Technical SEO is all the work you put in, behind the curtains, to make sure search engines understand your website and rank it well on their result pages. On the other hand, if your site is slow, not responsive or not properly indexed, you won’t come up on any searches and your traffic will suffer.
What’s technical SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization can be divided into three main segments – on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. While on-page is related to optimizing your content for search engines and off-page relies on link building and external efforts, technical SEO focuses on optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing of search engines.
This optimization occurs on the infrastructure on the website and doesn’t have much to do with your content or popularity, hence its name, technical SEO.
Why is technical SEO so crucial to your website?
When your website is fully optimized, it’s much easier for search engines to access your site, as well as crawl, interpret and index it. Then, your web pages get better ranking whenever they’re relevant to a search, and you get more traffic.
If you have one too many technical issues on your website, the consequences can be severe. It won’t matter how good your content is, if the search engine can’t properly identify it, you won’t get traffic. That’s why it’s so important to focus on technical SEO. Otherwise, your effort to create high-quality content goes to waste.
Overview of the Key Elements of Technical SEO
Search engines and search engine optimization are complex subjects. To get you started with technical SEO, here is an overview of its key elements.
Website speed
The loading speed of your web pages is crucial to get better ranked on searches. Google has mentioned time and time again in their SEO recommendations how essential it is for pages to load fast.
Make your website mobile-friendly
A website that’s mobile-friendly and loads fast on mobile is a must. If yours isn’t up to par, your ranking will undoubtedly suffer the consequences. By the way, consider enabling AMP. It’s a project backed by Google that aims to load pages super quick on mobiles.
HTTPS Website
One of the hot topics when it comes to the internet is security. By adding SSL to your website, you make sure all the information transferred between the server and your site is encrypted. This is a great technical SEO tactic to help your website be well-regarded online.
Duplicate content issues
Search engines frown upon duplicated content because many people try using them to manipulate searches. If you have duplicated content and want to keep both, try using a canonical link element, which tells the search engine which one is the main page.
Website structure
The structure of your website plays a huge role with the search engines as well as the user experience. When users can easily navigate through your site and find what they need, they are more likely to stay there longer. Also, the structure makes it easier for search engines to understand your website.
XML Sitemap optimization
The XML sitemap optimization is one of the most critical elements of technical SEO. The XML file is a list of all the pages of your website, along with its publication date and last update. It acts as the name suggests, a map for search engines.
Technical SEO might be a challenging topic to navigate, but ignoring it might come at a high cost to your website’s traffic. Take one step at a time and make sure you move toward optimizing all technical aspects of your site. It will allow your content to shine online and bring in relevant traffic.