What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO process optimizing a website for search engines, but it can also contain actions meant to improve the user experience. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website, is the process of confirming that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improving organic rankings.

Common tasks associated with technical SEO include the following:

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website:

Submitting your sitemap to Google

Creating an SEO-friendly site structure

Improving your website’s speed

Making your website mobile-friendly

Finding and fixing duplicate content issues

Much more

Why is technical SEO important?

You can have the best site with the best content.

But if your technical SEO is messed up,

Then you’re not going to rank.

Technical SEO can seriously impact a website’s presentation on Google.

At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render, and index the page on your website.

But that’s just scratching the surface. Even if Google does index all of your site’s content, that doesn’t mean your job is done.

To make your site technically SEO-friendly, you need secure, mobile-friendly, and fast-loading pages. It involves ensuring there’s no duplicate content and addressing various other factors for full optimization.

That’s not to say that your technical SEO has to be perfect to rank. It doesn’t.

But the more informal you make it for Google to contact your content, the better chance you have to rank.

If your web pages take too long to load, people might get annoyed and exit your site. This behavior suggests that your website isn’t providing a good user experience.

Consequently, Google might not place your site high in its rankings.

Understanding Crawling:

The first step in optimizing your site for technical SEO is making sure search engines can successfully crawl it.

Crawling is an important component of how search engines work.

Crawling occurs when search engines explore links on pages they already know to find new pages they haven’t encountered yet.

If you want your pages to show up in search results, you first need to ensure that they are available to search engines.

Create SEO-Friendly Site Architecture:

Site architecture, also called site structure, is the way pages are linked together within your site.

An effective site structure categorizes pages in a way that helps crawlers find your website content quickly and easily.

So when structuring your site, ensure all the pages are just a few clicks away from your homepage.

In the website structure shown, all the pages are arranged in a clear and organized order.

The home pages link to category pages. And then, category pages link to different subpages on the site.

This structure also reduces the number of orphan pages.

Leave pages are pages with no internal links directing to them, making it difficult or sometimes impossible for crawlers and users to find those pages.

Submit your sitemaps to Google:

Using sitemaps can help Google find your web pages.

A sitemap is like a special file, usually in XML format, that lists the important pages on your website. It helps search engines understand what pages you have and where they can locate them.

Which is especially important if your site contains a lot of pages. Or if they’re not well linked together.

Your sitemap is usually located at one of these two URLs.

 (yoursite.com/sitemap.xml)

(yoursite.com/sitemap-index.xml)

Once you have located your sitemap, submit it to Google via GSC (Google Search Console).

If you don’t already have GSC set up, read this guide to activate it for your site.

To submit your sitemap to Google, go to GSC and click “indexing” on “sitemaps” from the sidebar.

Then paste your sitemap URL in the blank and hit “submit”.

After Google is done processing your sitemap, you should see a confirmation message like this:

Why should you optimize your site technically?

Google and other search engines want to present their users with the best possible results for their queries.

Therefore, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages based on many factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads.

Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, among others, structure data does.

So, by improving technical aspects, you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If you do this well, you might be satisfied with higher rankings.

Similarly, if significant technical issues arise on your site, it can have consequences. You might accidentally prevent search engines from properly scanning your site by adding a trailing slash in the wrong spot in your robots.txt file.

What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?

A well-constructed website is quick for users to navigate and candid for search engine bots to traverse. An effective technical context supports search engines in understanding a site’s purpose, preventing issues such as duplicate content.

Moreover, it ensures that visitors and search engines are not directed to dead links, avoiding exasperating dead ends. Let’s briefly explore key aspects of a technically optimized website.

It’s fast

It’s crawlable for search engines.

It doesn’t have many dead links.

It doesn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content.

It’s secure                                                                                        

Plus, it has structured detail

Plus, it has an XML sitemap.

For an international website, use hreflang to indicate language and regional targeting.

Technical SEO best practices:

Creating an SEO-friendly site structure and acquiescing your sitemap to Google should get your pages crawled and indexed.

But if you want your website to be fully optimized for technical SEO, consider these supplementary best practices.

Use HTTPS:

HTTPS is a secure version of HTTPS.

It helps protect searching user information, like passwords and credit card details, from being cooperated.

And it’s been a ranking signal since 2014.

You can check whether your site is HTTPS by simply visiting it.

Just look for the “Lock” icon in the address bar to confirm.

If you see the “Not Secure” warning, you’re not using HTTPS.

In this case, you need to install an SSL certificate.

An SSL certificate confirms the identity of the website. and creates a secure connection when users are editing it.

You can get an SSL certificate for free from Let’s Encrypt.

Make sure only one version of your website is accessible to users and crawlers.

Users and crawlers should only be able to contact one of these two versions of your site:https://www.yourwebsite.com

Having both versions available creates duplicate content issues.

And it reduces the success of your backlink profile; some websites may link to the “www” version, while others link to the “non-www” version.

This can undesirably affect your performance on Google.

So only use one version of your website. and send the other version to your main website.

Improve your page speed.

Page speed is a ranking factor both on mobile and desktop.

So make sure your site loads as fast as possible.

You can use Google’s page speed insights tool to check your website’s current speed.

It gives you a performance score from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the better.

Confirm your website is mobile-friendly.

Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means that it looks at mobile versions of webpages to index and rank content.

So make sure your website is compatible with mobile devices.

To check if that’s the case for your site, head over to the “mobile usability” report in the Google search console.

The report shows you the number of pages that affect mobile usability.

along with specific issues.

If you don’t have a Google search console, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.