What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the foundation of a great search strategy. You can have all of the links and great content, but if your technical architecture is not good, you have no chance of ranking.

Technical SEO is the backbone of your website. It’s a behind the scene structure of content which needs to be correctly crawled by search engine bots.

Technical SEO is an important step in the whole SEO process. Technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content on your website. The goal of technical SEO is to optimize the techie parts of your website like infrastructure.

The best thing about technical SEO is that once you have fixed potential issues on your website, you won’t have to deal with them again.

Google heavily relies on the technical organization of your website, how you optimize single pages, link building structure we well as the quality of single page content.

Before search engine bots retrieve your pages based on the user’s search query, it first runs the webpage code and assesses its content to understand the structure of the page.

The search engine bots collect entire information during the rendering process. It’s then used to rank the quality and value of your webpage content against competitors and people searching.

Highly optimized websites and quality content are ranked higher on the first page of SERPs. Higher rankings = higher traffic, which translates to better ROI.

The main pillars of SEO are:-

# On-Page SEO – It looks at the content within your website and you can make it more relevant to user’s searching.

# Off-Page SEO – It’s also known as link building. It’s the process of getting mentions (links) from other websites to increase your website trust during the search ranking process.

# Technical SEO – It completes the trio. Without technical stuff, search engines can’t access your website at all which eliminates your chances of ranking.

Why Do You Need Technical SEO Audit?

Technical SEO is the foundation of Search Engine Optimization. It’s an essential requirement for a website to rank in organic search.

You can publish the best content in your industry, but if Google can’t crawl and index it, it’s not going to rank.

Technical SEO is the most overlooked aspect of SEO. Most of the issues related to ranking in the search engines are technical as:-

#Prior to a website redesign or migration to a new CMS platform

# a sharp drop in SEO web traffic or poor ranking

# developing an SEO strategy

# search engine penalty

Logical Structure for SEO Purpose –

The logical structure of website health is divided into 3 categories (Crawling, Indexing, Ranking) with details as:-

# Crawling – The first thing is to make sure that all of our targeted pages should be crawled by search engines.

##### Good Site Structure – Your important pages should be easy to find within a few clicks of the homepage. It can work well for a couple of reasons:

1. your homepage is the most linked to and then it can flow a lot of PageRank throughout the rest of the website,

2. Users will be able to find your key pages quickly which increase the probability for them to find out what they want and converting into customers.

# Indexing – It’ time to monitor who your pages are actually being indexed and actively monitor for errors.

##### Caching – You should check the cached version and compare it to the actual version. The purpose of behind this is to:

1. check that a page is being cached regularly,

2. checking that the cache contains all your content.

# Ranking – You should find out how many pages are getting traffic. It’ll probably be your homepage, categories, products, and content pages.

You should look at the number of URLs in your sitemap. If you want more accurate data, then you can export the list of URLs from analytics into a CSV.

Tools for Technical SEO Audit –

You can choose the technical SEO audit tools depending on your website needs. You should find out errors in identifying and fixing to understand technical approach:-

# Google Search Console – It’s one of the best free tools that will help you to see how well your website technical SEO is performing.

It helps you monitor your position in Google search results. You can use it to:-

• Receive important messages or warnings about your website health
• Find out how many pages have been indexed
• Find out how many links are pointing to your website
• Troubleshoot crawling and indexing issues on your website
• Detailed information on your website keywords and ranking within the Google search results

# Screaming Frog – It’s a crawler that crawls websites’ URLs like search engines. It can identify common errors and issues, and fetch key onsite elements in order to analyze On-page SEO.

This tool is with a free version up to 500 pages. It helps you to analyze your website health with technical analysis.

It can find broken links, audit redirects, analyze page titles and Metadata, discover duplicate content, review robots, generate XML sitemaps, many more.

# SEMrush Site Audit – It’s an SEO site audit tool that crawls a domain from the web browser. It can create an online report and find out potential issues. It shows the technical SEO report in easy to read format for offline analysis and reporting.

# GTmetrix – It’s a free online tool that checks over a webpage and suggested areas that can be improved to speed up page load times.

It’s recommended for On-Page SEO updates and other server-level site speed changes that have a real impact on your site. This tool is fit for CMS website (e.g. WordPress).

#11 Best Practices For Technical SEO –

There are few steps put together to ensure the best SEO results:-

# Page Speed – Google clarifies that page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches. Google webmaster shows how the performance of a page affects a user’s experience. It can consider a variety of metrics to effectively optimize.

You should evaluate the different elements that make up your website to see which ones need improvements like the Minification of your CSS/JavaScript files and Image compression.

# Site Navigation – If someone new to your website can’t navigate it with ease, two things will happen.

First – you’re losing potential customers.

Second – search engine bots have difficulty in crawling your website.

Web crawlers are similar to human beings. If they can’t figure out which way to go, they will leave without indexing all the good content.

It means your website wouldn’t show up in search queries. You make requests to a server to access webpages when navigating through the internet. But when something goes wrong, you’ll be greeted with a page error code.

Each code has a different meaning and here’s a quick breakdown of the different status codes:-

• • 1xx (Informational) – The server received and understood your request, but it’s still processing it.
  • 2xx (Successful) – The request was successfully accepted and the internet browser received the expected response.
  • 3xx (Redirection) – The server received your request, but you’ve been redirected to another place.
  • 4xx (Client Error) – The request can’t be completed because of an error on the website.
  • 5xx (Server Error) – The request was valid, but the server is unable to complete it.

# Create a Sitemap.xml – A sitemap is a file that contains information about the pages and content on your website. Sitemaps are used to navigate your website which helps human users and search engine bots.

An XML sitemap is a list of pages (URLs) in your website. It acts as a drawing by showing the number of pages and how to reach there.

Search engines use it as a map to navigate around your website. When you submit an XML sitemap to Google, you’re calling for bots to crawl your website.

Your website content will show up in search results after it indexed by the search engine bots. If crawling is difficult or complicated, then web-crawlers will stop and move on to another website during indexing.

You have to create a sitemap. It’s a file wherein you list all of your website’s pages to identify its organization and content to search engines.

Web-crawlers can leverage this data to crawl your website more smartly. So, creating a sitemap.xml is very simple that offers big rewards.

# Use Robots.txt – A robots.txt file is optimized in combination with the sitemap. It instructs bots that crawl your website. This function tells crawlers how to read your website.

The search engine bots look at the robots.txt file when a webpage crawls. If it’s not utilized correctly, robots.txt files can hurt ranking in search engines.

Here are some of the most common robots.txt instructions:-

• • Disallow – It tells a user-agent not to crawl a particular URL.
  • Allow – It’s only applicable to Googlebot. It allows pages or subfolders to be crawled, even if the parent page is disallowed.
  • Crawl-delay – It specifies how many seconds a bot must wait before crawling a page.

# Implement Structured Data – It basically tells what exactly is going on your blog/page in general. It shows who is owner, date of publishing, and organization.

It’s a secret language that can be used to speak with search engine bots more effectively. It’s called structured data and it’s a type of content markup.

It’s a language in your website’s HTML code that gives a detailed description of webpages content to search engine bots.

The schema.org produced the structured data that gives any website a serious boost if it contains any of the following types of content:-

• • Creative works including books, movies, music, TV series
  • Recipes
  • Product and offers
  • Places like local business or restaurants chain
  • Organizations
  • Events
  • Video or Audio content
  • Health or Medical topics
  • Reviews

# Header1 Tags (H1) – If your H1 tags aren’t effective, your content may never be seen. Each page on your website should have an H1 tag with your target keywords.

It’s an important element to improve visibility and webpage ranking for your website. The formatting of an H1 and its placement on the page has a greater impact on user experience.

# Alt Tags – Alt tags (Alt attributes) is about your website’s technical SEO image. It can effectively explain to the search engine bots the meaning or purpose of the images on webpages.

If the description of images is relevant to the surrounding content, it’ll come up in the search engine results page. You can give extra information about the images on your website results to bots that can boost your search rankings.

# Canonicalization – Canonical URLs tell a search engine which is the best URL to index as the master source for the content of webpages.

All the URLs below would be considered the same:-

• • www.abigidea.in
  • abigidea.in/
  • www.abigidea.in/index.html
  • abigidea.in/home.asp

But each page is technically different and each URL could return content. Search engines read the same content as duplicate content and your website ranking can drop.

The canonical tag prevents and direct search engines to use the one URL.

# Mobile-Friendly – It means a website can be easily read and accessed on mobile devices. Google’s mobile-first index is more important and it’s one of the best technical SEO to take advantage of.

It’s is one of the factors Google uses to determine rankings. Your site speed affects conversation rates. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly tool to find out if your website is optimized for mobile.

Most of the visitors expect a load time of 3 seconds. Visitors generally leave a website that takes more than 10 seconds to load. Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) in technical SEO is a great opportunity that no one can afford to ignore.

Here are some way to make sure your website is ready to:-

• • Create a separate mobile version of your website that will automatically be used for cell phones and tablets.
  • If you don’t have a mobile website, make sure your website is responsive and adjusts to the screen size of the device.
  • Use large fonts so that users won’t have to zoom in to see the words.
  • Try using accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) or progressive web apps (PWAs) for better compatibility.

# Broken Links – Nothing can hurt your website’s reputation like broken links. It’ll negatively impact your website’s technical SEO and all your efforts to rank higher on search engines will go to waste.

Once you’ve gathered a list of all the broken links on your website, you can fix them.

There are 2 basic ways to fix the broken links: 1. complete the missing information in the URL to make sure the links work properly, 2. by redirecting the broken links to actual pages on your website.

There are many reasons: e.g. need a new web design and migration is the big problem. Then your website changes can result in important pages turning to 404 errors. These broken links need to be found and fixed immediately.

# SSL Certificate (HTTPS) – This certificate is a type of security technology that allows for encrypted communication between a web server and a web browser.

It helps to protect sensitive information including, phone numbers, email addresses, and passwords from hackers. It’s a security issue and a ranking factor.

There are multiple hosting providers that also offer free Security Socket Layer (SSL) certificates. Google has made this a necessity now by warning users that a website is not secure (it’s not https).

A URL that has a secure application protocol will read HTTPS where the s stands for secure. Search engines prioritize websites that have been SSL certificates.

It puts lots of users off and reason to leave the website without exploring. You can secure your website by doing a few things:-

• • to make the https a canonical version for websites that are switching over, so as not to confuse the search engines.
  • all elements of your website have been redirected to the https version so that it’ll appear the same
  • Once you’ve migrated to https run a test on the website to check for any errors or broken links.

Conclusion – It’s one of those things that can’t be overlooked. The more you learn about technical SEO of your website code environment, you’ll get to know more about your website functionality. Technical SEO isn’t scary as it sounds, and the sooner you tackle the problems, the faster you’ll collect the rewards from the search engines.