Most marketers and business owners have some knowledge of on-page optimization tactics such as keyword research, titles, and meta descriptions. What often is overlooked is the Technical SEO of a website. According to The State of Technical SEO Report 2023, the biggest stumbling block is a company's lack of resources. Technical SEO changes don’t happen or are very slowly implemented which translates into less impactful SEO results.
Let’s dive into the fundamentals of and best practices for optimizing your website with good Technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a website's technical elements to improve its search engine ranking and visibility. Evaluation and addressing of website structure, code, and functionality are essential. This ensures that search engines can crawl and index your site efficiently.
Technical SEO is a combination of various tasks. These tasks include optimizing page speed, improving website architecture, implementing structured data markup, and making sure your website is mobile-friendly. Technical SEO is important for business growth. It optimizes websites for search engines, increasing visibility and driving traffic to the site. By optimizing the technical elements of a website, businesses improve visibility, attract more organic traffic, and improve user experience.
What’s the Importance of Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is important to business growth because it ensures that a website is optimized for search engines to drive visibility and traffic to the site. Technical SEO covers a website optimized for search engines and allows search engine crawlers to index its content. This increases the chances of a higher rank on the search engine results page. Factors including website structure, indexing, web page speed, and website security contribute to the overall user experience on the site.
An optimized site ensures that search engines can easily crawl and index pages, improving the chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This in turn increases the chances of attracting qualified leads and potential customers to your site, ultimately leading to increased business growth and revenue. Technical SEO helps businesses stay on top of industry best practices and ensures that their website remains competitive in an ever-changing digital landscape.
What is the Difference Between On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO?
On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO are three types of SEO techniques that improve website ranking and increase traffic.
On-page SEO: This involves optimizing the site content and image optimization of a website to make it more search engine-friendly. On-page SEO techniques include optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, URL structures, internal links, and incorporating relevant keywords throughout the content.
Off-page SEO: This focuses on activities outside of the website that can impact search engine rankings. Off-page SEO techniques include building high-quality backlinks from other websites, social media marketing, guest blogging, influencer outreach, and online reputation management.
Technical SEO: This involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website to improve its search engine visibility, including website speed, mobile accessibility, site architecture, canonicalization, sitemaps, hreflang tags, and the robots.txt file.
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing the content of a website, off-page SEO focuses on building a website's authority and reputation through external activities, and Technical SEO focuses on improving the technical aspects of a website. All are essential to improving your website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Other Considerations When Effectively Executing Technical SEO
How web hosting impacts Technical SEO:
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Server location and speed: The location and speed of the server affects the website's loading time, which in turn affects the website's ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs). A slow-loading website leads to a higher bounce rate, which will negatively impact page rankings.
- Uptime and downtime: Website uptime is crucial for SEO, as search engines continuously crawl the website to update their index. Downtime will negatively impact the website's ranking, as search engines may encounter an error when crawling the website.
- Server response codes: The server's response codes, such as 404 errors, will affect the search engine’s indexing and crawling of your site. It's essential to ensure that the hosting provider offers a reliable uptime guarantee and responds quickly to server errors.
- SSL Certificate: Having an SSL certificate is essential to SEO as it assures the user of security. Search engines will mark your site as 'not secure' if it doesn't have one. Some hosting providers offer free SSL certificates, while others charge extra.
WordPress SEO plugins can help with technical SEO in the following ways:
Keyword Optimization: A good SEO plugin will help you analyze your content to determine how well it is optimized for targeted keywords.
Page Speed Optimization: Some SEO plugins offer features that optimize your site’s performance, such as minifying CSS and JavaScript files, compressing images, and reducing HTTP requests.
Structured Data: Several SEO plugins provide tools to help you mark up your pages with structured data. Tools such as schema.org mark up pages to improve your chances of appearing in rich snippets and other enhanced search features.
XML Sitemaps: An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your site to help search engines crawl and index your content. Most SEO plugins will automatically generate and update an XML sitemap for you.
Robots.txt: SEO plugins can also help you manage your site’s robots.txt file, which tells search engines which pages to crawl and which to ignore.
Canonical URLs: Duplicate content will hurt your SEO efforts. A plugin will help you set up canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content issues.
Overall, SEO plugins are a valuable tool to optimize your site for search engines and improve your chances of ranking well in search results.
Get Insights into SEO with A Strategy, Forecasting, and Metrics
SEO Strategy: Developing an SEO strategy is essential for technical SEO as it helps to identify the technical areas of a website that need improvement. An SEO strategy might include a technical audit of the website to identify issues like duplicate content, broken links, and crawl errors.
SEO Forecasting: SEO forecasting involves predicting the performance of a website over a period of time. This will identify the impact of technical SEO changes on the website’s overall search visibility. This can be used to estimate the ROI for technical SEO improvements.
SEO Metrics: SEO metrics are used to measure the success of Technical SEO changes. Metrics including the number of crawled pages, page load time, and mobile usability will identify areas of improvement. These metrics should be tracked over time to determine the effectiveness of Technical SEO efforts.
SEO strategy, forecasting, and metrics provide valuable insights into the performance of a website’s Technical SEO. These insights will identify areas of improvement and measure the success of Technical SEO changes.
How to Test Your Structured Data Markup?
Test your structured data with Google Developer Tool.
- Go to Schema Markup Testing Tool
- Use the Rich Results Test to see what Google rich results can be generated for your page.
- Enter the URL to test and review the results.
- Use the Schema Markup Validator to test all types of schema.org markup, without Google-specific validation.
- Lack of resources needed to efficiently execute Technical SEO.
- Absence of technical subject matter expertise on SEO and your specific content management system (CMS)
- Lack of buy-in and authority from key decision-makers to execute or procure the resources needed.
- Not investing in tools and technologies to execute SEO more effectively.
