What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to enhancing technological aspects of a site to boost the rank of its pages in search engines. Making a site more efficient, simpler to navigate, and more understandable to crawlers are foundations of technical SEO.
Technical SEO is a part of SEO on-page, which is focused on improving the elements of your site to improve ranking. It’s not similar to Off-page SEO.
Why Should You Optimize Your Site Technically?
Along with other major search engines, Google strives to provide its users with the most effective results possible for their searches. Thus, Google’s bots crawl and assess web pages based on various variables. Also, a few factors are based on the user’s experience, like the speed of web pages.
Other factors can help search engines understand the content of your web pages. This is, among other things, structured data do. In addition, by improving the technical aspects, you aid search engines in crawling and comprehending your website. Also, if you can do this successfully, it could pay off with higher rankings or high-quality results.
The same goes for reverse when you make significant technical errors on your site, and they cost you. It’s not the first time to stop search engines completely from crawling your website by not adding a trailing slash at the wrong location inside the robots.txt file.
Top Important Components of Technical SEO
Here are some important components of technical SEO mentioned below:
1) HTTP Status Codes
The HTTP status codes provide server response to browsers. When a visitor visits any website, the browser requests the website’s server. The server then responds by generating a code like 302, 301, or 404, as an example.
Each code has a different meaning: “300” errors refer to redirects “400” errors typically mean errors. Owners of websites must understand why and where HTTP status codes are generated so that they can fix the issue since they could be a significant adverse effect on technical SEO.
The most effective method to identify and fix problems is to utilize a tool like Oncrawl.com and Google Search Console.
When you log into the account you have created on your Oncrawl account, click your “Indexability” option in the left-hand menu and then select the “Status Codes” option to view the various status codes that are displayed and the pages they appear on.
2) Run a Crawl Report
Craw reports are fundamentally an audit of your website. The process of running this report will give you an in-depth understanding of the errors that could be preventing your website from performing optimally. A crawl report can provide you with the top urgent issues it suggests that you address regarding technical SEO. This generally is due to broken headers, duplicated content, or extremely low page speeds.
In general, it is recommended to conduct a crawl every month. At a minimum, to ensure there are not any errors as well as to ensure that your site continues to be as efficient as it can be.
3) Analyze Your Website Load Time
Today, websites require speedy loading. The internet is awash with people who are not willing to wait around for pages to load. In 2016, research revealed that 53% of mobile site users would abandon a website that does not load within 3 seconds. If your website is slow, visitors will become angry and go to another site, which means you will miss out on the traffic.
Google is aware that slow web pages provide a less than ideal experience. They, therefore, prefer websites that load quicker. Therefore, a slow-loading web page can also be found higher in the results of searches than its speedier counterpart, which results in lesser traffic. In 2021 Page experiences, which refers to how fast users perceive the page, will also be an important factor in ranking. Therefore, you must prepare!
Do you want to know if your website is running fast enough? Find out how you can quickly check your site’s speed. Many tests also give you suggestions on how you can do to improve. It is also possible to examine these Core Web vitals as Google utilizes them to show Page performance.
4) Quality Keywords Only
The more keywords you have on Google do not indicate the more practical outcomes you can expect. Google rewards quality keywords, and this aspect of technical SEO is something you will have to invest lots of effort and effort into. Select the top few keywords to ensure that Google does not get overwhelmed, and you won’t be penalized for being over-zealous.
5) Make it Mobile-Friendly.
This is the second crucial aspect in the technical realm: making your site mobile-friendly. People often get involved in making the place look beautiful on a big screen that they don’t realize that most visitors are likely to be using their phones.
This means that you will require your website to automatically adjust the fonts, spaces, and images to accommodate the smaller as well as smaller screen. The final thing you would like is for a portion of your site’s content to not be displayed on phones!
6) It has an XML Sitemap.
The XML sitemap can be described as a listing of all the pages on your website. It is a waypoint to search engines that visit your website, and using it can ensure that search engines don’t overlook any crucial information on your website. It’s an XML sitemap.
An XML sitemap is usually classified into pages, posts tags, or other customized post types. It also includes the number of images and the last modified date on each page.
Ideally, a site does not require the use of an XML sitemap. The robots will not need it if it’s an internal structure that seamlessly connects all content. But, not all websites have an excellent design, so having an XML sitemap will not cause any harm. We would suggest including an XML sitemap for your website.
7) Canonical Tags:
A canonical tag informs search engines that a particular page is the “Master” page. Canonical tags are primarily used to limit cases of duplicative content, which must be avoided at all times.
You might think that you are protected from the dangers of duplicate content, but it’s not as easy as you think to create the same content on your site accidentally. For example, your home page might appear as a single page to you, but to Google, each of these pages is an entirely different page:
- http://www.domain.com
- https://www.domain.com
- http://domain.com
- http://domain.com/index.php
The use of canonical tags allows you to limit duplicate content. It tells search engines that the specific URL is the master version.
Conclusion:
There are many technical SEO elements that you can look up in the next SEO audit. Taking a proactive approach regarding on-page and off-page optimization is imperative for everything from HTTPS status to canonical content.