What is Technical SEO?

Here, we’ll go over the fundamentals of technical SEO. We will discuss what technical SEO is and what elements are considered in Technical SEO. Now, discussing the fundamentals of technical SEO may appear to be a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, a basic understanding of the more technical aspects of SEO can mean the difference between a high-ranking site and one that does not rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but we would like to explain – in layman’s terms – which aspects you should pay attention to when working on your website’s technical foundation.
So, what is Technical SEO? Technical SEO is the process of improving a website’s technical aspects in order to improve the ranking of its pages in search engines. The pillars of technical optimization are making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable to search engines. On-page SEO includes technical SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website in order to achieve higher rankings. It is the inverse of off-page SEO, which is concerned with increasing a website’s exposure through other channels.

Why do we need to optimize our Website Technically?

Google and other search engines want to provide the best results for their users’ queries. As a result, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages based on a variety of criteria. Some factors, such as how quickly the page loads, are based on the user’s experience. Other factors aid search engine robots in understanding what your pages are about. Structured data, for example, accomplishes this. As a result, by improving technical aspects, you assist search engines in crawling and understanding your site. If you perform well in this area, you may be rewarded with higher rankings or even rich results.

It also works the other way around: serious technical errors on your site can cost you. You wouldn’t be the first to prevent search engines from crawling your site entirely by inadvertently including a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file.

However, it is a common misconception that you should focus on the technical aspects of a website in order to please search engines. In the first place, a website should function properly – that is, it should be fast, clear, and simple to use for your users. Fortunately, laying a solid technical foundation often coincides with a better user and search engine experience.

What is Technical SEO Checklist?

Search engines prioritize websites that have certain technical characteristics, such as a secure connection, a responsive design, or a fast loading time, in search results, and technical SEO is the work you need to do to ensure your website has these.

Below is a checklist of critical steps you can take to ensure your technical SEO is up to par. By following these guidelines, you can help to ensure that the security and structure of your website meet all the required expectations of search engine algorithms and thus be rewarded accordingly in search results.

1. Use of SSL
2. Mobile-friendly
3. Fast Website Loading Speed
4. Removal of Duplicate content
5. Creating & Submitting Sitemap
6. Creating & Implementation of AMP
7. Structured Data Markup
8. Configuring Search Console Codes
9. Configuring Analytic Codes
10. Breadcrumbs

Use of SSL

SSL is a security technology that establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. A site that uses SSL is easily identified: the website URL begins with ‘HTTPS://’ rather than ‘HTTP://.’

Google announced in 2014 that they wanted to see “HTTPS everywhere,” and HTTPS websites would be prioritized over non-secure ones in the search engine result pages(SERPs). 

So, where possible, it makes sense to ensure your site’s security – this can be accomplished by installing an SSL certificate on your website. Most of the top website builders now include SSL by default.

Mobile-friendly

Responsive website design automatically adjusts itself so that it can be navigated and read on any device.

Google makes it clear that having a responsive site is a very important ranking signal for its algorithms. And, with Google’s’mobile first’ approach to indexing content, having a responsive website is now more important than ever.

As a result, it makes sense to ensure that your website is fully responsive and displays in the best possible format for mobile, tablet, and desktop users.

Fast Website Loading Speed

Nowadays, every search engine prefers websites that load quickly as page speed is a key ranking signal.

You can speed up your site in several ways:

• Opt High-Speed Hosting
• Make use of a quick DNS (‘domain name system’) provider.
• Reduce ‘HTTP requests’ by limiting the use of scripts and plugins.
• Instead of using multiple CSS stylesheets or inline CSS, use a single CSS stylesheet.
• Make your image files as small as possible
• Compress your website’s pages
• Remove any unnecessary spaces, line breaks, or indentations from your HTML, CSS, and Javascript code

Removal of Duplicate content

Duplicate content can be both confusing for users (and search engine algorithms) and used to manipulate search rankings or gain more traffic. As a result, search engines dislike it, and Google and Bing advise webmasters to correct any duplicate content issues they discover. You can resolve duplicate content issues by doing the following:

• Keeping your CMS from publishing multiple versions of the same page or post.
• Using the canonical link element to inform search engines about the location of your content’s “main” version.

If you keep duplicate data on your website, Google can penalty your website

Creating & Submitting Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that helps search engines understand your website while crawling it; think of it as a sort of’ search roadmap,’ telling search engines where each page is.

It also includes useful information about each page on your website, such as when a page was last modified, its priority on your site, and how frequently it is updated.

Your XML site is created automatically on many e-commerce platforms; if you are using another platform, you may need to use a sitemap generator to create one.

Creating & Implementation of AMP

AMP is a Google-backed project that aims to speed up content delivery on mobile devices by utilising a special code known as AMP HTML.
On mobile devices, AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly. They accomplish this by reducing your content and code to their bare essentials, retaining text, images, and video but disabling scripts, comments, and forms.
Because they load so quickly, AMP versions of pages are far more likely to be read and shared by your users, increasing dwell time and the number of backlinks pointing to your content – all of which are positive SEO factors. Furthermore, Google occasionally highlights AMP pages in prominent carousels in search results, giving you an advantage.

Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup is code that you can add to your website to help search engines understand the content. This information can assist search engines in indexing your site more effectively and providing more relevant results.
Data Structured
Furthermore, structured data improves search results by adding ‘rich snippets’ – for example, structured data can be used to add star ratings to reviews, prices to products, or reviewer information (example below).
These enhanced results can improve your click-through rate (CTR) and generate additional traffic to your site because they are more visually appealing and highlight immediately useful information to searchers. Because sites with higher CTRs are generally thought to receive preferential treatment in search engines, it is worthwhile to make the effort to include them.

Configuring Search Console Codes

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools from Google and Microsoft that allow you to submit your website for indexing to their search engines.

When you’re ready to launch your website, submit its XML sitemap (see above) to Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools so that they can crawl it and begin to display results from it in search results.

These services also allow you to monitor your site’s overall performance from a search engine standpoint – other things you can do with the tools include:

• Evaluating the mobile usability of your website
• Gaining access to search analytics
• Examining backlinks to your site and removing spammy links as well as much more

Configuring Analytic Codes

Google Analytics assists businesses in better understanding their website. It also aids in evaluating and measuring how marketing, content, and products perform in terms of user engagement. This tool gathers data and organizes it into useful information.

Guest Blogging Pro has tried its best to make you understand what is technical SEO and why we need to optimize it. Apart from this, we have told you the checklists of Technical SEO to consider when working on the On-Page of the Website.