Technical SEO is the practice of using your site in such a way that search engines find it easy to crawl, index and comprehend your content. It does not look at the content or back links, but more on the backroom features of your site.
Consider your site to be a home. Technical SEO ensures that the basement is dry, that the pipes are functioning, and the electrical is grounded. These are as important as the beautiful furniture (content) and decorations (design) without which they will not mean much.
The Significance of Technical SEO
Technical SEO is crucial as it provides certainty that a site is well organized, quick, safe, and searchable by search engines. Its absence can make the content, even the high-quality one, not display in the search results. It enhances user experience, as it makes websites mobile friendly and fast loading that also improves rankings. Altogether, technical SEO is the basis of other SEO activities that enable websites to work more effectively, generate organic traffic, and guarantee long-term development.
Learning about Indexing and How to Optimize it
After crawling your pages, the search engines then attempt to analyze and comprehend the contents of your pages.
Then the search engine adds these chunks of content to its search index- an enormous database that comprises billions of webpages.
The search engines have to index your webpages so that they can be visible in the search.
The easiest method to verify that your pages have actually been indexed is to do a site: operator search.
In our case, to verify the index status of semrush.com, you will go to the Google search box and type site:www.semrush.com.
This indicates to you (approximately) the number of pages of the site that Google has indexed.
To make sure that Google does not face difficulties in indexing your webpages, there are a couple of things you ought to do:
Noindex Tag should be used with Caution
Noindex tag is an HTML fragment that prevents your pages being listed in Google index.
It goes in the <head> section of your web page and it appears as follows:
Ideally, you would wish that all your valuable pages be indexed. Therefore, apply noindex tag sparingly, in cases where you do not wish particular pages to be indexed.
They can be:
Thank you pages
PPC landing pages
It is your desire to find out more about noindex tags and the pitfalls to avoid during the implementation? Meta tags: see our robots meta tags guide.
Use Canonical Tags where needed
When Google discovers duplicate content on several pages within your site, it is not always sure which of the pages to include in its index and to display in search results.
It is at that point that the so-called canonical tags can be helpful.
Canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) defines a link as a canonical one, and this is used by Google to determine the page to be indexed and ranked.
Key elements of technical SEO services
The most important aspects of technical SEO can be divided into three fundamental groups, which are critical to the search engine performance of your site:
1. Crawlability
Crawlability is about making your site easily accessible to the search engine by effectively using your websites crawl budget, ensuring that JavaScript is friendly to search engines, having a good quality of links, having a logical site structure, handling redirects in an efficient manner and ensuring that server errors are fixed as fast as possible.
2. Performance
Performance involves benchmarking your site speed, ensuring that you have minimal code bloat, using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve the speed at which mobile pages load, and having a responsive site that could be rendered on a wide variety of devices.
3. Indexation
The idea of indexation is all about making the search engine comprehend your web site better. This involves implementation of a good internal linking structure, development of sitemaps that enable search engines crawl your site effectively, dealing with the problem of duplicate content, and periodically viewing log files that enable you to track how search engines interact with your site.
How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?
This is a step-by-step guide for conducting a thorough SEO audit to make sure your site is optimized to perform better in search engines:
1. Analysis of Crawling on the Web site
Run your site through a tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs, Semrush or SE Ranking Site Audit.
2. The assessment of crawling and indexing
To diagnose whether search engines are crawling and indexing your site, go to Google Search Console. Watch out to see crawl errors, sitemap issues, or blocked resources that are not to be indexed.
3. Site Speed analysis
Check the speed of your website loading with the help of PageSpeed Insights or any other tool. Find out ways you can improve to make your site faster.
4. Mobile-Friendliness Check
Google Mobile-Friendly Test can be used to test whether your site is responsive on mobile or not. Ensure an optimal experience to mobile users.
5. Identifying and Managing Redundant Content
Employ Siteliner or Copyscape to detect any instances of redundant content on your website. Duplication of website content can negatively affect search engine optimization.
6. Internal Linking and Site Structure Review
Review the organization of your site, the navigation, and how the pages interconnect. Make certain users can easily pinpoint their desired information and that search engines can easily interpret your site structure.
7. Structured Data and Rich Snippets Analysis
Check your website’s proper usage of structured data with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Schema.org Validator. With proper structured data implementation, your site can have enhanced visibility in search engine results.
8. Website Security Check
Ensure your website is using HTTPS along with a valid SSL certificate. Follow best practices to secure your user’s information and retain trust from search engines.
9. Meta Tags Evaluation
Review all the pages on your site to make sure they have descriptive and distinct title tags and meta descriptions.
With the knowledge of conducting a technical SEO audit, begin addressing the prioritized issues and implementing the needed fixes and enhancements.
Top Technical SEO Practices
Follow these SEO-friendly technical techniques to help your site more effective in search engine results:
1. Choose One Website Version
Choose as your permanent address, and use it consistently. Both versions can cause issues. You can redirect one to the other in order to prevent problems.
2. Speed Up Your Website
Speed up loading of your site by reducing image file sizes with the Content Distribution Network (CDN) and cleaning out unneeded code to increase the speed with which your pages display.
3. Use Structured Data
Include a unique code on your website in order to help Google to understand your site’s web pages better. This can help make your search results appear more useful.
4. Fix Broken Pages
Pages that are not working properly on your website can be detrimental to user experience and also waste links. Utilize tools to locate and bring back the pages that were deleted or to redirect older ones using links to more relevant ones.
5. Optimize for Core Web Vitals
Google determines how quick and user-friendly your website’s pages are. You should aim for speedy loading times (under 2.5 second) rapid response for user input (under 100 milliseconds) and solid layouts for your pages.
6. Multilingual Content
If your site is available in multiple languages, use the hreflang tag to inform Google which version of your site to display to users from different countries. Incorporate these tags into the code of your page.
Conclusion
Understanding the basics of SEO is essential to not just achieving better ranking in search engines, but also providing the best user experience. If you adhere to the best practices, you will build a solid web-based foundation. But, it’s important to realize that the online landscape is constantly shifting and that constant focus and flexibility are essential.
