Technical SEO
Technical SEO is improving the software code of a website to increase its ranking in search engines. The ultimate goal is to make the site faster and more search engine friendly. Technical SEO focuses on improving elements of your website to get higher search engine rankings.
Why should you optimise your website from a technical point of view?
Search engines want to provide their users with the best results for their queries. Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages based on many factors: page load speed, lack of errors, meta data, structured data, headings. By improving the technical aspects, you help search engines better understand the structure of your site and index your content. As a result, your site will be rewarded with higher rankings.
A site that has serious technical errors will rank poorly in search and may even be completely eliminated from the search engine.
But you shouldn’t think that technical SEO is the only thing you need to succeed. A website needs to be fast, clear, and easy to navigate.
What is a technically optimised website?
A technically optimised website is characterised by fast performance, no duplicate content and no broken links, and is accessible to search engine robots. Search engines need to understand the structure of the site and what the site is about. Next we will look at some important characteristics of a technically optimised website.
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Web pages should load quickly. If your site is slow, visitors may not wait for the site to fully load or start interacting with a site where all the scripts have not fully loaded, they will think the site is faulty and close it, and you will lose customers.
Google knows that slow web pages create a bad impression on users. So a slow web page ends up lower in the search results than its faster counterpart from another site. As of 2021, Page experience (the speed at which a web page loads) has officially become one of Google’s ranking factors. Therefore, it is very important to have pages that load fast enough.
The site is available to search engines
Search engines use robots to click on your website links, and crawl the content on your site. Internal re-linking gives the robots insight into what content on your site is most important.
But, you can also prevent robots from viewing certain content or clicking on links on a particular page if you don’t want them to go there.
Robots.txt file
You can give robots guidelines for your website with a robots.txt file. This is a powerful tool that should be handled with care. A small mistake can prevent robots from exploring certain sectors of your site. Often people block the CSS and JS files of their site in the robots.txt file and search engines cannot determine the quality of your site.
No 404 errors
Slow sites create problems for users. But if the user navigating through the pages of your site falls on a non-existent page, the credibility of your site is undermined finally.
Search engines also react badly to such pages with errors. And, rest assured robots will find even those pages with errors about which you did not suspect, which are hidden from the eyes of ordinary users, because robots work with the code of the site, not with how it looks on the screen.
Unfortunately, most sites have 404 error pages because the site is made by humans and humans can make mistakes. Fortunately there are programs that mimic the work of search engine robots and can tell you where on your site there are pages that don’t work.
No duplicate content
It is difficult for search engines to understand the structure of the site if several pages on your site with different URLs will have the same content. It doesn’t matter to the visitor, but the search engine will see the same content on different URLs. How does a search engine understand which of these pages to show in a search and which not to show? As a result, they may downgrade all pages with the same content.
Website security
You need to make your website secure for users to guarantee privacy is a basic requirement these days. One of the most important things is to implement HTTPS. To implement HTTPS on your website, you will need an SSL certificate. HTTPS ensures that no one can intercept the data travelling between the browser and the website.
Having structured data
With structured data you can tell search engines what services you provide, create a catalogue of products with sections and subsections, provide detailed information about these products, their prices, and user ratings.
Structured data will allow your content to qualify for special representation in search results: with stars, price or details that stand out in search results.
There is a specific format (described on Schema.org) in which you must provide this information so that search engines can easily find and understand it.
Having an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a listing of all the pages on your website. With a sitemap, you ensure that search engines don’t miss any important pages on your site. XML sitemap besides page addresses can include images and last modified date for each page.
hreflang for international sites
If your site targets multiple countries, search engines need to help understand which countries or languages your site targets and then they can show a site relevant to their region in the search results.
With Hreflang tags, you can identify which country each page is for. This also solves the possible problem of duplicate content: if your pages for the US and UK have the same content, Google will realise that they are written for different regions.