The Ultimate Guide To Technical SEO

So, you have written well-optimized content loaded with keywords. But, it is important to make your content readable not only for the readers but for search engines too. Right?

And… that’s why technical SEO plays an important role in the whole process of SEO. if there is any issue with the technical part of your website, it is going to affect your whole website. 

So, it becomes very important for you to understand what technical SEO is and how to get it done right. 

There is a piece of good news you can easily perform a website technical SEO audit and fix the issues. 

In this blog, you are going to learn about what technical SEO is and how you can perform it properly on your website. 

So, let’s get started:

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the technical aspects to make it easily crawlable and indexable. 

Technical SEO optimization makes your website easy accessible and crawlable. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO that works on improving the technical elements of your website to get higher rankings in SERP. 

Why Should You Optimize The Technical Part Of Your Website?

You must have known to rank your site in Google, the Google crawler comes and crawl your website first and evaluate it on many different factors. 

It evaluates your website on many different factors like good user experience, unique content, and how the crawler grasps what your content is all about. 

So, it is important to work on the technical SEO of your website to make Google and other search engines better understand your website. 

All and all, you should make sure your website works well and it should be fast, clear, and easy to use. 

Best Practices To Optimize The Technical SEO Of Your Website

Here are the technical characteristics of the website that you should optimize:

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

This is one of the foremost technical aspects of any website. A responsive and mobile-friendly website is a must-have technical aspect. 

Google is very clear about the fact that it is considered a responsive and mobile-friendly site is one of the ranking factors. 

So, that’s why a mobile-friendly site is more important than ever. 

Most website owners consider mobile-friendliness as just an option and don’t work it on as a priority based. 

And.. of course, if you also treat your website like that and don’t take mobile-friendliness seriously then, it is going to affect your website rankings very badly. 

The best thing about mobile-friendliness is, once your website is mobile-friendly it is going to stay like that forever, you don’t have to optimize it again and again. 

Here are some steps to follow to make your website mobile-friendly:

First of all, run a mobile-friendly test on Google and you will get to know if your website is mobile-friendly or not. 

Paste your website URL above (shown in the image) and run the test. If you pass the test then, it is well and good and if you don’t pass the test, then, of course, you need to work on your website. 

Here are some things you need to consider:

• Make sure your mobile website has the same content just as your desktop website. Don’t forget about the mobile-first index. Google prioritizes ranking mobile websites on the basis of their content. 

• Your website should load in less than 3 seconds. 

• Don’t use popups on mobile phones

Use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)

SSL is a part of technical SEO. Let me explain what SSL is if you are new to this. SSL is a technology of security that creates an encrypted link between the web server and the browser that your user is using.   

You can spot this where the page URL comes… let me show you:

In 2014, Google made it very clear that websites with secure and SSL encryption will be prioritized in SERP over unsecured websites. 

So, don’t forget to secure your site with an SSL certificate. 

When you install the SSL certificate, it would start showing HTTPS before your website URL which means, the data and credentials(name, phone number, bank account number, passwords) a user is giving on your website are encrypted and only in between the user and website server. 

If you don’t have an SSL certificate on your website, you must ask your hosting provider to enable an SSL certificate for you. 

After that, you need to follow a migration process to activate the SSL on your website. 

Improve The Speed Of Your Site

Another technical SEO factor for a website is website speed. Even, Google also mentions the importance of site speed. 

Besides this, a study found that faster websites perform and rank well on SERP. 

Also, slower websites lead to a high bounce rate, which is also a factor in why Google ranks some websites lower.

See the image below:

You need to check the website speed using 3 tools called, Google page speed insights, Pingdom tools, and Google mobile speed tools.

The above tools will absolutely be helpful in getting information about what needs to be done to improve your site speed. 

However, you would require to hire a web developer as it is a technical issue. 

Here are the following things that you can do to improve your site speed:

• Upgrade your server to a 64-bit operating system.
• Upgrade to PHP 7.2 
• Optimize the right size of your images 
• Use only the plugins that are necessary.
• Don’t use much heavy themes.
• Optimize your CSS and JS files
• Use caching plugins 
• Use asynchronous javascript loading

Get Rid Of Duplicate Content

If you have the same content on different pages of your website, then it’s an issue called duplicate content, which of course harms your technical SEO.

It could be confusing for both the search engines and users as well. The search engines will get confused about which content to rank higher when all of them have the same content.

As a result, Google or other search engines may rank those pages lower in the SERP.

Your website could also have duplicate content issues. Sometimes, it happens due to some technical error. Different URLs may show the same content. It may not be very problematic for users but it could be problematic for search engines.  

However, we also have a solution for that. 

1. You can prevent your CMS from creating multiple pages.

2. Or, you can use the canonical link element and indicate to the search engine which page is original or the page you would like to rank higher. 

Create An XML Sitemap

Then, the next thing that comes in technical SEO is, XML sitemap.

An XML sitemap is kind of a roadmap for search engine bots. It is created so that, a web crawler doesn’t miss any page of your website. The XML sitemap is often categorized as tags, blog posts, or pages and contains the data about the no. of images and the last modified date of the page. 

Along with that, it also contains data about

• The last modified date of the page 
• The priority it has on your site 
• Frequency of its updation 

if you have the right internal linking structure that connects all the pages, then it’s not compulsory to have an XML sitemap. 

However, if you use an XML sitemap on your website then it is not going to harm your website but create a pathway for search engine crawlers about how to crawl your website.  

Add Structured Data Markup

Structured data is a code that helps Google and search engines better understand the content of your web page. 

This will help search engines effectively crawl and index your content and provide more relevant results in SERP. 

See my website example above… this is one of my website pages, ranking in SERP. 

And below that, you can see the questions. These are my blog’s FAQ questions shown in SERP. it is there in  SERP because I have put them on Structured Data markup. 

And, want to know the best part?

It also enhances the CTR of your website. When people see the additional information on the page, people are more likely to click on your web page. 

Add Robots.txt File

Robots.txt is a text code in the root directory of your website that provides instructions to search engine crawlers about which page to crawl and index. 

The format of the Robots.txt file looks something like that:

Here, your only work is to check if you are not blocking anything important that may prevent the search engines to crawl your website. 

Use An Organized Site Structure

To improve your website’s technical SEO, you must have an organized site structure or site architecture. The site architecture is how you organize your web pages. 

For example, related pages would be grouped together. Your blog homepage would have all the links to your blog posts. 

This structure is mainly helpful for search engine bots to make them understand how are pages related to each other. 

Ultimately, this is helpful in crawling and indexing.

A good site structure would look like this… check the image above.

Enable AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

The AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, mainly it is helpful in delivering content at a fast speed to mobile users. It delivers fast content from the cache server and uses AMP versions of HTML and Javascript. 

Have A Consistent URL Structure

The URL structure is how you structure your URLs. if you have a website, you must understand that there could be some sub-directories of a URL like,

I have a website incrementors.com and then I have a subdirectory for it i.e., incrementors.com/blog/ 

Mainly, this indicates where the URL leads. 

And, that’s how when I post a blog on my website, it would be like, https://www.incrementors.com/blog/practices-for-website-seo-testing/

The reason why the URL shows up like this is that this particular article comes in a subdirectory i.e., incrementors.com/blog/

You just have to create a roadmap, apply it to your URL, and follow it. 

Some tips to create your URL:

• Always use lowercase words
• Use dashes between the words
• Make them short and elaborative to the content of the page
• Add your primary (targeted) keyword 

Once you have the URL structure of your important pages, then submit that list to search engines in a form of XML sitemaps. 

Conclusion

In this blog, I have deeply described all about technical SEO. Technical SEO is the most important factor for website rankings. If your website’s technical part is not optimized then it is going to harm your website. 

That’s why is good to optimize the technical SEO of your website. 

That’s all about my technical SEO guide, now you tell me in the comment section, which strategy are you going to implement first. 

If you have any doubts or queries, you can simply comment down below in the comment section and I am going to reply for sure!