What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing your website’s technical aspects to make it search engine-friendly. It involves ensuring that search engines can crawl, index, and understand your website’s content effectively. By addressing technical issues and implementing best practices, you can improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search results.
If Done right, technical SEO can boost your visibility in search results. Technical SEO has become an essential component of a successful online strategy. By optimizing your website’s technical aspects, you can enhance its visibility in search engine results, improve user experience, and drive more organic traffic.
How Complicated is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO can be complex, especially for those without a strong technical background. It involves understanding various elements like site architecture, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and coding practices. However, with the right knowledge and tools, it’s possible to implement effective technical SEO strategies.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO can make or break your SEO performance. You may ignore this component of SEO completely, however, it is an important factor in driving organic traffic to your website.
Technical SEO is crucial for several reasons:
- Improved Search Engine Visibility: A well-optimized website is more likely to appear higher in search engine results, leading to increased organic traffic.
- Enhanced User Experience: Technical SEO ensures your website loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and is easy to navigate, resulting in a better user experience.
- Stronger Website Foundation: A technically sound website provides a solid foundation for other SEO efforts, such as content marketing and link building.
- Increased Conversions: A website that is easy to find and use is more likely to convert visitors into customers.
Understanding Crawling & How it Works
Crawling happens when search engines follow links on pages they already know about to find pages they haven’t seen before. Search engines use algorithms to crawl websites, following links from one page to another. To ensure your website is crawled effectively, you need to have a clear site structure and internal linking strategy.
Factors Affecting Crawlability:
XML Sitemap: A sitemap provides search engines with a list of important pages on your website, helping them understand your site’s structure and content. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines. You can create a sitemap through sitemap generator (sitemap.xml) and then submit the sitemap to the root directory of your website.
Robots.txt File: Use a robots.txt file to instruct search engine bots which parts of your website to crawl and which to avoid. This can be helpful for preventing search engines from crawling sensitive or low-quality content.
Internal Linking: A well-structured internal linking strategy helps search engines navigate your website efficiently and discover new pages. Link to important pages within your content and ensure that all pages are reachable from your homepage.
Site Architecture: A clear and logical site architecture makes it easier for search engines to understand your website’s content and navigate between pages. Use a hierarchical structure with clear categories and subcategories.
Crawlability Checklist
- Create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines.
- Use a robots.txt file to control crawling.
- Ensure your website has a clear and logical site structure.
- Implement a comprehensive internal linking strategy.
- Regularly update your website’s content to keep it fresh and relevant.
Understanding Indexing & How to Optimise it?
Indexing is the process of storing information about your website’s pages in a search engine’s database. Once indexed, your pages can appear in search results. Once search engines crawl your pages, they then try to analyze and understand the content on those pages.
The simplest way to check whether your pages are indexed is to do “site:” operator search. For Example, if you want to check the indexed pages of 3MMave.com, you will simply type “site:https://3mmaven.com/” in the search bar and the all the indexed pages of the website will appear on SERP.
Factors Affecting Indexing:
- Crawlability: Search engines must be able to crawl your website’s pages before they can be indexed.
- Content Quality: High-quality, relevant content is more likely to be indexed.
- Duplicate Content: Avoid duplicate content on your website, as it can confuse search engines.
- Canonical Tags: Use canonical tags to specify the preferred version of a page if you have multiple versions.
Additional Technical SEO Checklist
- Mobile-Friendliness: Ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices.
- Page Speed: Optimize your website’s loading speed to improve user experience and search engine rankings.
- HTTPS: Use HTTPS to secure your website’s connection and improve user trust.
- Schema Markup: Implement schema markup to provide search engines with additional context about your content.
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): Consider using AMP for faster mobile page loading.
- Security: Protect your website from security threats to maintain user trust and avoid search engine penalties.
Technical SEO Audit Tools
Several tools can help you identify and address technical SEO issues:
- Google Search Console: A free tool provided by Google that offers insights into your website’s search performance and technical issues.
- Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyzes your website’s page speed and provides recommendations for improvement.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A popular tool for crawling your website and identifying technical SEO issues.
- Ahrefs: A comprehensive SEO toolset that includes features for technical SEO analysis.
- Semrush: Another powerful SEO tool that offers technical SEO features.
