Technical SEO is the ‘hidden’ powerful element in strengthening your organic search engine optimization, which includes technical aspects like site architecture, mobile optimization, and page speed. These factors do not directly impact the traffic result but play a significant role in SEO.
By doing a site audit or outsourcing SEO audit service, you may learn where you are and take the first step toward site technical enhancement. This SEO guide will answer the question: What is technical SEO? Why is it significant? And what are its fundamentals and checklist?
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO enhances technical aspects to raise the page’s ranking in search engines. The following are typical duties related to technical optimization:
- Submit the sitemap to Google.
- Improve page ranking.
- Optimize SEO technology on the website.
- Enhancing the web page’s speed.
- Increase crawlability & indexability.
- Identify and solve duplicate content problems.
Technical SEO is a component of on-page SEO that focuses on-site technical optimization to grow organic traffic. On the other hand, off-page SEO aims to increase a website’s visibility through external sources.
Why Is Technical SEO Significant?
Technical optimization may have a significant influence on a website’s Google ranking. Users may become easily impatient and leave your site if your pages load poorly. Similarly, if your site’s pages are inaccessible to search engines, they will not appear or rank in search results, no matter how good your material is. As a result, Google will disqualify your website and not give you a high ranking.
Google and other search engines aim to provide people with the best search outcomes. Therefore, the crawlability and assessment of Google’s robots will depend on various criteria. Google has stated that technical aspects like page speed and mobile friendliness are the most impactful elements. Hence, enhancing SEO technology will make it less complex for search engines to crawl and understand your site.
3 Technical SEO Fundamentals
When you begin your SEO checklist, there are technical aspects you must establish:
- Examine Preferred Domain
- Improve Page Speed
- Install SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
Examine Preferred Domain
The domain is the SEO programming URL address that gives people access to the right site, for example, roidigitally.com. This fundamental allows people to find your business site through search engines and offers a dependable way to recognize your site.
Choosing the right domain allows search engines to analyze the preferences of www or non-www version usage of your site in the search results. You may select http://www.yourwebsite.com instead of yourwebsite.com, for instance. This process notifies search engines which are highly used to prioritize and redirect all users to the preferred URL. If not, search engines will consider these two versions as different sites, reducing their site technical value.
Google previously prompted you to specify which URL version you prefer. Now Google will analyze and decide which version to display to searchers. Yet, you can control the domain version by using canonical tags. Ensure all variations, including www, non-www, HTTP, and index.html, permanently link to your chosen domain after selecting it.
Improve Page Speed
Are you aware of the average loading time for your website? Six seconds is the least amount of time for SEO programming to run. The bounce rate rises by 90% as the page load time increases from one to five seconds.
Page speed is not for user experiences only, it is the SEO technology that determines page ranking. Audiences prefer to save time. Therefore, you must be aware of how to improve page speed. Here are some tips:
- Compress all documents
- Audit redirects
- Streamline your code
- Contemplate a content distribution network (CDN)
- Avoid plugin happy
- Utilize cache plugins
- Utilize asynchronous loading
Install SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
Installing SSL is an essential technical aspect. Your website is safe thanks to SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, which adds an extra layer of security between a browser and a web server. Because you have SSL to safeguard them, therefore, when a user provides information such as payment or contact to your website, hackers can barely touch them.
A domain that starts with “https://” rather than “http://” and the lock icon in the URL bar are indicators of an SSL certificate.
Search engines like secure websites. Google has taken SSL as a technical aspect when determining rankings as early as 2014. So, ensure you configure the SSL version on your site.
Crawlability Checklist
The core component of your technical optimization is crawlability. Search engines will crawl your pages to learn more and collect information about your website.
Once these bots are blocked from crawling, they cannot give indexability or ranking to your pages. Thus, ensuring your crucial pages are accessible and straightforward to browse is the first step in implementing this SEO checklist.
The SEO guide to crawlability checklist includes eight steps, which are:
- Make a sitemap in XML
- Make the most of your crawl budget
- Improve the website’s architecture
- Establish a URL structure
- Utilize robots.txt
- Include breadcrumb menus
- Implement pagination
- Examine the SEO log files
Make a sitemap in XML
An XML Sitemap helps search engines in improving site technical comprehension and indexability. Once it is ready, you’ll upload your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console.
Maximize your crawl budget
The crawl budget is the number of pages and resources available on your site that search engines will explore. Because crawl budgets are limited, prioritize your most critical pages for crawling.
Improve the website’s architecture
Your website pages. should all be set up so search engines can quickly locate and crawl them. That’s where your website’s information architecture, often known as the site structure, comes into play.
Establish a URL structure
Regarding URL structure, your site layout may impact how you organize your URLs. After your URL structure is in order, you should submit an XML sitemap to search engines listing the URLs of all of your key pages. This provides search bots additional context about your site, saving them from figuring it out as they crawl.
Utilize robots.txt
When a web robot crawls your site, it will first look for the Robot Exclusion Protocol file or /robot.txt. This protocol can let or prohibit some web robots from crawling your website. The indexing process involves search bots crawling your website to gather information and identify keywords that will help them match your web pages with pertinent search requests.
Include breadcrumb menus
Breadcrumbs are a trail that directs website visitors back to where they first came. Users may see how their current page links to the other pages on the site by using this menu of pages.
Implement pagination
Pagination has a different function in technical SEO, but you can still consider it a type of organizing. Search engines are informed by pagination when sites with different URLs are connecting.
Examine the SEO log files
Log files are like journal entries. Web servers (the journaler) collect and retain information about every activity they perform on your site in log files (the journal). The info saved comprises the request’s time and date, the requested content, and the IP address of the audience making the request.
You may also recognize the user agent, a piece of software that is specifically recognizable and handles a user’s request. Log files are helpful to you since you can see how your crawl budget is acting and what obstacles a bot is facing when indexing or gaining access.
Indexability Checklist
Search engine bots start indexing pages as they explore your website based on the pages’ topics and relevancy to those topics. When your page successfully implements this SEO checklist, it will likely rank on the SERPs. Here are a few elements to apply indexability to your page.
- Open up the sites to search for bots
- Take out any redundant text
- Look over your redirects
- Verify whether your website is mobile-responsive
- Resolve HTTP errors
Open up the sites to search bots
Although you will probably take care of this step when talking about crawlability, it is still important to highlight it. You want to ensure that bots can easily access and navigate your favorite pages. A few tools are available to support this. Check the list of restricted pages using Google’s robots.txt tester, and use the Inspect tool in the Google Search Console to find out why.
Take out any redundant text
Duplicate content confuses search engines and hurts your website’s indexability. Remember to set your chosen pages using canonical URLs.
Look over your redirects
Make sure all of your redirects are configured correctly. While your site is indexing, problems might arise from redirect loops, broken URLs, or ineffective redirects. Audit all of your redirects often to prevent this.
Verify whether your website is mobile-responsive
If your website needs to be responsive to mobile devices, you must catch up with where you should be. Google indexed mobile pages first in 2016, prioritizing the mobile experience over the desktop one. These days, indexing is running by default. You may use Google’s mobile-friendly test to see where your website needs to change to stay up with this significant trend.
Resolve HTTP errors
By keeping them away from crucial material on your site, HTTP failures might hinder search engine bots’ ability to do their jobs. So, responding to these errors immediately and entirely is crucial.
You’ll utilize the resources in the section below to learn more about or find out how to fix each HTTP issue, as each is distinct and calls for a particular solution.
Despite the cause of these mistakes, you need to fix them if you want people and search engines to continue visiting your website.
Renderability Checklist
The simplicity of rendering determines whether a site is accessible. These are a few technical aspects to examine for your renderability audit:
- Server Efficiency
- Status HTTP
- Page Size and Loading Time
- JavaScript Rendering
- Error Pages
- Page depth
- Redirect Chains
Server Efficiency
HTTP problems result from server timeouts and issues that prevent visitors and bots from accessing your website. Because it is frustrating for users to see a broken page, search engines may only remove your website from their index if you apply this site’s technical SEO optimization.
Status HTTP
HTTP failures will restrict access to your web pages, like server efficiency. You may carry out a thorough error audit of your website using a web crawler like Screaming Frog, Botify, or DeepCrawl.
Page Size and Loading Time
A delay in page load time might cause a server fault, preventing bots from seeing your sites or forcing them to crawl partly loaded versions that lack necessary content. Depending on the crawl demand on a specific resource, bots will use similar resources to load, render, and index sites.
JavaScript Rendering
To increase accessibility, Google advises using pre-rendered content since it can handle JavaScript (JS) more easily. Also, Google offers much data to understand better how search bots access JavaScript on your website and how to fix search-related problems.
Error Pages
Depending on how essential the page is, each page on your website should be connected to at least two additional pages. An error page lacks any internal connections. These pages need more context bots to understand indexability, similar to an essay without an introduction.
Page Depth
Page depth represents the number of layers deep a page available in your site structure. No matter how many layers your site has, it should be at most three clicks away. A design that makes your product page so challenging to locate for people and search engine bots makes it less accessible and offers a bad user experience.
Redirect Chains
Rerouting traffic from one page to another is an additional cost. Crawability performance is that cost. Incorrectly configured redirects can make your site unavailable, slow down crawling, and limit the speed at which pages load. Try to limit the number of redirects you use for each reason.
Rankability Checklist
The following SEO checklist boosts ranking from a technical SEO perspective. There are s several on-page and off-page components necessary for a page’s ranking. Remember that all of these aspects, when combined, will create a friendly SEO technology website.
- Connecting Internally and Externally
- Backlink Quality
- Content Clusters
Connecting Internally and Externally
Links provide context for how to rank a website and assist search bots in understanding where a page belongs in the overall scheme of a query. Links direct visitors and search bots to relevant material and communicate the relevance of a page. Generally, linking helps with crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Backlink Quality
Backlinks inform search engines that your page is high quality and worth crawlability. There are various techniques to get high-quality backlinks to your website, including outreach to pertinent publications, securing unlinked mentions, and offering relevant content that attracts links from other websites.
Content Clusters
Search engines can quickly identify, crawl, and index all sites you possess on a specific topic through content clusters. They serve as a method for self-promotion to demonstrate to search engines your expertise on a subject, increasing the likelihood that they will rank your website as an authority for any connected search queries.
Clickability Checklist
Although searcher behavior has a significant role in click-through rate (CTR), there are things you can do to increase your clickability on the SERPs. Although page names and meta descriptions containing keywords can affect CTR, there are other technical aspects on this SEO checklist:
- Implement database structure
- Achieve SERP’s feature
- Prepare for Featured Snippets
- Contemplate Google Explore
Implement database structure
Database structure uses a specialized vocabulary known as schema to categorize and name components on your website for search bots. The schema clearly defines each element’s purpose, relationship to your website, and method of interpretation. This SEO programming assists in structuring your material so that search engines can easily rate the readability, indexability, and site technical ranking.
Prepare for Featured Snippets
Featured Snippets aims to provide searchers with results for their queries as rapidly as feasible. According to Google, winning a snippet requires offering the best response to the searcher’s question.
Contemplate Google Explore
Google Discover is a new algorithm that lists content by category for mobile users. With over 50% of queries coming from mobile devices, it’s no wonder Google has focused more on the mobile experience. The tool allows users to create a material library by choosing interest-based categories.
5 Technical SEO Tools
Technical SEO is a complicated process to enhance. Therefore, utilizing these five site technical tools will help to store and provide accurate data and give troubleshooting to websites in search engines:
- Google Search Console
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
- Chrome DevTools
- Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar
- PageSpeed Insights
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service that gives business authority to track and fix how their website appears in Google’s search results. This tool shows and points out technical errors, sees structured data, provides sitemaps, and more.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test determines how easily a mobile user can navigate your page. Moreover, it points out particular problems with mobile usabilities, such as difficult-to-read language and the usage of incompatible plugins.
The Mobile-Friendly Test displays what Google finds when it crawls the website. You should consider the Rich Results Test to examine the material that Google sees for desktop or mobile devices.
Chrome DevTools
Chrome DevTools is the built-in website debugging tool in Chrome. This SEO technology is designed to fix sluggish page load times, enhance webpage rendering, and more. It has numerous applications from a technical SEO perspective.
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar
The free Chrome and Firefox addon Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar offers practical SEO programming about the pages and websites you visit. With Ahrefs’s service, you will get:
- SEO analytics for each website and page you visit, as well as Google search results
- Search engine results pages (SERPs) directly display keyword data like search volume and keyword difficulty.
- Exporting SERP results
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights examines the loading speed of your web pages. It displays practical suggestions to speed up page loading and the performance score.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit verifies that a website’s technical aspects comply with best search engine optimization practices. It refers to your website’s technical aspect directly influencing search engine ranking factors like Google or Bing.
It is essential to maintaining the efficacy of your SEO programming. If your website needs to be correctly optimized for search, you’re losing out on a sizable quantity of search engine traffic and prospective consumers. Therefore, the professionalism of an SEO audit service is necessary to avoid the negative impacts of improper technical optimization.
What is ethical SEO?
Ethical SEO is search engine marketing that only involves methods and tactics that search engines find acceptable.
The strategy, sometimes called white hat SEO, is based on abiding by the rules established by the main search engines rather than attempting to trick them.
By taking ethical SEO techniques, your website ensures to optimize for users and search engines.
Conclusion
In short, this SEO guide gives the ultimate answer to the question: What is technical SEO? Why is it significant? And what are its fundamentals and checklist? Technical SEO aims to raise a website’s technical standing so that search engines will rank its pages higher. Crawability, indexability, renderability, and clickability are the fundamentals technical aspects involved in your technical optimization process.
The combination of technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO makes it accessible to grow organic traffic. As a result, these technological strategies will accomplish your SEO plan and observe the outcomes.
Co-Founder & General Manager @ ROI Digitally
