Technical SEO is often left backstage in comparison to content marketing. If your technical SEO is not implemented well, your good quality content might not reach its true potential. The best thing about technical SEO is that once you a full audit of your website, you will not need to repeat the process again.
Let’s recap; What is SEO?
SEO is the procedure of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines. SEO specialists optimize websites to ensure the following:
- Encouraging search engine crawlers to understand the website’s context.
- Search engines can access and index websites easily.
- To ensure content contains appropriate keywords and appeals to its audience.
- The three main pillars of SEO are properly utilized and implemented. The three pillars are Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO is the process of making your content more relevant to what the user is searching for; off-page SEO is the process of link building. It consists of getting links from other sites to increase search engine confidence when ranking your website.
So, what is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of correctly optimizing your website to prepare it for the crawling and indexing phase. Technical SEO will help search engines to access websites more easily. It is called technical because the process does not have anything to do with the actual content of the site; instead, it focuses on optimizing the infrastructure of a website.
Let’s go through some best practices to follow when conducting technical SEO:
- Optimize your Robots.txt: Robots.txt is a text file that exists in the root directory of your website. It gives instructions to search engines on which pages of your site must be crawled and indexed.
- Optimize Your URL Structure: Make sure to optimize your URL site’s URL structure by using lowercase characters, keywords and avoid unnecessary characters or words.
- Optimize visuals: Make sure your images sharp by adjusting their sizes correctly. However, limit the size to the necessary minimum because large pictures are very heavy and can strongly disturb your loading time.
- Adjust Your Site’s Navigation and Website Structure: A website’s structure is important for various reasons – it helps search engines understand how to index pages on your site. For Google, your site’s overall structure is very important.
- Check your canonical URL: Every page of your website must have a canonical URL. It is defined by adding the tag <link rel=”canonical” href=”yourpageurl”>, in the <head> of your posts and pages. It’s a simple way to tell Google what pages to index.
- Optimize Your 404 Page: A 404 page is where your users get relocated when the URL they visit on your site does not exist, was changed, deleted, or mistyped. It must be a friendly redirection to a different page and an explanation of why your site is not working.
- Use Structured Data: Structured data is the code that you add to your website that is visible to Google crawlers to understand the context of your site. It helps websites understand the content of your website better.
- Website Speed (The Faster, the Better): Another crucial point in SEO is improving your site’s speed to rank higher in SERPs. Google regularly reminds us of the importance of speed in their SEO recommendations.
- Add SSL to Make Your Website HTTPS: Internet security is important; HTTPS is a ranking signal that helps you establish trust with users. By installing an SSL on your server, your website can be accessed by HTTPS, not HTTP. This ensures that any information transferred between your site and the server is encrypted.
- Mobile-friendliness: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. If your site cannot be accessed via mobile, then is it ready for the modern world?
Conclusion
Technical SEO consists of numerous important checks to optimize your site, as well as help search engines crawl and index your web. It’s important to cover the technical aspect of SEO since your website will not reach its full potential without full optimization.
