What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of making improvements to the technical aspect of a site to improve the rank of its pages on search engines. Making websites faster, more user-friendly and more understandable to search engines are the primary goals that make up technical SEO.
Technical SEO is an aspect of SEO that is on-page. It concentrates on improving the elements of your site in order to achieve higher positions on search engines. It’s not the same as Off-page SEO which is focused on creating exposure for your website via other channels.
Why should you improve your website’s technical capabilities?
Google as well as other engines aim to give their users the most effective results possible for their search. So, Google’s robots search and assess web pages in a myriad of ways.
A few factors are based on the user’s experience. For instance, the speed at which pages load.
Other factors aid crawlers understand the content of your web pages. This is, among other things, structured data can do. In addition, by improving the technical aspects, you aid search engines to crawl and comprehend your website. If you can do this effectively it could pay off with better rankings or high-quality results.
The same goes for in the reverse direction If you make grave mistakes with your website’s technical aspects that could cost you.
It’s not the first time to prevent search engines from crawling your website by making a mistake and adding a trailing slash at the wrong spot within the robots.txt file.
It’s not true that you need to concentrate on the technical aspects of a website to impress search engines. A site should function well and should be speedy and clear to use for visitors in the initial place.
The good news is that establishing a solid technological foundation is often a prerequisite for the best experience for the users and the search engines.
What are the features of a website that is technically optimized?
A properly designed site is speedy for visitors and is easy to crawl for crawlers from search engines. A properly designed technical layout assists search engines in understanding the purpose of a website and prevents confusion that can be caused by, for example, duplicate content. Furthermore, it doesn’t lead visitors, or search engines, down dead streets due to broken hyperlinks. In this article, we’ll look through the essential characteristics of a website that is technically optimized.
- It should be crawlable to search engines.
Search engines employ robots to crawl or crawl your website. The robots use hyperlinks to find the content of your website. A well-designed internal linking structure can ensure that they understand you’re most famous content of your website.
However, there are many other options to direct robots. You could, for example, stop the crawling of certain pages in case it is not your intention for them to explore that particular site. It is also possible to let them explore a site but instruct them that they should not show this page in the results of a search or not follow links from the page.
- it should have a Robots.txt file
You can provide robots with directions on your site by making use of the robots.txt file. robots.txt file. It’s a very powerful tool that must be handled with care. As we said in the beginning, one tiny error could stop robots from accessing (important portions of) your website.
In some cases, users accidentally block their website’s CSS or JS files within your robot.txt file. The files contain code that informs search engines what your website should appear in and also how the site functions. If the files aren’t accessible the search engines won’t figure out the site’s functionality. in a way that is correct.
Overall We recommend that you take a dive into robots.txt for those who want to understand how it functions. Perhaps, prefer to let a programmer take care of it!
- It does not have (many) dead links.
We’ve talked about how slow websites can be frustrating. What could be even more frustrating for users than a page that is slow, is being directed to a page which doesn’t exist? If a hyperlink leads to a page that isn’t on your site, visitors are likely to be presented with a 404 error page. This is the end of your carefully designed user experience!
- There should not be any duplicate content
If you’ve got the same content across multiple pages of your website and even on other websites, search engines could become confused. Since, if the pages contain identical information, which page should be ranked highest? In the end, they may rank all pages that have similar content lower.
It is possible that you have duplicate content issues without knowing about you, have it? Because of technical reasons, different URLs may display identical content. For a user with the same content, it’s not a different however when it comes to search engines, it will show identical content on an entirely different URL.
There’s good news: there’s a technological solution to this problem. With the so-called canonical link element, you can specify the page’s original URL or the one that you’d prefer to be ranked on the search engines. In Yoast SEO it is easy to create a canonical URL for the page. In order to simplify your life, Yoast SEO adds self-referencing canonical links to all of your pages. This can help avoid duplicate content issues that you have no idea of.
- It should look safe to viewers
A well-designed and optimized website is a secure site. Making your site secure for users in order to protect their privacy is a fundamental necessity in today’s world. There are numerous ways to ensure that the security of your (WordPress) website is safe, and one of the most important things is to implement HTTPS.
HTTPS ensures that nobody could intercept the information transmitted from the web browser to your website. For instance, when users log on to your site the credentials of their account are safe. You’ll require a so-called SSL certificate to install HTTPS for your website. Google recognizes the importance of security and has implemented HTTPS as a ranking signal. Secure websites are ranked higher than their counterparts that are unsafe.
It is easy to determine whether your website is HTTPS on the majority of browsers. On the left side of the “search bar” in the browser, you’ll notice an icon that indicates if the site is secure. If you find”not secure” or “not secure” you (or your developer) must work on it! accomplish!
- It should contain structured data
Structured data aids search engines comprehend your website and content, or your business more easily. With structured data, you are able to inform search engines about the type of product you offer or the recipes you’ve posted on your website. In addition, it will provide you with the possibility of providing any information about the products or recipes you sell.
Since there’s a standard structure (described in Schema.org) where you must give the information that search engines are able to discover and comprehend it. This helps them place your content within a larger image. You will find a detailed explanation of how it functions and the ways Yoast SEO assists you in this. For example, Yoast SEO creates a Schema graph for your website and provides free content blocks with structured data for FAQ and How-to content.
Implementing structured data will give more than just an understanding of search engines. It can also make your content more qualified for more extensive results. the shiny results that have highlights or stars that pop out in the results of a search.
- It should be indexed in different search engines and must have an XML sitemap
Indexing functions like google’s file cabinet. When the Googlebot is able to crawl a website and store the content (when it’s done indexing) the site will show relevant results from a search engine that most closely meet the searcher’s needs.
One method of ensuring that Google has correctly crawled your site and then indexed your site is to use a no-cost Google tool known as Google Search Console.
When you sign up for your account for free You can then do a variety of things such as track the time when a new page that you’ve created is being found by Google. Sitemaps can also be submitted which makes the process easier for Google to find and properly catalog your website’s content.
The creation of a sitemap is important as it makes Google’s job (and yours) much simpler. Instead of searching in vain for your site, you can provide Google where your most important content is located and when you change it.
Simply put in simple terms, it is an XML website map is simply a map of all pages on your website. It is a waypoint to search engines that visit your website. By using it, you can ensure that search engines don’t overlook any crucial information on your website. This XML sitemap is typically classified into pages, post tags, or other custom types of posts and contains the number of pictures and the date of last modification on each page.
In the ideal scenario, a website won’t require the use of an XML sitemap. When it’s got an internal link structure that connects all content in a seamless manner the robots will not require it. But, not all websites have a well-constructed structure, so having an XML sitemap isn’t going to cause harm. Therefore, we’d recommend including an XML sitemap on your website.
- International websites should have the hreflang tag
If your website is targeted at multiple countries or countries that have similar languages spoken, the search engine requires some help in understanding the countries or languages you’re trying to connect with. If you can help them, they will provide the correct site for their region in the results.
The Hreflang tags allow you to do exactly this. It is possible to specify for a web page the country and language it’s designed for. This can also help solve a duplicate content issue: even when your US and UK sites display identical contents, Google will know it’s designed for a different area.
Optimizing international websites is an area of expertise. If you’d like to know how to get your site’s international rankings high, we suggest taking an interest in our Multilingual SEO course.
Furthermore, Google doesn’t like to come across these error pages, either. In fact, they are likely to uncover more dead hyperlinks than users encounter, since they look for every link they run into even if they don’t know it’s there.
The problem is that most websites have (at) certain dead links because websites are an ongoing work-in-progress that is, people create things break and damage things. However, there are tools to assist you in removing dead links on your website.
- Core Web Vitals should be optimized
One method to determine the speed with which content is loaded on your site is by using Our Website Audit Tool’s Core Web Vitals metric.
These Vitals Web Cores can be broken into three categories:
Largest Contentful Painting (LCP): This is the amount of time it takes for the majority of the content on a website page to load for visitors.
First Input Delay (FID): FID is a measure of a page’s the responsive time at the point that a user starts engaging with the webpage for the very first time. This could include clicking buttons, links, or various other customized JavaScript actions.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This is a measure of the number of unintentional changes to the layout of the page that affect the primary information on a page.
Google also offers these metrics by way of its Google Search Console Core Web Vitals Reports.
Ideal Status Metrics for Core Web Vitals:
LCP under 2.5 seconds
FID: Under 100 milliseconds
CLS score of .1 or less