SEO is the major factor that helps a site to come up in the search results. The concept of SEO or Search Engine Optimization was born from the necessity of improving the page ranking in the Google search results for the targeted keywords. The need was felt by every website owner to have a high page ranking to be listed on the first page of the Google search result for his/her selected keyword or phrase. In order to achieve this, you need to optimize your site for the targeted keywords or phrases. Technical SEO is one of the major parts of SEO. Because it also affects SERP results.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to a process of ensuring a website complies with the technical requirements of the search engines to improve organic page rankings. It involves website optimization, which helps to index and crawl the site with greater efficiency to achieve higher organic rankings. The process of Technical SEO seeks to make your website easily readable and understandable by the search engines as well as user friendly so that it can be easily found when someone performs a search using the keywords or phrases you have chosen for your site. It mainly works in three steps:
1st step – Searching for SEO-related issues in the website.
2nd step – Perform a site audit.
3rd step – Optimize website and solve SEO issues.
Importance of Technical SEO
It helps in search engine crawling and indexing. In brief, technological SEO increases your site’s usability and decreases your site’s technical problems.
- Boost website’s crawling rate.
- Reduces the negative SEO impacts.
- Provides a great overall user experience.
Basic Technical SEO Checklists:
Web Crawl Testing
This is also known as search crawl indexing. It involves checking the crawling rate of a particular website. In order to be ranked on a top-ranking, the website should be analyzed to know if there are any technical difficulties that are preventing it from being indexed and crawled by the search engines. The importance of this is that the site speed should be near to 100 percent according to google page speed. In order to achieve this, you should maintain important optimization techniques.
Broken Links Fix
It is also a great factor in SEO. If you have indexed broken links, they will hamper your site ranking. These links are generated from removed content or mistakenly. As the search engines index these web pages, they count as broken links. This hurts your organic rankings. Even Google can penalize your site for this. This is why you should consider checking your website for broken links regularly. If you found any broken links, try to deindex them from Google Search Console or redirect them to another page.
Remove Duplicate Contents
Duplicate contents are the enemy of SEO. If you built a website with duplicate contents, Google would never bring it to the top search result. Because those contents are already available on the web. To rank a website, you must post unique and plagiarism-free content.
Create Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt File
Sitemap.xml indicates the content structures of your website. It helps Google crawler to crawl your website. This is why it is important to create an XML sitemap and submit it to the google search console. Otherwise, Google search bot won’t understand the structure of your website.
Robots.txt allows Google bot to crawl only those pages are allowed by the site owner. It blocks those pages, which can hamper the website’s ranking. If you don’t have a Robots.txt file for your website, Google bot will crawl the whole website, and if it finds any negative issue, Google will penalize it.
Responsive and User-Friendly Website
It is another factor of Technical SEO. Your website should load very fast. According to many studies, if a site takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, the visitors leave the site. So, you should optimize your site so that it can load very fast. You need a User-friendly website to rank. These things depend on your site’s design. If the site is not well planned and optimized, it won’t be able to give a good experience both on mobile and computer. That’s why Google considers responsive web design and user-friendly websites as key factors for ranking.
Use HTTPS
HTTPS is the short form of HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. It indicates that a website or protocol is safe to browse or use. Basically, Secured Socket Layer (SSL) ensures the security of this protocol. It prevents hackers from collecting information of your website. If you have an eCommerce website, then you must use SSL for the website’s security. Otherwise, customers won’t use your site to purchase products.
Optimize Page Speed
Pagespeed is another factor for Google ranking. Optimized websites are favorites of Google. So you can use a content delivery network (CDN) for better speed. Besides, you should optimize your content sizes, such as images and video size. There are lots of plugins that can help you to reduce the sizes of your files. Cleaning cache and minifying CSS and javascript also can help you to get a better speed.
Free Tools for Technical SEO Audit
Google Webmaster Tool (GWT) – One fantastic and free SEO tool is Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). You can use this to search and fix 404 errors on your website. Besides, you can use this tool to manipulate your Robots.txt file.
Google PageSpeed Insights – Google pagespeed insights analyze your website speed, and it is totally free. There is a score between 0-100. If your website can rank around 80 or higher, then it is working well.
Screaming Frog – Screaming Frog crawls a website like a search engine. It crawls every corner of the website. It’s an outstanding tool for on-page SEO and technical site audit.
These technical SEO guides have provided basic information about technical SEO. However, to improve your website’s ranking and performance, it is important to make use of the correct technical tools and strategies. Because the more you pay attention to the technical issues, the better rank your website will get.