Technical SEO Best Practices

While on-page SEO and link-building SEO get all of the attention in the search engine optimization world, technical SEO is often neglected. Yet, by fixing a few technical issues, your website could see a big boost in SERPs. In this article, you will have the chance to learn about crawling, indexing, structured data, canonicalization, and more. Moreover, you’ll get to know what technical SEO is, how it affects your website’s performance, and how it can improve your website.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves making changes to your website to improve its indexability, crawlability, and ranking. For the most part, the process begins with a detailed analysis of the website’s log files. These files contain a wealth of information, including requests from search engines and human visitors. With the right technical SEO strategies, these files can help you resolve a number of bugs, errors, and hacks. Here are a few technical SEO best practices.

Why technical SEO is important?

Technical SEO is important for several reasons:

• Improved website crawlability and indexing: By optimizing a website’s technical elements, such as its structure, code, and metadata, technical SEO helps search engine crawlers to more easily and efficiently crawl and index a website’s pages, leading to better search engine visibility.
• Improved user experience: Technical SEO can help to improve website speed and performance, website navigation, and website structure, resulting in a better user experience and higher user engagement.
• Better search engine rankings: By improving website crawlability and indexing, technical SEO can help to improve a website’s search engine rankings, leading to more organic search traffic and potential customers.
• Increased website accessibility: Technical SEO can improve website accessibility for users with disabilities, such as by ensuring that the website is mobile-friendly and that images have appropriate alt text.
• Protection against search engine penalties: Technical SEO can help to prevent common technical issues, such as duplicate content, broken links, and page errors, which can result in search engine penalties and lower search engine rankings.

Overall, technical SEO is an essential part of any comprehensive SEO strategy, as it helps to ensure that a website is both user-friendly and search engine-friendly. By improving website crawlability, indexing, and search engine rankings, technical SEO can help businesses to drive more traffic, generate more leads, and ultimately, increase revenue.

How to do Technical SEO Optimization?

In a world where every second counts, boosting your website’s technical SEO capabilities is crucial for the success of your online marketing strategy. Performing full-scale technical SEO can help you improve the usability of your website and boost its rankings. As part of your SEO strategy, you should plan for every step in the process to avoid making common mistakes. Let’s look at the recommended practices to follow now that it is obvious what technical SEO is. You can conduct your own technical SEO audit using the list below.

Setting the Primary Website Address

The domain that appears in the address bar when someone visits your website is its principal domain. In general, the URLs have http headers and www at the beginning part. But, some individuals or companies can decide have their URL without www. So, by using Google Tools such as Google Search Console, you can set the primary website address and let Google to index website’s pages the way it’s determined. This set up is the first thing that needs to be when doing Technical SEO optimization.

Optimize URL Structure

Whether it’s part of technical SEO or not, it’s important to build a website that the visitor can easily understand and navigate. If the urls are not clear, contains many meaningless signs, the users won’t be able to use the site and it’s also a negative signal to Google.

Crawling of the Website

Firstly, you should understand that Google has limited resources to crawl every website. Even if you have a massive website, it will only have a limited amount of time to crawl it. Thus, you should consider creating a crawl budget to make the most of Google’s limited resources. Crawling your site is important in maximizing the amount of time Google will spend crawling it. In addition, you should ensure that the pages on your website are crawlable.

Optimize Robots.txt

In the root directory of your website, there is a text file called robots.txt that tells search engines which pages on your site they can crawl and add to their index. This file’s format is quite straightforward, and you typically don’t need to make any changes to it. However, it’s crucial to examine and make sure there aren’t any erroneous blockings that prevent search engine crawlers from scanning your website.

Add SSL to Make Your Website HTTPS

Security is the newest Internet trend and an important part of Technical SEO check. A well-known ranking signal and supplementary method of building user trust is HTTPS.

When you add an SSL to your server, https rather than http can be used to access your website. This means that any data (including usernames, passwords, and personal information) sent between your website and server is encrypted.

If SSL is not already installed on your website, the first step is to get in touch with your hosting company and ask them to enable SSL for your account. After that, you must go through a migration process to activate SSL on your website without jeopardizing your search engine results.

Website Speed

The speed of a website is an important ranking factor. No one likes to wait a lot for a website to load. If your site is slow to load, you’re likely to lose visitors, which will have a negative impact on your business. It’s also another important factor to improve in order to rank higher in search engines
Faster pages offer a better user experience, and Google will reward you with a higher page rank if your content loads faster.  Two measures of page speed are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID). For the best performance, LCFP should occur within 2.5 seconds. The FID, or First Input Delay, measures interactivity, and a page should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
Website speed can be improved by optimizing images, minify the CSS files and Javascript.

Mobile Friendliness

One of the important things that is check while doing technical seo optimization is checking the mobile friendliness. An automatically adjusting website design known as “responsive” makes it simple to access and read on any device.
Google is upfront about the fact that its algorithms give having a responsive site a very high ranking signal.

Accelerated Mobile Pages ( AMP)

AMP is another Google-backed initiative. This technology uses special code to distribute content faster on mobile devices. It’s an essential Technical SEO Factor for 2023. AMP-compliant versions of your website will load fast on mobile computers. They’ll be optimized for text, photographs, and navigation, while removing unnecessary scripts, comments, types, and images. By optimizing your site code for AMP during technical seo optimization, you’ll be giving your website a better user experience while improving your rankings and boosting your website’s rankings.

Pagination

Pagination is an essential part of technical SEO for news sites, blogs, forum websites, and ecommerce websites. Pagination ensures that users can navigate the content of a website without having to read it all.

Structured Data – Markup Schema

Schema is a type of structured data that helps search engines understand content and display it in a more meaningful way/ One example on how schema works is that book property name can include the author, title, publisher date, illustrator, and more information.

When you implement schema markup, you’ll be adding structured data to your website’s HTML code. Search engines will interpret the data as structured information, and you’ll get a better Knowledge Panel. The Knowledge Panel is a box of additional information that appears on SERP results. A well-structured knowledge graph is a key part of SEO, and using it can boost your organic traffic. The more structured your knowledge graph is, the more informative the Knowledge Panel will be for your visitors.

XML sitemaps

You might be wondering if XML sitemaps are essential for your SEO strategy.? XML sitemaps have two primary purposes: to provide search engines with a detailed list of links to your website and to help them rank it in search results. However, they’re not a 100% effective solution, and some people may find them useless.

A sitemap may not contain all of your pages, but it can provide search engines with a comprehensive list of your entire site. The XML sitemap can also be used to add rich media to your site, like videos and images. In addition, an XML sitemap tag refers to a specific URL. The URL must begin with a protocol, end with a trailing slash, and be less than two thousand five hundred forty-five characters long.

XML sitemaps can help you find problems in your site’s indexation. They allow search engines to determine which pages are relevant to SEO. For example, you can see which pages have errors and which are not. This report will help you find errors, duplicate content, or other problems. By analyzing this report, you can optimize your site for greater ranking. It also allows you to see which pages are getting indexed, and you can make changes to improve your content and website to fix them.

Server headers

The X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP header field. It shows whether a user wants to save information. HTTP headers like this are useful for optimizing server-side redirects and auditing. Google has a great resource on X-Robots-Tags. And the Last-Modified header is like an E-tag. By inspecting this field, you can easily determine which version of a resource has the most recent content.

Conclusion

If you are struggling with your website’s ranking, you should consider learning more about technical SEO. This type of SEO involves work outside of your content that helps the search engines understand your site’s design and quality. Search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated and complicated over the years, and there are many different areas to focus on to ensure your site gets the best rankings possible.