Technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery of simplicity.
Technical SEO is a very important step in the whole SEO process. If there are problems with your technical SEO then it is likely that your SEO efforts will not generate the expected results. It is thus crucial to make sure that you understand what is technical SEO and how to get it right. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
Saletancy has deep expertise in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Display Banner Ads, Digital Branding, Creative Design, Social Media Marketing, Online Reputation Management, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Influencers marketing.
The good news is that after you do a technical SEO audit of your website and fix any potential problems, you won’t have to deal with it again. Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more. Now that you’ve crafted valuable content on the foundation of solid keyword research, it’s important to make sure it’s not only readable by humans, but by search engines too! On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is the practice of optimizing web page content for search engines and users. Common on-page SEO practices include optimizing title tags, content, internal links and URLs. This is different from off-page SEO, which is optimizing for signals that happen off of your website (for example, backlinks).
You don’t need to have a deep technical understanding of these concepts, but it is important to grasp what these technical assets do so that you can speak intelligently about them with developers. Speaking your developers’ language is important because you'll probably need them to carry out some of your optimizations. They're unlikely to prioritize your asks if they can’t understand your request or see its importance. When you establish credibility and trust with your devs, you can begin to tear away the red tape that often blocks crucial work from getting done.
How a website becomes the best?
Highly functional sites reach their entire SEO potential based on the keyword and market research optimization, E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), backlinks profiling, content relevance, and so on. The most important and common factor in the above order is technical SEO.
Technical SEO may look like an underrated topic in SEO, but your website will not rank in search results even with amazing contents if your SEO efforts are technically weak. Only 51% of online web traffic reaches websites via organic search. A successful strategy is built via a strong technical SEO that helps you to maximize your site crawlability, usability, and rankings.
Technical SEO is the cornerstone of a search engine optimization strategy as it can deliver high-performance websites. In simple words, it is the process of optimizing websites for crawling and indexing the web pages effectively. The faster the response time of your websites, the better you will make valuable impressions on the search engines. Technical SEO helps to access and interpret your website that can improve search visibility, generate more leads, and drive conversions. Technical SEO makes web crawlers go through the web pages and reverse the URL structure of the website.
Why is it important?
With technical SEO, you can help search engines index, crawl, interpret, and access your websites with the page structure and base code. The major objective of performing a technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website.
The essential elements of a technical SEO are:
1) Site Architecture – Proper website architecture is the centerpiece of XML sitemaps and breadcrumbs that guides search engine crawlers to index your pages. Good site architecture has a few basic aspects:
a) Sitemap – A sitemap is used to guide crawlers through the site structure and can be either XML or HTML. It is placed in the footer of a website to help users identify particular pages.
b) Robots.txt – It is a standard technical SEO tool that can make or break a website. It enables search crawlers to skip the pages by adding directions and plays a vital role in the crawl functionalities of a website.
c) Breadcrumbs – It is a navigation tool that can show current page hierarchy and helps users to align themselves on websites.
2) Website speed – According to a study, “53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that loads longer than three seconds”. The websites should have a quick loading time that helps you to boost your rankings in the search engine result pages (SERP).
3) Mobile-friendliness – Mobile-friendly designs look great and are understandable on small screens. Mobile browsing is facing continuous growth in popularity as there is a drastic rise in people using internet surfing on their devices.
Characteristics of a technically optimized website:
Technical SEO comprises of the following features:
- crawlability
- indexability
- accessibility
- rankability
Some of the benefits of performing technical SEO on websites are:
- Technical SEO offers faster web page loading
- Technical SEO examines backlinks to boost rankings and uses internal linking structures to promote web pages
- It improves website positions with semantic optimization and prevents duplicate contents
- Technical SEO makes easy crawling for search engine robots
- A website with strong technical SEO will not have dead links
- A technical website is secure and contains structured data
- Technical SEO can provide XML sitemaps for easy access
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit is a process performed to check the technical aspects of a website’s SEO. Generally, it checks the health of a website and bugs that need to be fixed.
The following technical SEO audit helps to enhance the user experience of a website and rank better in Google search engine results page.
1) Begin with a crawl – Use tools like SEMrush, DeepCrawl, or Spyfu to start with the crawling of your website. It helps to find errors such as poor images, bad keywords, page title issues, and broken links. The crawlers also help in identifying indexation restrictions, duplicate content, unlinked pages, and more.
2) Create a sitemap – A sitemap is highly important to discover new pages and understand the structure of the website. Sitemaps should be registered in Google Search Console with clean, concise, and up-to-date content.
3) Inspect your website browsability versions – Make sure to check that only one of the versions of your website is browseable.
4) Conduct on-page SEO checks – The key criteria that Google evaluates in their rankings are page titles and title tags, Meta descriptions, and keywords.
5) Manage links and test site speed – Check the internal and external links for a logical hierarchy in your website. If your website takes 5 seconds to load, the probability of your customer bounce increases by 90%. Hence, it is very essential to check for your website speed and performance against other websites.
6) Check for HTTPS content – “70% of the Google search results on the 1st page are HTTPS.” The common HTTPS issues such as mixed content, links, redirects, and canonicals should be checked in the technical SEO audit.
7) Leverage analytics to compare site metrics – Analytics service is used to report live metric data. Google Analytics helps to check your bounce rate as well as compare metrics with the MozBar.
8) Perform a backlink audit – Backlinks are critical for the success of your website. Backlink audits help you to identify the areas for high-value links, check the number of backlinks of your competitors, and check out the keywords of competitors.
9) Re-crawl the website – Once the issues identified in the technical SEO audit are fixed, Google will re-crawl the website if requested.
CONCLUSION
An efficient technical SEO is critical for the success of an SEO strategy. The internal linking and website loads should be done perfectly to obtain a technically optimized website. The technical parameters should be tested frequently for errors and misconceptions so that they can be spotted and rectified quickly.