SEO, also known as search engine optimization, affects the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s natural or organic search results. SEO may leverage search engine optimization techniques that are not within the direct control of website owners. Technical SEO is a broad section of the more comprehensive set of SEO focusing on items not generally seen to the untrained eye. Website-related things are hidden from view and sit beneath the surface, technical ‘items,’ so to speak. Technical SEO is a large area of concern, underlying and supporting the vast framework.
In many ways, technical SEO is the most unsettling area of SEO. It quite quickly gets the average marketer’s pulse racing and sweating at the thought of an overwhelming and complicated issue. However, it is the SEO foundation, one of the three pillars of SEO on which everything else is built. If a website has technical flaws, then no amount of marketing magic can plug the gap and save your website’s search performance. Google has proven to have a solid technological culture and has documented the importance of quality technical SEO when ranking your website. This is undoubtedly an area every online marketer needs to pay attention to.
Technical SEO is crucial as it essentially ensures that your website is easy to maneuver and is free of any technical issues that prevent it from being understood and ranked by search engines. You should establish technical SEO to boost organic traffic and turn that traffic into customers.
Technical SEO Secrets That Will Make Your Website a Success
To adequately tackle Technical SEO, you will need to think about it in three main areas:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Rendering
It’s essential that search engine robots can locate your page and crawl it efficiently, including your website’s status codes, sitemaps, architecture, and robots.txt
Since search engine bots read webpages, how they interact with JavaScript, the DOM elements, and page speed is essential. It’s also vital to send appropriate signals to search engines to help you rank higher. Consider how schema markup is implemented on your website and how accessible it is. Sending the right signals to search engines through canonical tags and effective pagination is essential.
Understanding HTTPS Status Codes
Crawlers use HTTP status codes when crawling to determine the health of a website. These Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status codes are given by a web server in response to a request made by the 74c1lient or a crawler when you browse the website or when crawlers, such as Googlebot, crawl the website.
200 (OK) – This is the response we want for our site to be indexed by Google.
301 (Moved Permanently) – Tells Google the page has moved to a new location.
302 (Found) – obscure, but thought of as a temporary redirect, not permanent.
500– An unwanted, unexpected error has occurred.
403 (Forbidden) – Permission Denied.
404 (Not Found) – This page cannot be located resulting in a broken link.
410 (Gone) – Use this to tell search engine bots that the page is a permanent removal.
XML Sitemaps
Not every website has to be worried about having an XML sitemap. For example, if all your pages are properly interlinked and if Google can crawl and explore all those URLs, for smaller sites, you may not, strictly speaking, need to implement a XML sitemap.
However, given that you want to boost your SEO, it’s highly recommended to put in a well-structured XML sitemap on your site.
301 Redirects
When it comes to redirecting, it is essential to have a good strategic approach for the use. You want to present a coherent picture to the search engines. For example, if a page has been removed and it’s gone forever, it’s better to use a 301 redirect to transfer the ranking signals to the new destination page.
Fixing broken links to avoid 404 errors
Broken internal links can be caused by a number of reasons. If the page linked to is missing, it is called a broken link. A broken link that sends users to a 404 error is not just annoying for users, but also indicative of quality issues and a lack of website maintenance. Broken links to external websites may not be as detrimental, but a failure to maintain those links may ultimately have an impact on your SEO rankings. Unaddressed broken links could possibly lead to a loss of rankings.
Cross-Device Compatibility
Today web designers have the difficult task of ensuring the site is well reviewed on desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, and any other kind of device you can think of. The more cross-device compatible your website is, the simpler it will be for a search engine to make sense of it and rank it accurately. Make sure that your site runs smoothly on as many real devices as you can, and use online emulations to cover the more obscure possibilities. Although it’s almost impossible to achieve perfect functioning across the whole range of devices, at least make sure that your site degrades gracefully on an incompatible device, rather than collapsing into an unviewable and unrankable mess.
Other important components of Technical SEO are-
- Internal Linking strategy
- Canonicalization & Duplicate Content
- Reducing page size
- Speed Optimization & Core Web Vitals
- Meta robots tag
- Robots.txt file
- Meta Tags
Bottom Line
Essentially, technical SEO is a process which aims to remove barriers from the search engines’ way, making it as simple as possible for them to understand your site and rank it well. I have always focused strongly on Technical SEO when working on client campaigns, which has always yielded exceptional results. Get under the hood with crawling, indexing and rendering to be certain Google sees and ranks your site. Dive into HTTP status codes and HTTPS/SSL configurations to make sure Google sees and ranks your site.
Work on your broken links as well as your Canonicalization. Streamline the Mobile version of your website, make sure it runs fast and passes the Core Web Vitals. Never underestimate the potency of good solid Internal linking. Happily, you will have the chance to be compensated twice by simultaneously increasing your organic rankings and improving your conversion rate – the same efforts will pay you back twice by boosting ranking and increasing conversions. At Digixfly we specialize in improving the website overall performance on Search Engines by improving the Technical SEO Structure of website.