Technical SEO is the process that refers to website and server optimization and helps search engine spiders crawl and index the site a lot more effectively. It is done to help improve the organic rankings.
Technical SEO refers to improving a website’s technical aspects to increase its pages’ ranking in the search engines. The pillars of technical optimization are making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines. Technical SEO is also a massive part of ON-page SEO.
On-page SEO focuses on improving the elements on the website to get higher rankings. The On-page SEO is the exact opposite of the Off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is all about generating the exposure for a website through different types of channels.
Why should one optimize the site?
Google and the other search engines also want to present their respective users with the best results for their queries. Google’s robots also crawl and evaluate web pages on many factors. These factors are based on the experience of the user. For example-how, fast does a page load? Other factors also help the search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what the structured data does. By improving the technical aspects, one also helps the search engines crawl and also understand your site. If you can do this well, you might also be rewarded for higher rankings and rich results.
This could work the other way around. They can cost you if you make any severe technical blunders on the site. You wouldn’t be the first to block these search engines entirely from crawling the site by adding a trailing slash in a wrong area.
A website should work very well and be fast, straightforward and easy to use for the users in the first place. Creating a robust technical foundation also coincides with a better experience for the search engines and users.
The characteristics of a technically optimized website
The technically optimized website is fast for the users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. There should be a proper technical setup to understand what a site is all about and prevent the confusion caused. Duplicate content is also a result of this. It also does not send visitors or the search engines into dead-end streets by the links that do not work.
Mentioned below are the essential characteristics of a technically optimized website-
1. It is fast
The web pages need to load fast. People tend to become impatient once they stumble upon a website. They do not want to wait for it to open. According to research that was conducted in the year 2016, 53% of the mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage does not open within 3-4 seconds of them opening it. If the website is slow, people tend to get frustrated and move on to another website. Thus, you will miss out on the traffic that could have otherwise increased your business.
Google knows slow web pages offer you a less than optimal experience, so customers prefer the web pages that load faster. A slow web page goes further down the search result than its faster equivalent. It thus results in even less traffic.
You can even test the speed of the website, and most tests will also give you pointers on what to improve and how to improve.
2. It’s crawlable for search engines.
The search engines use robots to crawl or spider for your website. These robots follow links to discover the content on your site.
There are several ways to guide the robots. One can block them from crawling certain content if you do not want them to go to that extent. One can also let them crawl a page but tell them not to show this page in the search results.
Many people use SEO audit services as these are professional services, and they evaluate the SEO of the site. They also include an inspection of the website to find problems or issues that hold your site back in the organic search results.
Robots.txt file
If you give the robots direction on your site by using robots.txt file, they will be able to do their job better. It is a potent tool which should be handled extremely carefully. Even a tiny mistake might prevent the robots from crawling your site.
People sometimes unintentionally block their site’s CSS and JS file. These types of files contain code that tell the browser what your site should look like and how it works in the long run. However, these files also contain the codes that tell browsers what your site should look like and how it works. If these type of files are blocked, the search engines will not be able to trace how your site works.
The meta robots tag
This tag is a piece of code that one will not be able to see on the page as a visitor. It is in the source code in the head section of a page. The robots read this section when finding a page.
If anyone wants the search engine robots to crawl a page, they can tell them with the robots meta tag.
3. It doesn’t have many dead links
We all know that slow websites are extremely frustrating. A slow page is even more annoying. If a link leads to any page that is non-existing, people will encounter a 404 error page.
The search engines do not like to find these error pages. They also tend to find even more dead links than visitors encounter as they follow every link they bump into. They can spot it even if it is hidden!
Most sites have at least some amount of dead links as a website is a continuous work in progress. There are tools that help you retrieve the dead links. For preventing unnecessary dead links, you should always redirect the URL of a page when you delete it or move it.
4. It doesn’t confuse the search engines with the duplicate content
If you have the same type of content on multiple pages of the site that you have created, there is a high possibility of the search engines getting confused.
Different URLs can show the same content because of some technical reasons. For a visitor, this does not make any kind of difference at all, but for a search engine it does. The search engine will see the same content on a different URL.
5. It is very secure
The website that is technically optimized is a very secure website. Making your website safe for the users to guarantee their privacy is a very basic requirement nowadays. There are several types of things one can do to make the website secure and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.
If the people log in to your site, their credentials are extremely safe and encrypted. You will need an SSL certificate to implement HTTPS on your site. You can check if your website is HTTPS in most of the browsers.
6. Structured data
The structured data helps the search engines understand your website properly. With the structured data, you can also tell the search engines what kind of product or business you sell or which recipes you have on your site.
It will also give one the opportunity to provide all kinds of details about these types of products.
Implementing the structured data can also bring you more than just a better and more in-depth understanding by search engines. It also makes your content eligible for good results.
7. It has an XML sitemap
One should put an XML sitemap on the site. It serves as a roadmap for the search engines that are present on your site. It is often categorized in posts, tags or any other custom post types. They include a number of images and also a latest modified date for every page.
A website does not necessarily need an XML sitemap. If the website has an internal linking structure and this structure connects all the content nicely, the robots won’t need it at all. Not all sites have a great structure. Having an XML sitemap will not do them any kind of harm.
8. International websites
If the site targets more than one country where the same language is spoken, the search engines also need a little help to understand which countries you’re trying to reach. If you help them, they can also show the people the right kind of website
Wrapping up
The combination of technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO opens the door to organic visitors. Technical SEO is essential for getting your website to the top of search results and putting your content in front of your target audience, even if on-page and off-page strategies are frequently the first to be implemented.