
Revise Website Architecture
The site architecture is basically how the content or information is integrated on your website. An example of this is the organization of web pages into categories.
The website architecture influences how web spiders and human users go through the website. If you have a reasonable and logical site architecture, crawlers can more easily index your website.
To improve your site architecture, you have to do the following:
- Make sure it has an XML sitemap. A sitemap contains information about each page on your site. It is a list of all significant pages on your site arranged to ensure that search engines find, crawl, and index them. These include information about the last modification of each page and how frequently each one is modified./li>
- Make sure to organize the website’s addresses or URLs with a commonsensical flow. Do not confuse users and crawlers by interchanging categories and subcategories.
- Make sure you optimize the URL structures for searching. Remember to add essential and relevant keywords close to the root domain (site name). Practice keeping the URL length to merely 60 characters
Eliminate Duplicate Content Issues
You won’t get a formal penalty from creating and posting duplicate blog posts on multiple pages on the same site. But you should still get rid of duplicate content issues for several reasons.
Web crawlers won’t know which version of the content is the original one. This means they will not be able to determine what page to show in SERPs. And that can result in the low rank of your site.
You can use specific tools to key out on-site duplicate content issues. Some errors only require you to rewrite the meta so it will appear original. Entire pages of duplicate content may require a 301 redirect. The 301 Redirect will send human visitors and search engine crawlers to a different URL than the one they chose from the results.
Other Ways to Improve Technical SEO
- Improve the site speed — This is one of the biggest ranking factors for search engines. As such, it’s essential to ensure that your pages load quickly.
- Intensify website security — Make sure that you are on a secure HTTP. You may have to purchase a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and set up 301 Redirect from the HTTP pages to the new secure pages.
- Introduce a mobile-friendly design — Based on a study by Statistica, mobile users make up about half of the global web traffic. It’s only right to consider creating a mobile-friendly design for your site to make your content readable on tiny screens.
- Use structured data markup — Structured data refers to the site information that is carefully systematized within a database. Logically structured data makes it a lot easier for internet search engines to analyze information quickly. If you use structured data, you can improve the chances of ranking in SERP features like rich snippets. This may then result in enhanced click rates for your site.
What Type of SEO to Prioritize
All in all, every type of SEO is significant. For a digital marketing strategy to work, you have to make SEO your foundation. If you want to create the biggest improvement in rankings, you have to cover all three types of SEO for your website.
We suggest that you begin with on-page SEO. You can then proceed to technical SEO. And then you can fine-tune your website ranking with off-page SEO techniques.
If you start applying the best SEO strategies today, organic search can become fundamental in your business’s growth.