In a simple word, Technical SEO helps search engines crawl to understand your content and index your content without any issues. Technical SEO plays an important in the whole SEO process. If your technical SEO is not on point then no matter what your SEO efforts will not generate the expected results you are looking for.
It is very important to understand what technical SEO is and how to get it right. The good part is when you do a technical SEO audit of your website and fix any visible problems, you won’t have to face that kind of problem again.
In this blog, you will learn what is technical SEO and how does it work and how to do a technical audit of your website using our technical SEO checklist.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice work of the process of optimizing any website for the search engine crawling and indexing phase. It is called “technical” because it has not any relation with the actual content available to the website or with website promotion. The ultimate work of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website.
Technical SEO needs to be optimized to make the required foundation that provides your content and links with the best possible marketing environment so you can gain rank in the search engine results without any obstacles.
How does Technical SEO work?
The requirements of Technical SEO are constantly changing and becoming more complex in order to keep up with the search engines, which are getting more and more sophisticated each day. So we can say that technical SEO is in a state of constant refinement.
The requirements of Technical SEO are constantly changing and becoming more complex in order to keep up with the search engines, which are getting more and more sophisticated each day. So we can say that technical SEO is in a state of constant refinement.
Let’s take a look on some of the important steps you can take to ensure your technical SEO is up to mark. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that the security and structure of your site meets the expectation of search engine algorithms. Let’s take a look How Technical SEO works and their elements:
- SSL
SSL stand for Secure Sockets Layer, is a security technology which creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can spot a site using SSL fairly easily: the website URL starts with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’ So it makes sense, where possible, to ensure your site is secure – this can be done by installing an SSL certificate on your website, though most top website builders now include SSL by default.
- Site is mobile-friendly
A ‘responsive’ website adjusts automatically on any device so that it can be navigated and read easily on any device with different screen size. Google is very clear about having a responsive site is considered a ranking signal by Google algorithms. And, with the Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing content, a responsive website is now more important than ever in time.
- Speed your site up
Search engines always prefer sites that load quickly and page speed is considered an important ranking signal.
There are so many ways for speed up your site:
Use fast hosting.
Use a fast domain name system provider.
Minimise HTTP requests, keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum.
Use one CSS stylesheet.
Ensure your image files are small and more.
- Duplicate content issues
Duplicate content can either be confusing for users and also for search engine algorithm, it can also be used to try to manipulate search rankings or to gain more traffic with less effort. In result Search engines like Google, Bing aren’t keen on it, and advise webmaster to fix any duplicate content issues they find:
Prevent your CMS publishing multiple versions of a page or post
Use canonical link and let search engines know where the main content resides.
- Create an XML sitemap
It is a file that helps search engines crawlers to understand your website, in other word you can think it like a search roadmap of sorts, and telling search engines exactly where each page is.
It contains important information about each page on site, including:
Page was last modified; priority it has on your site; how frequently updated.
- Enabling AMP
AMP is a Google-backed project aims to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices through the use of special code known as AMP HTML. It is more likely to be read and shared by your users, increasing dwell time and also the number of backlinks pointing to your content, all good things from an SEO point of view.
AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly on mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code down to the bare bones, leaving text, images and video intact but disabling scripts, comments and forms.
- Add structured data mark-up to your website
Structured data mark-up is a kind of code added to your website to help search engines better understand the content on it. This data can help search engines index your site more effectively and provide more relevant results.
Additional, it enhances search results through the addition of ‘rich snippets’, for example you can use structured data to add star ratings to reviews; prices to products; or reviewer information.
- Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools from Google and Microsoft respectively that allow you to submit your website to their search engines for indexing. When you launch your website, first submit its XML sitemap to both Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools so that they can crawl your new site and start to display results from it in search results.
Technical SEO Checklist
If you have reached this point, then most probably you have a very good idea now on what is technical SEO and how it works?
Even if you have done Technical SEO before, but it’s always a good idea to perform a technical SEO audit of your website again with time.
This is your technical SEO checklist you should perform:
- Specify a preferred domain
- Check and optimize your robots.txt
- Check and optimize your URL Structure
- Revise your navigation and website structure
- Add structured data to your homepage and posts
- Check your canonical URLs
- Optimize your 404 Page
- Optimize and submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing
- Enable HTTPS
- Check your loading speed and try to make your website faster
- Check the mobile-friendliness of your website
- Consider adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.
Conclusion
Technical SEO consists of a number of checks and settings you need to optimize to help search engines crawl and index your website without any problems. In the majority of cases, once you get your technical SEO right, you won’t have to deal with it again, other than doing periodical SEO Audits. The word technical implies that you need to have some technical knowledge to carry out some of the tasks but it’s necessary to do it otherwise your website won’t reach its full potential and gain rank on search engine.
