Technical SEO is all about improving your website to make it easier for search engines to find, crawl, understand, and index all your website content. The aim is simple – to get you as high on search engine results pages as possible, and in order to do so you need to ensure that your website meets all of the technical requirements of modern search engines.
Technical SEO and search engine optimisation (SEO) go hand in hand – you can’t do one without the other. However, the most important elements of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering etc – it is essentially website architecture. To help make this easier to understand and implement, we’ve put together the ultimate guide, from technical SEO basics right through to technical SEO tips and tricks.
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What is Technical SEO?
Essentially, technical SEO is all about improving the technical aspects of your website to help increase your site’s ranking on search engine results. It is a set of website and server optimisations that will make your website easier to understand and use for both crawlers and website visitors. Some examples of technical SEO include making your website faster, enhancing the user experience, and making the site easier to understand.
As a lot of technical SEO is done behind the scenes, it is easy to miss or forget as part of your SEO strategy. However, it plays an important role in helping to guide organic traffic to your website. You might have the most well-researched, thoughtful, and useful content on the whole internet, but unless a search engine can crawl your website very few people will ever see it. Technical SEO doesn’t need to be perfect for your website to rank on search engines, but the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the better chance you have of ranking as high as possible.
Technical SEO Tips
If you are ready to start optimising your website for technical SEO, then take a look at our checklist below to make sure that you maximise and make the most out of your SEO strategy.
1. Update your page experience
Nowadays, your website needs to have an amazing user experience, and it needs to adhere to Google’s new page experience signals. A good user experience includes:
- Being mobile friendly
- Safe-browsing
- HTTPS security
- Fast page speed
There are plenty of tools available to help you improve your site speed and core web vitals, and they will help you check how fast different pages from your site load from various operating systems, locations, and devices. Some quick optimisations that you can make to help improve your website speed include optimising image formats, implementing lazy-loading for non-critical images, and improving JavaScript performance.
2. Crawl your website and locate any crawl errors
Crawl errors occur when a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails to access it. You need to make sure that your website is free of these kinds of errors as it means that crawlers will struggle to index your website and it will mean they won’t display your site on search engine results. Many website crawl tools will help you to do this, for example, Screaming Frog or Google Search Console. When scanning for crawl errors, you will need to make sure that you correctly implement all redirects with 301 redirects, and go through any 4xx and 5xx errors to figure out which page you want to redirect them to.
3. Fix any broken internal and outbound links
Poor link structure and dead links can cause a negative user experience for both visitors and search engines. What is even worse for users than a slow-loading website is landing on a page that doesn’t exist, and if a link leads them to a non-existent page on your website there goes your carefully crafted and thought-out user experience! Moreover, search engines don’t like to find these pages either, and as they follow every link they bump into (even the hidden ones) they are more likely to find these dead links and pages. To prevent these unnecessary dead or broken links, you need to redirect a page’s URL whenever you delete or move it, so the customer always has something to land on when they click a link. Ideally, you want to be creating a new page to replace any old pages to help enhance the content on your website.
4. Get rid of weak or duplicated content
Search engines will get confused if you have the same content on multiple pages of your site, or if you copy content from other websites. If all of these pages have the same content, then which one should they rank the highest? Instead of ranking high, a search engine will dismiss duplicated content and end up ranking low or not ranking at all. The problem is, that you might have duplicated content without even realising it.
Due to some hidden technical reasons, some of your different URLs can end up showing the same content, and while this won’t be shown to visitors, search engines will see the same content on a different URL. Luckily, there is an easy solution for this. Using the canonical link element, you can indicate which the original page is and search engines will use this as the page to rank. This will help you to prevent duplicated content that you didn’t even realise you had, and help to push your website higher in the results ranking.
5. Make sure your URLs have a clean structure
Overly complex URL structures can cause problems for crawlers as they create an unnecessarily high number of URLS that indicate similar or duplicated content on your website. A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible, otherwise a Googlebot will not be able to index all of the content o on your website. Easy ways to clean your URL structure include:
- Using lowercase letters
- Separate words with “-“
- Keep URLs short (and make sure that most URLs feature your target keyword)
- Avoid symbols, like “#” or “&,” as well as avoiding dates
6. Make sure your site has optimised robots.txt file
Robot.txt files are essentially the instructions for the search engine robots on how they should crawl your website. Every website has a crawl budget (a limited number of pages that can be included in the crawl) so it is vital that only the most important pages are being indexed by the crawlers. Ideally, you want to use these instructions to prevent crawlers from overwhelming your servers with requests and stop them from viewing unimportant pages.
What you don’t want to do is block the crawlers from viewing your entire website. If do manage to block them, then search engines won’t be able to index your website and you won’t rank anywhere in the search engine results. The good news is, Google will help you to create an easy and SEO-friendly robots.txt file. It also offers a robots.txt test tool, which can be accessed via the Google Search Console account.
7. Add structured data and schema markup
Structured data helps search engines understand your website, content, and business better. With structured data (otherwise known as schema markup), you can tell the search engines what kinds of products or services you have on your website, as well as provide important information. By giving context to Google about the meaning of a page, will help your organic listings stand out on the search engine results. You can use Google’s free tool Structured Data Markup Helper to markup any existing pages on your site, and it will help you to easily generate structured data by highlighting important page elements such as price, rating, and much more.
How can seoBusiness help with your technical SEO?
We’ve tried to make this process as simple as possible, but technical SEO can still be daunting and overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. You can try to keep on top of the ever-changing and constantly evolving world of SEO, or you can look at hiring a company like seoBusiness. Hiring a company that specialises in technical SEO optimisation is an important step in your business development, and while you can invest in SEO at any time, there are certain times when we can help you a little bit more:
1. You are just launching your business – if you want to enter the market with a bang, hiring an SEO company will give your business the edge you are looking for.
2. You are scaling up your business – if you are looking to grow your business, then a digital marketing agency can help you optimise your website to reach new audiences.
3. You are revamping your website – if you think that your website could do with some improvements, we can help bring in more traffic and potential customers and make the site look more up-to-date and trendier.
As experts in digital marketing, we are here to help you stand head and shoulders above the crowd. Whether you are looking to start from scratch or you want to overhaul your website completely, we offer a wide range of services to suit every budget. Not only can we help boost your online traffic and generate new, solid leads, but we can also help to seriously increase your brand awareness and reputation to help create a loyal and repeat customer base. Remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and not a quick fix. You might find that the best results appear months after you have started the process, but it is worthwhile waiting for if you want to get ahead of your competitors. If you are looking for more information about SEO, or you wish to book a consultation appointment, our friendly team are happy to help. Get in touch today for more information.
