Technical SEO is the process of improving the technical aspect of your website to enhance its page ranking on search engines. This involves editing the code, structure, and other parts of a website. This differentiates it from on-page SEO, focusing on content and keywords, and off-page SEO, focusing on external links and reputation.
There are different things that one should look into improving when doing technical SEO for a website:
Website Speed
Improving your website’s speed involves optimising images, leveraging browser caching, reducing server response times, and simplifying CSS and JavaScript files. Your website must load fast as 40% of consumers will usually leave a website if it hasn’t loaded after 3 seconds. By improving your page load speed you can retain visitors and improve your search engine ranking. You can check your mobile and desktop load speed on pages such as GT Metrics and PageSpeed.
Mobile-Friendliness
As search engines prioritise mobile-first indexing, your website must be optimised for mobile devices. You should ensure your website has a responsive design, menus that work properly on different screen sizes, and a good mobile load time. While your website could have a good load speed on a desktop, your mobile version could have other elements which affect load speed, this is why it is important to check the load speed of both mobile and desktop versions.
Indexing and Crawling
Effective indexing and crawling are foundational to SEO. Crawling is the process in which search engine bots discover new content and updated content online. Indexing refers to the storage, organization and analysis of your content and connection between pages. It is important to employ robots.txt files to manage crawler access, use XML sitemaps to guide search engines through your site’s content, and ensure that URL parameters facilitate search engine understanding.
Site Architecture
Develop a coherent site architecture that supports both user navigation and search engine discovery. This involves strategic use of keyword-rich URLs, logical hierarchy in site structure, and clear, consistent navigation paths.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a code added to your pages which helps search engines understand what your page is about and other details such as language. The addition of this code can boost your visibility in search results by helping search engines interpret the context of your content. Detailed implementations can include marking up individual products, FAQs, and events to trigger rich results that capture user attention in SERPs.
HTTPS Security
It is important that you migrate any HTTP to HTTPS as the latter is the same as HTTP but with security and encryption, while this is positive for your SEO, it is even more important for your page security as it can protect you and your traffic from a variety of cyber attacks.
Canonicalisation
Canonical tags are added to the page’s source code to indicate to search engines that a master copy of the page it is viewing exists. You should use canonical tags to manage duplicate content, directing search engines to consider one version of a page as the authoritative source, this way you avoid your pages competing with each other for SEO ranking.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Implementing a CDN can drastically reduce load times by storing copies of your site on multiple, geographically diverse servers. This speeds up access to your website for users around the world.
Advanced JavaScript Handling
Since search engines can struggle with complex JavaScript, ensure that your site’s dynamic content is fully accessible and indexable. This might involve pre-rendering or server-side rendering for crucial content. You should also check once in a while that all JavaScript is working properly and not slowing down your website.
Why Technical SEO is Essential:
- Elevates Website Performance: A technically optimised site loads faster, handles user interactions more efficiently, and is more reliable.
- Boosts Search Engine Visibility: Addressing technical flaws helps align your site with the criteria search engines use to rank pages, enhancing search engine ranking and traffic.
- Improves User Engagement: Fast, easy-to-navigate, and secure websites promote a positive user experience, encouraging visitors to stay longer and interact more with your content, which can lead to higher conversion rates.
- Increases Content Reachability: Ensuring that all content is accessible and indexable by search engines expands your audience reach, making your site more effective at attracting and engaging users.
- Provides a Competitive Edge: In a competitive market, a well-optimised website stands out and performs better in search results, drawing more traffic and potential business than its less-optimised counterparts.
By addressing these technical SEO elements, you can enhance not only your site’s structure and user experience but also its overall search engine performance, ensuring it meets the latest standards for content visibility and security. At RankFresh we have over 20 years of experience with SEO, if you would like to learn more about Technical SEO or have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.
