Most inexperienced marketers and bloggers limit their search engine optimization tactics to content-based SEO, relying heavily on keyword density and placement. However, other factors go into determining your search engine rankings. The following guide will introduce you to some of them by exploring the importance of technical SEO and the best way to implement it.
There are over 1.8 billion websites on the internet as of 2023, and at least 80% of them are inactive. Consequently, search engines have to work a little harder to return the best results for user queries.
With the number of websites and web pages increasing every day, it’s very easy for yours to get lost in the shuffle. You may try to implement a comprehensive SEO strategy to combat this but may not be aware that there are different types of SEO.
To understand how technical SEO fits into the equation, you must be able to distinguish it from the other forms. There are four main types of SEO:
On and off-page SEO are your traditional forms of SEO, incorporating elements like meta descriptions, link building, etc. Local SEO involves optimizing your website, marketing content and business for local searches.This includes running word-of-mouth campaigns and optimizing your Google Business Profile.
Technical SEO is a little harder to understand and implement. It relies heavily on the user experience (UX) elements of your website and other marketing materials.
Many website developers and site owners may not even be aware that they’re improving their technical SEO by making their websites more accessible. Now the question is, how do you do this consciously? The next section will cover how you can improve your website’s technical SEO and remain competitive.
When it comes down to it, technical SEO is about making your website as search engine accessible as possible. Because search engines work on algorithms that are designed by humans and made for humans, they crawl through websites similarly to how site visitors would.
They try to find the best content for queries by looking at certain indicators and signs. Implementing an effective technical SEO strategy will require you to understand these signs and how to place them on your website. The following steps will show you how to do this.
Marketers mostly focus on optimizing each piece of content or blog entry, but this strategy often misses the forest for the trees. Your content won’t carry your whole site’s SEO aggregate score; you have to ensure its foundation and skeleton frame are SEO-friendly too.
This means you have to plan your website’s structure accordingly, including how your website’s pages will be indexed, how they will connect to the homepage and the various tags and categories web pages will have on your website.
A well-featured website builder can help you optimize your website’s architecture for SEO. So if you’re creating your own website with very little coding or design experience, ensure your chosen site builder facilitates technical SEO.
Sitemaps usually come as XML, HTML or RSS/mRSS files. They contain your website’s structure, featuring the most important web pages. Your sitemap helps search engine crawlers navigate your site, making them a crucial SEO element. Luckily, they are easy and free to generate.
Once you’ve generated your sitemap (preferably as an XML file), you must submit it to all the search engines. Unfortunately, not all SEOs have sitemap support for their crawlers, so we recommend submitting your sitemap to the top three most popular search engines.
While this may seem like a strictly UX enhancement, it does influence your SEO as Google uses data about website load times to determine rankings. On average, your web pages should load fully in less than three seconds.
There are a host of techniques and tools you can employ to increase your website’s speed. For instance, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test how fast your site is and get recommendations on how to fix any issues.
In the past, companies were required to create mobile versions of desktop websites to load on mobile devices. Today, this has changed, and most smartphones and tablets have both the processing power and resolution to render websites as well as personal computers can.
However, you want your website to be accessed by as many people as possible globally, so you must ensure it is compatible with as many devices as possible. You don’t have to make a separate mobile website; just ensure it is mobile-friendly.
You can achieve this by limiting the number of popups, streamlining and optimizing your website’s scripts, using large and well-placed font, etc. These changes will also make your website more lightweight and improve its general performance - a win for both technical SEO and the user experience.
Having two web pages that are too similar on your website may confuse search engine crawlers and cause backlink dilution. You don’t have to remove duplicate content completely. You can edit it and prevent it from being crawled by using the Robot Exclusion Protocol.
This also goes for broken or dead content on your website. You should redirect visitors from those pagers or remove them completely.
The goal of search engines is to return the best quality pages for user queries. Your aim shouldn’t be merely to trick search engines by appearing to be the best result; you should be following the above protocols and techniques to improve the user experience and general quality of your website and its contents.
If this is a part of your product and marketing philosophy, you will likely already have good technical SEO. Of course, improvements can always be made, and that’s what the above text was written to help you with.
