Essentially, technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of your website with the purpose of improving its search engine ranking and visibility. The technical elements can be anything from the server to the actual code on the site to how the code in the website is structured, etc. All of these things make a whole system that fits together and makes sure that your website is both friendly for users and the search engines that will be discovering your pages. Technical SEO also involves optimizing the backend website infrastructure, such as the servers that the website is hosted on and the code to make it easy for Google to crawl, index, and understand the content on your site.
What is Technical SEO – An Overview
With technical SEO, you can give your website the best chance to rank well. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website from a technical perspective with the goal of improving its organic performance. A lot of the work happens behind the scenes, where all the technical stuff comes together to optimize the website for both the user and search engines.
You should know that technical SEO is quite different from the content side of things. With technical SEO, you are dealing with infrastructure and code instead of content, such as blog posts and articles. When you look at technical SEO, you will be dealing with things such as making the site fast, mobile-friendly, and essentially easy to crawl for Google bots.
For a comprehensive technical SEO approach, your site also needs proper sitemaps and robots.txt files to guide Google or other search engines through your website content.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Now that you know what technical SEO is about, let us assess the importance of technical SEO. Quality content matters; however, without proper technical optimization, Google might not discover your content, which is why it might not index or rank your content either. On page off page technical seo are the key areas that work together to upgrade the visibility and search engine rankings of a website. With that said, technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl and index your content.
By optimizing elements, such as the website structure and website navigation, you can help Google bots effectively move through the site. This aspect also affects rankings directly as the website speed and mobile responsiveness are essential ranking factors.
Potential Characteristics of A Technically Optimized Website
Potential Characteristics of A Technically Optimized WebsiteSpeaking of the technical seo checklist for a technically optimized website, it comes down to the following aspects:
Fast-Loading Website
Your website should load quickly on all tech devices and under all network conditions. When your page loads fast, your users have a better user experience. Search engines, such as Google, are prone to reward a fast-loading website with higher rankings.
Good Web Vitals
Getting a good web vitals score is essential as it helps your website to rank well, too. This aspect is specifically crucial if your competitors have slower sites.
Preserve Link Equity
Another trait to look out for is that your site should preserve link equity. This aspect emphasizes the effective use of internal links that guide bots and users to the relevant content while avoiding redirect chains and broken links.
Internal links can help spread link equity around your website and help users explore more pages.
Easy-to-Crawl
Google, along with other search engines, should be able to crawl your website without problems. With that said, if search engine bots cannot crawl the site, you will have issues when trying to rank in Google search results.
The robots.txt file and meta robots tags should tell Google exactly which pages to crawl and index and which ones to skip. It is important to mention here that not every page needs to be crawled, especially when it comes to the admin pages and the pages that comprise customer information.
Mobile Friendliness
You should know that making your website work well on mobile devices is no longer an option. Last year, Google actually stopped indexing websites that don’t work on mobile devices. More than sixty percent of the US organic traffic actually comes from mobile devices, which is why you must focus on establishing a mobile-responsive site for ultimate success.
Site Security
Security is another must-have, which is why all sites must use the HTTPS protocol. Why, you might ask? Well, this encryption builds user trust, especially when it comes to handling sensitive data, such as payment information.
The use of HTTPS is also a crucial ranking factor.
Structured Data Markup
Adding structured data markup gives search engines more context about your content. Structured data markup helps search engines show rich snippets in Google search results, which can improve your click-through rate and also increase the number of visitors to your site.
Core Pillars of Technical SEO – An Overview
The core pillars of technical SEO are crawling, rendering, indexing, and ranking.
Pillars #1: Crawling
Crawling is how search engine bots examine the content and structure of your website to collect information for ranking and indexing purposes. Here is what happens: search engines will send bots to visit your well-known web pages first. Subsequently, bots will follow links and find new pages that they can render, index, and rank.
When you add an XML site map to the site, you give search engines a list of all your URLs. By doing so, you will effectively help crawlers understand how your website content is organized, which is also how you can make sure that crawlers find and index your important pages quickly.
Without a site map, crawlers must discover your content through internal links, which can actually take longer.
For improved crawlability and indexing, you can leverage technical seo services and get professional help optimizing your site’s mobile-friendliness, crawlability, site speed, etc.
Importance of Website Structure
The structure of your website shapes how search engines navigate through your website content. For instance, you might want to make the most important pages accessible from the navigation bar of your website. By doing so, you will ensure that as much link equity is passed on as possible. The use of internal links is also effective in distributing link equity and allows scrollers to find more of your content.
When it comes to a great site structure, make sure to avoid complicated URLs with unnecessary symbols and parameters, as these will make it harder for crawlers to understand what your content is about. Your website should also use a robots.txt file to help with crawling.
Regular log file analysis will allow you to see which parts of your site the search engines visit and how often. This information will help you understand which pages search engines consider important and whether or not they find your site easy to navigate.
Pillar #2: Rendering
Rendering is about how search engines process the content and structure of your website. This helps search engines decide your ranking on search engine results pages. You should know that rendering does so much more than just reading the HTML. Essentially, rendering processes dynamic elements on modern sites that might not show up in the basic HTML. Here is the list of dynamic elements that are processed during rendering:
- Content loaded with JavaScript
- AJAX
- Other scripting languages
- The page’s CSS
You should know that search engines try to mimic the user experience. The underlying reason is that it helps them see your website like users do, which is absolutely necessary for proper website indexing. With that said, to get the best SEO results, make sure search engine bots can easily render your website. This aspect involves using techniques, such as server-side rendering and pre-rendering, for sites that use a lot of JavaScript.
With the help of these techniques, you can make sure that search engines can easily process everything on your pages. The addition of proper metadata and the effective handling of canonical text also helps search engines to better understand and avoid duplicate content problems.
Pillar #3: Indexing
Indexing is when search engines collect, organize, and store information about web pages. Indexing helps search engines show pages quickly when someone performs a search. During the indexing phase, search engines take important information from the potential web pages that they visit, including the following:
- Content
- Metadata
- Images
- Links
With that said, it is absolutely crucial to fix duplicate content and keyword cannibalization to help your web pages get indexed faster. The thing about duplicate content is that it confuses search engines, which is why you should remove duplicate content so that the main version of your content remains. It is equally important to fix keyword cannibalization.
If you wonder what keyword cannibalization is, you should know that keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages target the same keywords.
Examine Site’s Redirects
You should examine or audit the site’s redirects as a way to improve how quickly search engines index your content as well. When search engines encounter multiple redirects or redirect chains, indexing tends to slow down. Sometimes, search engines even stop trying to index those pages altogether.
Finding and removing unnecessary redirects helps search engines access your content quickly.
Fix HTTPS Errors
You should also pay attention to HTTPS errors. The underlying reason is that these errors make it challenging for search engines to access and understand your content. With that said, if a bot cannot access or understand your content, it cannot index it.
Leverage Google Search Console for Checking Page Indexing
You should use Google Search Console to assess the page indexing report. You can leverage Google Search Console to check how your content is indexed. In the pages indexing report, you can see the pages that haven’t been indexed and the reasons for them.
Pillar #4: Ranking
After crawling, rendering, and indexing, we have the final step, which is ranking. Search engines essentially decide the order in which pages appear in the SERPs. The essential goal is to show users the most relevant but also valuable content based on their search queries. With that said, rankings depend on complex algorithms that use multiple factors to determine the relevance and authority of a web page.
One basic aspect of ranking keywords is relevance. This means how well your content matches the words and phrases that users search for. Pages with high keyword relevance tend to rank better, but they go way beyond just matching words.
Improve Quality and Trustworthiness
Search engines also consider the quality and how trustworthy the site is while looking at things, such as backlinks from other respected sites. The more quality backlinks you have pointing to your content, the better your chance of ranking well.
The technical performance of your site matters, too. For instance, fast-loading pages that work well on mobile and give users a smooth experience tend to rank higher. Similarly, sites that keep people engaged and interested also send positive signals to search engines, showing that your content is absolutely worth ranking well.
Personalization is Crucial
Personalization is another crucial aspect of ranking. Different users might see different results for the same search. Why, you might ask? The underlying reason is that search engines consider things such as location, search history, and personal preferences when showing results.
To save your valuable time and effort, you can hire the services of a Technical seo agency like ours and let our experts help your business improve your website’s performance by focusing on the technical aspects, such as speed, user-friendliness, and overall site health, with the purpose of improving your site’s search engine rankings.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO focuses on the various aspects of the technical SEO hierarchy, such as the crawlability of your website, as without it, search engines cannot discover your site at all. You need to have an indexable site that includes the aspects of your site’s accessibility, rankability, and clickability. The first three layers of crawlability, indexability, and rankability can either make or break your site’s search engine visibility. If you don’t have these in place, you can forget anything else, as this is the core foundation of your website’s technical SEO.
FAQs
What are the different types of SEO?
There are four basic types of SEO:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Local SEO
All these SEO types are interconnected and essential for improving the ranking of a website.
What are the three core pillars of SEO?
The three core pillars of SEO are authority, relevance, and experience. Authority helps build trust through quality backlinks and content. Relevance helps optimize content for keywords and search intent. Experience improves user engagement through effective website design and performance.
What is the SEO theory about?
According to the SEO theory, SEO helps search engines understand your website content and helps users find your website and decide whether they want to visit or click on your site through a search engine.
