Technical SEO is a very necessary step in the entire website positioning process. If there are issues with your technical SEO then it is probably that your SEO efforts will now not generate the anticipated results.
Technical SEO refers to the technique of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO, you can assist search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website except for any problems.
It is known as “technical” because it has nothing to do with the proper content material of the website or with website promotion. The main purpose of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website.
To understand what is the actual means of technical SEO, let’s begin with some primary terminology.
First, let’s recap what is SEO? The most simplified definition is that SEO is the process of optimizing your website for Search engines.
Optimization in the SEO context implies:
Ensuring that web crawlers can access and file your site with next to no issues
Having great substance that coordinates with the goal of the searcher
Giving web search tools crawlers the right motions toward comprehending the construction of your site
Aiding internet searcher bugs to comprehend the significance (setting) of your substance.
Giving web index calculations motivations to trust your site and rank it higher than different sites.
How do you start SEO?
If you have perused my past article on how web search tools work, you should realize that the initial step taken via web search tools well before noting a pursuit question, is the creeping and ordering process.
During this cycle, web search tools are searching for openly accessible website pages to add to their list.
They find, peruse and sort out these pages into their data set with the goal that they are subsequently gotten to by their calculations to give exact responses to the questions entered by clients.
To get the entire picture, take a gander at the chart beneath which shows the three-fundamental mainstay of SEO: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-page SEO.
On-Page SEO is identified with content and how you can make it more applicable to what the client is looking and off-page SEO (otherwise called third party referencing), is the most common way of getting specifies (joins) from different sites to build trust during the positioning system.
You can use the list below to carry out your own technical SEO audit.
A website by default is accessible with www and without www in front of a domain name.
For example, if your domain is example.com, your website can be accessed by both http://www.example.com and http://example.com (i.e. without the www).
While this is ok for users, it is confusing for search engines because they consider these as two different websites.
This means that you may encounter indexing issues, duplicate content problems, and loss of page rank.
Robots.txt is a text file residing in the root directory of your website that gives instructions to search engines as to which pages of your website they can crawl and add to their index.
The next item in your technical SEO audit list is to revise the URL structure of your website. By URL structure we mean the format of your URLs.
Best SEO practices dictate the following about URLs:
Users are more likely to stay on a website longer and find out what they want faster and search engines can understand and index a website easier.
A big mistake many webmasters make is that in their effort to optimize their websites for conversions, they forget about navigation and site structure and they end up damaging their SEO.
A typical example is to hide from users their archive pages and have all content under a single category.
A breadcrumb menu is a set of links at the top or bottom of a page that allows users to navigate to a previous page (usually the category page) or to the home page of a website.
A breadcrumb menu serves two main purposes: it helps users navigate a website easily without having to press the back button on their browsers and it gives another hint to search engines about the structure of a website.
Breadcrumbs are mentioned as an SEO element in various SEO Guides because they are highly recommended by Google.
In basic terms, organized information is code you can add to your site pages that is noticeable to web search tool crawlers and assists them with understanding the setting of your substance. It's a way of portraying your information to web indexes in a language they can comprehend.
How is organized information identified with specialized SEO?
Albeit organized information has to do with the substance of a site, it is important for specialized SEO on the grounds that you really want to add code to your site to hit the nail on the head. Ordinarily, you add the organized information definition once and afterward you don't need to do anything about it.
For instance, on account of breadcrumbs, you want to arrange your organized information once and no further activities are required.
The equivalent with articles. When you add the right organized information definition to your CMS it will consequently be applied to new substance.
It can assist you with upgrading the introduction of your postings in the SERPS either through highlighted pieces, information diagram passages, and so forth and increment your CTR.
There are numerous ways you can utilize organized information to depict your substance. The most famous are: articles, plans, occasions, work posting, neighborhood business, and the sky is the limit from there. You can see the total rundown here.
It’s an easy way to inform Google which model of a web page to take into account when indexing your website. The concept is similar to the favored domain where a single web page is accessible via a number of URLs.
You can use the rel=” canonical” when you have pages with similar content, for paging functions and keep away from duplicate content troubles when you add content to your website from different websites.
As a general rule, you have to specify a canonical URL for all your website pages.
The easiest way to test if your website presents a canonical URL is to go to any of your pages, right-click somewhere on the web page and select VIEW SOURCE. Search for rel=canonical and look into the value.
If you can't discover any reference to canonical then you can both use a plugin to add this automatically (if you are on WordPress you can use Yoast SEO)
As with different technical SEO elements, once you set your website to output the canonical URL correctly, you don’t have to do something else.
A 404 page is shown to the users when the URL they visited does not exist on your website. Maybe the page was deleted, the URL was changed or they mistyped the URL in their browsers.
An optimized 404 page should:
One of the most important elements of technical SEO is XML sitemap optimization.
An XML Sitemap is an XML file that lists all pages/posts available on your website. Besides their title, it also includes the published date and last updated date.
Search engines can use the XML sitemap as a guide when crawling a website.
XML sitemap optimization is simple, only include in your sitemap the pages that are important for your website. In the majority of cases, these are your pages, posts, and categories. you can create an XML site map from our free tool
Use the Google search console to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing and check the status.
HTTPS is a known ranking signal and an additional way to establish trust with your users. When you install an SSL on your server, your website can be accessed using https and not http. This indicates that any information transferred between your website and server (such as usernames, passwords, personal data, etc) is encrypted.
Google is mentioning the importance of speed in all their SEO recommendations and studies confirm that faster websites perform better than slower websites.
Tackling website speed is a technical issue and it requires making changes to your website and infrastructure to get good results.
Having a mobile-friendly website is not optional. Most probably the majority of your users are on mobile and with the introduction of the mobile-first index by Google, if you don’t have a fast, mobile-friendly website your rankings will suffer.
Mobile-friendliness is part of technical SEO because once you have a mobile-friendly theme, that is properly configured, you don’t have to deal with this again
If you already have a responsive website, then most probably you won’t have to worry about the mobile-first index but if you are having a separate mobile website on a subdomain or folder, then make sure that it has the same content as your desktop website.
Accelerated Mobile Pages is a relatively new concept introduced by Google in its effort to make the mobile web faster.
In simple terms, with AMP you provide a version of your website using AMP HTML which is a cut-down version of normal HTML.
The most important pros and cons of AMP are:
Pagination is used when you want to break up a long page into multiple shorter pages and when you enable paging in your category pages.
To avoid duplicate content issues and to consolidate links and page rank to your main page, you can make use of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” links to tell search engines that the subsequent pages are a continuation of the main page.
When Google finds the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” links in the code, it will understand which is the main page and it will use that for indexing purposes.
If you have content on your website in more than one language, then you need to make use of the hreflang attribute to give Google more information about your site structure and content.
To elevate out the most essential technical SEO tasks, you want the assist of webmaster tools. Webmaster tools are provided by search engines and can be used to optimize a website for technical SEO.
The most whole set of tools is the Google Search Console, provided via Google.
With Google search console you can check your robots.txt file, post a sitemap to Google and find and fix crawl errors.
It is highly recommended to register your website with Google and Bing webmaster tools and configure the primary settings
Your starting point is to check your speed using three tools: google page speed insights, Pingdom tools and google mobile speed tool.
