Technical SEO plays a vital role in amplifying website performance in terms of safety, speed, and accessibility. But, technical SEO is increasingly becoming a complicated subject matter for most site owners and SEOs due to the ever-changing Google norms. In this write-up, we will dive into the fundamentals of technical SEO and highlight the best practices.
What do you mean by technical SEO?
As the name suggests, technical SEO deals with a given website’s technical aspects so that it can witness a better SERP ranking. Making the webpages discoverable on SERP, improving the upload time, and fixing indexing issues are the pillars of technical optimization.
Technical SEO is a crucial facet of on-page SEO, which primarily pays attention to improving the website’s elements for better SERP ranking. On the other hand, off-page SEO deals with content dissemination and link building. This helps websites foster better credibility and authority over time.
Understanding the significance of the Technical SEO
Google and other search engines prioritize user-friendly content when it comes to responding to searchers’ queries. Thus, search engine robots crawl and examine site pages against various grounds such as page speed, page relevance, etc. By improving technical elements, you make the website search engine-friendly. And this can translate to a lot of things such as better ranking, improved brand exposure, improved domain authority, and so on.
Likewise, if you do not pay attention to technical SEO, your site may lose its credibility on SERP, which would lead to poor ranking and even the non-discoverability of pages. Doing technical SEO should not be all about making the site crawler-friendly. Your website must serve the users’ intentions by staying intuitive and speedier. Correcting technical aspects of a website is important unless it does not compromise its user-friendliness.
What Are The Traits Of a Technically Sound Website?
A technically strong website is easy to crawl and adheres to speedier performance. An apt technical setup enables search engines to easily comprehend what a site is about. It also mitigates the confusion triggered by non-original content. Moreover, it gets rid of the dead links that cause a significant nuisance to visitors and search engines.
It is quick to load
These days, web pages must adhere to speedier performance. Searchers do not care about sticking to a page that takes ages to open. Factually, a webpage that takes more than 3 seconds to load loses more than 50 percent of the traffic on SERP. Every second counts for a website when it comes to inviting traffic and customer engagement. Google considers slow web pages a significant deterrent to searcher’s experience. They only prefer ranking pages that do not bother users with sluggish performance.Page experience is among the critical ranking factors for Google. Therefore, every website owner should pay attention to this without an exception.
Core web vital is an ideal platform for website testing in terms of speed and overall performance. It is handy in detecting technical pitfalls with the website that is compromising users’ experience.
It is discoverable for search engines
Almost all search engines, including Google, employs robots to crawl/analyze millions of websites. An ideal internal linking within a given webpage enables the search engines easily comprehend the content therein. You can prevent these robots from crawling a particular web page or entire the website. Likewise, you can also direct them to unfollow the links on the given page. In a nutshell, you have complete control over how these robots perform. By using the robots.txt file, you can guide the robots to perform the predetermined crawlings. That is why you should think twice before doing so. Any mistake can cause a significant ranking drop or index pages that you do not want to.
Oftentimes, site owners mistakenly block their website’s JS and CSS files in the robots.txt file. These files entail codes that let browsers understand the site’s appearance and its working inside out. Blocking these codes can translate to non-crawling, which may lead to non-appearance in SERP.
What about the meta robots tag?
The meta-robot tag refers to a piece of code that stays invisible to the searchers. It is usually found in the head section of the page. Robots crawl this section on priority to know detailed info about the page. Meta robots can help with crawling control.
It is free from non-working links
Non-working links offer a risky experience and lend no benefits to the users. They often land visitors on a page that does not exist at all. They are the reason why searchers often witness a 404 error. Dead links serve as a bad signal for Google thus they can hamper the SERP ranking. That is where URL redirection comes in. After identifying all the dead links, you can use page redirection to send visitors to a page that matters.
It stays away from duplicate content
It is not uncommon to witness the same content on several website pages. This usually perplexes the search engine when it comes to page prioritization for ranking. Consequently, this often caused low ranking for all such pages.
For the most part, site owners remain unaware of such flaws. Although this has nothing to do with the user experience, it serves as a bad signal for the search engine. Fortunately, there is a fix to this critical problem. By using the canonical link element, you can tell robots which page to prioritize for ranking.
It is highly secure
Today’s users are more informed and know that their data and privacy gets exposed every time they hop onto unsafe websites. Thus, it is an onus of the owner to strengthen the safety aspect of their site for end-users. By Implementing HTTPS, the site owner can boost site safety manyfold. HTTPS keeps the data movement safe from the intruders that take place between the browser and the site.
All you need is to buy something called an SSL certificate to start leveraging HTTPS. Google has started prioritizing site safety more than ever and takes HTTPS as a ranking signal. Sites that have HTTPS are usually represented by a lock icon located at the left-most part of the URL field on the browser
It leverages structured data
Structured data enables search engines explicitly comprehend any website and its content. In a nutshell, structured data simplifies things for search engines when it comes to analyzing site content. Structured data has a fixed format and it is easy to implement. Also, Webpages that have structured data are more likely to qualify for rich results, leading to better traffic and engagement.
Uses XML sitemap
XML sitemap provides for the apt orchestration of all the webpages. It helps search engines systematically crawl the site, leading to prompt indexing of new pages. The XML sitemap categories website information based on pages, posts, tags, images, and the last modified date of the web page. Although adding an XML sitemap doesn’t make a significant difference in how the site is crawled, it serves as a boon for websites that has highly unorganized.
Bottomline
Website creation and maintenance are two different things. Keeping up with these SEO practices will help keep the site faster, secure, error-free, and search engine-friendly. Let us know if you are dealing with site performance issues, we will be glad to answer your queries.
