In this article, we’ll learn the basics of technical SEO. Becoming an expert in technical SEO requires dedication and experience, but here we’ll explain it in layman’s language. So that you can ask your developer to pay attention when working on the technical aspects of your website.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the term to improve the technical aspects of a website which helps in increasing the ranking of the website’s pages in the search engines. The primary activities performed in technical SEO are making a website faster, easier to crawl, and indexable in search engines. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements like content, design, structure, etc on your website to get higher rankings. Whereas in off-page SEO we expose our website to other channels to generate traffic and ranking.

Why should you do tecnical SEO of your site?

Google as well as other search engines try to present their users with the best possible results for their search query. To achieve this Google’s and other search engine’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on various different factors. Few factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors aid search engine robots know what your webpages are about. By improving the technical aspects of your website you help search engines crawl and understand your website. If you do this well, you might be rewarded with higher rankings and even better leads for your business.

A website should work well – it should be fast, clear, and possess great UI/UX for your users. Luckily, optimizing technical SEO creates a better experience for both users and search engines.

Checklist of a technically optimized website

1. It’s secure – SSL

SSL – Secure Sockets Layer is a security protocol that provides privacy, authentication, and integrity to Internet communications. SSL eventually evolved into TLS – Transport Layer Security.

A website that implements SSL/TLS has “HTTPS” in its URL instead of “HTTP” eg. https://mditech.net instead of http://mditech.net or https://www.mditech.net

So make sure your site is secure by installing an SSL certificate on your website.

2. It doesn’t have duplicate content

Duplicate content can be confusing for users as well as search engine bots; it is used to try to manipulate search rankings or win more traffic but it firebacks and harms your website.

Use the canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) to define the “main” version for duplicate, near-duplicate and similar pages.

3. It is fast

If your website doesn’t load fast, within 3 seconds, there is a 60% chance that the visitor will leave your website. Search engines prefer web pages that load fast which results in getting a higher rank in search engine result pages. Check Page Experience and Page Speed Insights to see how fast your website loads.

4. It has a sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all web pages available on your website. It helps search engines find all the web pages present. If your website’s content is internally linked with each other then it might not be required. However, all websites might not have great structure, and having an XML sitemap would benefit them.

5. It is crawable to search engines

Search engines use web robots or crawlers to crawl your website. You can control which files crawlers may access on your website with a robots.txt file. robots.txt is a text file that follows Robots Exclusion Standard. There might be multiple rules to block or allow access for a given crawler to a specific file path in your website. By default, all files are allowed for crawling.

6. It has structured data

You might have heard about JSON-LD, structured data, and Schema.org. Structured data is a method to describe your website to search engines. To do this you need to create a vocabulary that presents content in a way that search engines can understand. Use the Schema.org vocabulary to markup your pages in ways that can be understood by search engines.

7. It doesn’t have many dead links

A slow-loading website is frustrating. What might be more frustrating than a slow loading page, is landing on a that even doesn’t exist. A non-existing page will throw a 404 HTTP error.

Crawlers tend to find more dead links because they crawl each and every link present in a website and they really don’t like many dead links.

You should detect and fix dead links. Always redirect the URL of a page when you delete or move it.

Conclusion

Hopefully, it would be now clear that what is Technical SEO and what points one should check to do Technical SEO of their website. Contact us in case you are not able to do it yourself.