Simple Steps For Improving Your Online Customer Service
Subhasree Nag, 12 hours ago
Technical SEO is the exercise of increasing the technical capabilities of the website and working towards ranking the pages higher. There are various user experience factors which are involved as well. It is based on improving the speed, making it easy for the search engines to understand the website and make it easy to crawl.
When correctly done, technical SEO can improve the visibility of the website in search results. Let’s learn about the basics of technical SEO in this article.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is all about improving the website and making it easy for search engines to find, evaluate and store the content. It also involves factors like user experience. For instance, making a website easy and fast for mobile usage.
Technical SEO can improve your visibility and presence in search results when done correctly. This article has the basics of technical SEO that you need to know for the benefit of your website.
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is the most important part of SEO. It has the power to make or break the performance. When the pages of your website are not accessible by the search engines, they will not appear in the search results, no matter how well-crafted your content is.
This can cause a loss of website traffic and hamper the business’s potential revenue. Moreover, mobile friendliness and the website’s speed are ranking factors, and these must be taken care of.
Users can get annoyed and leave the site if the page speed is low. This kind of response from the user can portray that your site is not giving a positive user experience. Because of this, the search engines might not rank your site well. To have a better understanding of technical SEO, here are a few parameters that you should know.
Technical SEO checklist
There are a lot of parameters that you must take care of to ensure that the website has all the technical elements that any search engine would prefer, like a secure network, a responsive design, and quick loading time. Here are a few things that you must check to make sure your technical SEO is updated.
Use SSL
There is an encrypted connection between a web server and a browser that uses SSL as a security method. Any SSL website is easy to understand because the website URL starts with “https://” and not just “http://.”
Back in 2014, Google announced that it wanted to use “https” everywhere to be given preference over the insecure ones. It is for safeguarding the security of the website.
Make your site mobile-friendly
The website must be designed so that it can be navigated and read from any device. A website that can adapt to any device has a high-ranking indication in Google’s algorithm. Moreover, an adaptable webpage is now more important for Google’s new “mobile first” strategy to index information.
Fix duplicate content
Duplicate content is often used to influence the search results or to increase the traffic. However, it confused the users as well as search engine algorithms. And search engines hate it when this happens. Bing and Google advise webmasters for addressing these duplicate contents when they come across any.
Use a conical tag to inform Google which original content is and which page it should index first.
Submit sitemap to Google
Bing Webmaster Tool and Google Search Console are free tools from Microsoft and Google, which let you submit your website to the index of their search engines.
When you are set to publish the website, submit the XML sitemap to Webmaster Tool and Google Search Console for crawling it. After that, it can display results from it in the search results.
Use the Noindex tax cautiously
The HTML snippet has a “no index” tag, and it keeps the pages out of Google’s index. Mostly, you would want the important pages to get indexed. So be careful while using the no index tag and use it only when you want to exclude certain pages for indexing.
Core web vitals should be optimized
The speed metrics come under core web vitals which Google uses for measuring the user experience. These include:
LCP(largest contentful paint) – This calculates the time a webpage takes to load the largest element for a user. It should be less than 2.5 seconds.
FID(first input delay) – This measures the time a website takes to react to the user’s first interaction with that webpage. It should be aimed for 100 milliseconds or less.
CLS(cumulative layout shift) – This part measures the unexpected shifts among the layout of different elements on a webpage. It should be 0.1 seconds or even less than that.
Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO audit is a procedure used for inspecting the technical aspects of the website’s SEO. Overall, it goes over the website’s health and figures out the flaws that need correction. Here is a short glimpse of the technical SEO guide, which can better the user experience and rank better on Google search results.
Start with a crawl
Start crawling the website with the help of tools like Spyfu, DeepCrawl, and SEMrush. It finds mistakes like incorrect keywords, poor photos, broken links, and page title issues. It also helps identify unlinked pages, duplicate content, indexation constraints, and various other issues.
Create a sitemap
A sitemap is important for discovering pages and understanding the structure of the website. Simple, clean, and up-to-date Sitemaps need to be registered in the Google Search Console.
Conduct on-page SEO checks
Ranking factors include meta descriptions, keywords, page titles, and tags. You must check these out to make sure they are on point.
Test site speed and manage links
Examine the external and internal links for the logical hierarchy. If the website speed is more than five seconds, then there is a 90% chance that the visitor will leave your website. So, make sure you compare the performance and speed with your competitors’.
Check the HTTPS content
70% of the Google search results on the first page are HTTPS. While conducting technical SEO audits, look for issues common with HTTPS, like canonicals, links, mixed content, and redirects.
Do a backlink audit
For the success of a website, backlinks are important. Backlink audits help you find locations that with high-value links, research competitive keywords, and check the number of backlinks your competitors have.
Benefits of technical SEO
Here are some of the key elements of technical SEO and their benefits.
Helps get a better ranking
By raising the ranking of the website for specific search terms, technical SEO allows you to get more traffic to the landing pages. With a proper website structure, Google indexes and shows content efficiently and enhancing and supports your site for organic search results.
Google is all for increasing the page speed. When the pages load quickly, the audience will prefer your pages more than your competitors. In the end, technical SEO assists you in identifying and removing the barriers that prevent users from enhancing CRO results and navigating the site.
Improves page speed
Technical SEO is important for increasing page speed, which is one of the key ranking factors. A website with a higher loading speed is likely to rank better in searches. A website that takes longer to load would have a higher bounce rate and will get fewer conversions.
You can speed up the loading of the website by doing a few things. Using limited HTTP queries and CSS style sheets changes are needed. Make the image size small and compress the web pages by removing line breaks, unnecessary spaces, and indentations from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
Eliminates duplicate content
As I mentioned above, try canonicalization to remove identical content from URLs. This is a way of choosing one URL when numerous URL alternatives exist for one page. Utilizing content that is optional should be avoided. Schedule regular checks, that way you can lower the chances of duplicate content.
The search engine will penalize the website if there is the same material on various pages. Use titles, heading tags, and meta descriptions to make one page different from the other and avoid repetition.
Helps structure the data
One of the basic needs of a website is to have its data structured for proper functioning, mainly in terms of efficiency. Structured data markup is the coding you add to the website to help search engines understand the content better. With this information, search engines might index your website better and get better results.
Moreover, “rich snippets” that the structured data provides, like adding a star rating to the reviews, enhance the search results. They are visually pleasing and highlight important information immediately for searchers. These results raise the CTR and get more people to your site.
Websites that have higher CTR often get better ranking from search engines. So, it is worthwhile if you are using your time to incorporate structured data into your website.
Locate issues with website structures
Another thing that leads people deeper into the website is internal links. The website page should be three clicks away. The visibility of the page decreases for the users and search engines as you go deep into the website.
The site audit report, which highlights the issues with the page, indicates those pages that need more than three clicks to access. Along with that, validating the sitemap is also important.
The XML sitemap file contains the list of eerie pages and content that exists on your website. It has the names, the dates, recent updates, and release information. While crawling, search engines can follow the instructions from an XML sitemap.
Wrapping Up!
Technical SEO is necessary for any SEO plan to work out successfully. Website loading and internal linking should be flawless for technically achieving an optimal website. You should often check the technical parameters for misconceptions and errors and fix those as soon as possible.
This behind-the-scenes work helps in improving with the organic growth of your website in search engines like page speed, mobile optimization, and site architecture. This makes the entire experience more user-friendly. To fix any glitches, you can always perform an SEO audit.
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Subhasree Nag
A self-proclaimed Swiftian, Instagram-holic, and blogger, Subhasree eats, breathes, and sleeps pop culture. When she is not imagining dates with Iron Man on Stark Tower (yes, she has the biggest crush on RDJ, which she won’t admit), she can be seen tweeting about the latest trends. Always the first one to break viral news, Subhasree is addicted to social media, and leaves out no opportunity of blogging about the same. She is our go-to source for the latest algorithm updates and our resident editor.
