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Technical SEO: What is it?
Technical SEO is the process of enhancing a website’s technical components in order to raise the ranking of its pages in search results. The three pillars of technical optimization include making a website quicker, simpler to crawl, and intelligible for search engines. On-page SEO, which focuses on enhancing components of your website to improve rankings, includes technical SEO. It is the antithesis of off-page SEO, which focuses on increasing a website’s visibility via other methods.
Why should your website be technically optimized?
The goal of Google and other search engines is to provide users with the most relevant results for their search. As a result, Google’s robots scan and assess websites based on a variety of criteria. The user’s experience is dependent on several aspects, such as how quickly a website loads. Other elements aid search engine robots in understanding the content of your pages. Structured data does a variety of tasks like this. Therefore, by enhancing technological elements, you aid search engines in crawling and comprehending your website. If you succeed in doing this, you can be rewarded with improved ranks or even wealthy outcomes.
The opposite is also true: if you create severe technical errors on your website, they might cost you. By inadvertently inserting a trailing slash in the incorrect location in your robots.txt file, you wouldn’t be the first to completely prevent search engines from indexing your website.
It’s a fallacy that you should concentrate on a website’s technical aspects in order to appease search engines. A website should, first and foremost, function properly for its visitors. It should be quick, clear, and simple to use. Fortunately, building a solid technological basis often results in a better user and search engine experience.
What traits define a website that is technically optimized?
A website that is technically sound loads quickly for visitors and is simple for search engine robots to crawl. A good technological foundation makes it easier for search engines to comprehend the purpose of a website and reduces confusion brought by, for example, by duplicate material. Additionally, it doesn’t use broken links to direct users or search engines to dead ends. Here, we’ll briefly discuss some key characteristics of a website that has been technically optimized.
1. It is quick
Web sites nowadays must load quickly. People don’t want to wait for a page to open because they are impatient. 53 percent of mobile website users, according to a study from 2016, will quit if a page doesn’t load in three seconds. Therefore, if your website is sluggish, visitors will get impatient and go to another website, costing you all that traffic.
Google is aware that sluggish websites don’t always provide the best user experience. They thus favor websites that load quickly. A sluggish website thus receives even less traffic since it is listed lower in the search results than its speedier counterpart. Page experience, which measures how quickly users perceive a web page to be, may even start to influence rankings in 2021. So, you’d best get ready!
Concerned about how quickly your website loads? Learn how to quickly test the speed of your site. Most assessments will also provide feedback on areas where you may improve. Additionally, because Google utilizes the Core Web vitals to determine Page experience, you may look at them. We’ll also walk you through some popular site performance improvement advice right here.
2. It may be indexed by search engines
Robots are used by search engines to crawl or spider your website. Links are followed by robots to find material on your website. The most crucial stuff on your website will be clear to them thanks to a strong internal linking structure.
However, there are more techniques to direct robots. If you don’t want them to get to a certain piece of material, you may, for example, prevent them from crawling it. You may also allow them to crawl a page while instructing them not to include it in search results or to click any of the links on it.
Robots.txt file
Using the robots.txt file, you may guide robots to certain areas of your website. It is a strong instrument that has to be used with caution. As we indicated at the beginning, a little error might stop robots from crawling (critical portions of) your website. In the robot.txt file, individuals sometimes mistakenly block the CSS and JS files for their website. These files include the code that instructs browsers on how and what to display on your website. Search engines can’t determine if your site is functioning correctly if such files are restricted.
All in all, if you want to understand how robots.txt works, we advise you to truly delve into it. Or maybe even better, delegate the task to a developer!
3. It doesn’t include a lot of dead links.
We’ve spoken about how annoying it is to use sluggish websites. Landing on a page that doesn’t exist at all may irritate visitors much more than a sluggish page. People will see a 404 error page if a link on your site directs them to a page that doesn’t exist. Your well designed user experience is gone!
Additionally, search engines also dislike coming across these mistake sites. And since they click on every link they come across, including those that are hidden, they often discover even more dead links than visitors do.
Due to the fact that websites are always changing as a result of individuals adding and removing content, most websites unfortunately contain (at least) a few dead links. Thankfully, there are resources that may assist you in recovering dead links from your website. Take a look at those tools and learn how to handle 404 problems.
When you relocate or remove a page, you should always redirect the URL in order to avoid needless dead links. Redirecting it to a page that replaces the previous page is ideal.
4. It prevents duplicate information from confusing search engines.
Search engines may get confused if the same material appears on many pages of your website or even on other websites. Since these sites all provide the same material, which one should be ranked first? They can rank all pages with the same content lower as a consequence.
Unluckily, you can be struggling with duplicate material without even realizing it. The same material may appear under several URLs for technical reasons. Visitors won’t notice a change, but search engines will notice since they will view the same material on a new URL.
Fortunately, there is a technological fix for this problem. You may provide the original page, or the page you want to rank in the search engines, using the so-called canonical link element. A page’s canonical URL may be readily set in SEO.
5. It is safe
A website that has been technically optimized is secure. Making your website secure for visitors to ensure their privacy has become a fundamental demand in today’s world. There are numerous things you can do to keep your (WordPress) website safe, but adding HTTPS is one of the most important ones.
The use of HTTPS ensures that no third party may intercept the data being passed between the browser and the website. As a result, when users check in to your website, their credentials are secure. A so-called SSL certificate is required in order to enable HTTPS on your website. Google introduced HTTPS a ranking indicator because it understands the value of security and prefers secure websites over their unsafe counterparts.
In most browsers, you can quickly determine whether your website is HTTPS. Your browser’s search box will have a lock on the left side if it is secure. You (or your developer) have work to do if you notice the phrase “not secure”!
Additionally, it contains structured data.
Structured data aids search engines in better comprehending your website, content, or even your company. You can inform search engines what sort of products you offer and which recipes are on your website by using structured data. Additionally, it will allow you to share a variety of information about those items or recipes.
Search engines can readily discover and comprehend this data since it must be provided in a certain format (specified on Schema.org). It aids readers in situating your material within a larger context.
Implementing structured data might benefit business in ways more than merely improving search engine comprehension. Additionally, it qualifies your material for rich results—those gleaming outcomes with stars or additional information that stick out in the search results.
7. An XML sitemap is available.
An XML sitemap is only a list of all the pages on your website. It provides search engines with a map of your website. You may use it to ensure that no crucial material on your website is missed by search engines. The number of photos and the latest changed date for each page are included in the XML sitemap, which is often organized into posts, pages, tags, or other custom post kinds.
A website should ideally not need an XML sitemap. Robots won’t need it if it has a good internal linking structure that ties all of the information together. An XML sitemap won’t hurt, either, since not all websites have a wonderful structure. Therefore, we always recommend having an XML site map for your website.
8. In addition, foreign websites make use of hreflang
Search engines need a little assistance to comprehend which nations or languages you are aiming to reach if your website targets more than one country or countries where the same language is spoken. If you assist them, they will display in the search results the appropriate website for the user’s location.
You can accomplish it thanks to hreflang tags. You may choose the nation and language that a page is intended for. This also resolves a potential issue with duplicate content since Google will recognize that the information is created for a separate location even if it appears on both your US and UK websites.
International website optimization is a somewhat specialized field. We suggest looking at our Multilingual SEO course if you’d want to find out how to make your multinational website rank.
