You may have the most engaging content, but if the search engines can’t index it, your efforts are wasted. This is where technical SEO comes in.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO makes a website easier to crawl and focuses on improving the backend elements for higher ranking. A proper technical niche website setup prevents confusion on the SERPs and optimizes the infrastructure of a website. In other words, technical SEO happens behind the scenes and can’t be seen by your front-end visitors.
Technical SEO Factors
These are the main technical SEO factors that help to improve search engine rankings. They include:
Page Speed
The site speed refers to the loading time of a webpage. The faster the better! Site speed affects the bounce rate of your site because no one wants to hang around a slow-loading website. The page loading speed is determined by the page file size, the site’s server, and image compression. Page speed is a critical ranking factor.
Analyze your page speed insights here.
Site Speed
Google always mentions the importance of speed in its SEO recommendations. If the website loading speed is 1-3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%. If the bounce rate is more than 1-10 seconds the bounce rate increases by 123%.
The starting point for speed check is making a few changes to your site infrastructure. To increase the page speed, you should upgrade the server to 64 bits system and optimize the size of the images. Other tips include minimizing the use of plugins, upgrading WordPress and all plugins, and avoiding adding too many scripts to your website.
Site Structure
Site Structure refers to the way you organize your blog’s post content. A good site structure is organized by topics, categories, and unifying themes. The site will also explain how the content is linked, grouped, and presented to the visitors. If visitors can easily find their way around a website, Google can index URLs better. The site architecture not only gives Google good tips about your site, but it is critical for user experience.
Mobile-Friendly
If you want your website to appear high on the SERPS, it should be mobile-friendly. Without a mobile-optimized site, your ranking will suffer. Generally, your desktop site should be the same as a mobile website.
Google ranks the website based on the elements available, including the mobile site. It’s okay to have a lower mobile loading rate (compared to desktop) – this doesn’t mean you should ignore mobile optimization.
Crawlability
A crawler (also called a robot) finds your website, reads it, renders it, and saves the content. Every time a crawler comes to your site, you get a revised version of it. Depending on how Google deems your website, the crawler comes your site around more often, which is great for you.
There are a couple of ways to block crawlers on your site. When this happens, your site won’t turn up. Other things that affect crawlability are internal linking, server errors, looped redirects, sitemaps, and navigation bar structure.
Indexability
After bots crawl to your website, they start indexing pages. Since duplicate content impacts Indexability, you should avoid it. You should ensure all redirects are set up properly. Broken URLs or redirect loops can interfere with your site when being indexed. If your business is not paying attention to indexability, you may never get the top positions on Google.
Use of Headings in the Theme
Don’t include too many H2 and H3 heading tags in various places around your site like the Navigation bar and the Sidebar. Everything outside the body of your blog post should be normal paragraph text. This may mean you have to edit your Theme files.
Few 404 Errors
An optimized 404 page should have the same structure as the navigation menu on your site. It tells web visitors that the page they are looking for is no longer available. Additionally, it’s easy to go back to the previous pages, and users get other alternatives. To understand what your website looks like, you should type a web page that doesn’t exist. Always ensure your page has a few 404 errors.
SSL Installed (HTTPS)
HTTPS is a simple way to establish trust with users, and your website can be accessed with HTTP(s). This also means that the usernames, personal data, and passwords are encrypted. If you don’t have SSL installed on your site, you should follow a migration procedure to activate it.
Structured Data
Structured data is used by Google on the SERPs. This is a code you can add to your website to understand your content. It describes the data of search engines in a language they can understand. Because it’s part of SEO, you need to configure your data.
What are the benefits of structured data? It enhances the presentation of your listing on search engine results pages through graph entries and snippets. And there are many ways to do this. The most popular ones are in events, local business, and job posing.
You can use structured data to understand the prices of products. It’s visually appealing and improves your click-through rate.
XML Sitemap
The easiest way to optimize your XML map is to list all pages on your website. You should never include author pages, tag pages, and other pages without original content. When a new page is added, the sitemap is automatically updated. The Yoast SEO plugin automatically creates a sitemap for your website. I highly recommend it!
I hope this post helped you understand technical SEO better!