Most online business owners and website administrators know the importance of having a well-optimized website in today’s competitive environment. As per the digital marketing consulting services provider, technical SEO refers to technical issues on your website that do not act as barriers to search engine indexing or overtax servers. However, not many people know that poorly executed technical SEO can get you penalized by Google. This article will discuss why technical SEO is important and why you should never neglect it when developing a new website or revamping one that is outdated.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to site optimization performed primarily in code, often using a content management system (CMS).
Technical SEO is a subset of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that focuses on improving the visibility of your website in organic search results by prioritizing, indexing, and ranking website content correctly. Technical SEO can be considered an ongoing process because it involves continuously monitoring site changes to ensure that once optimized topics remain so over time.
Technical SEO helps you ensure that your site is structured and built correctly so that search engines can crawl your site and fully understand its content. It is, also known as On-Page SEO, is a branch of the digital marketing world that helps shape how users view and interact with your website. For example, technical SEO can help your site rank higher in search engines by making sure that each page of your site is optimized for search engines or by making sure that the code itself is properly written to help boost your rankings.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO is important because it allows your site to be more accessible and attractive to search engines. Without technical SEO, the content of your website won’t be easily accessed by the search engine crawlers, which could negatively impact the amount of traffic your website receives. It helps your website rank better in search engines, improves user experience, and can help your site stand out above the competition.
Technical SEO consists of various tasks to improve a site’s performance and user experience. While site speed is the most common factor in technical SEO checklists, many other factors can affect the quality and performance of a website. A clean codebase, a well-organized database, updated plugins, and many other factors come into play here.
How Can You Improve Your Technical SEO?
Knowing where and how to focus your efforts is crucial to improving your technical SEO. Some of the pointers to improve technical SEO are as follows.
Site Structure and Navigation
Site Structure and Navigation, also known as Information Architecture and Accessibility, is an essential aspect of web design. It refers to the organization and structure of both static and dynamic websites.
Site structure is crucial for making your website easy to explore and use, especially for users who are not particularly familiar with the site, by organizing and describing the hierarchical relationships between content on your site. It also means how you divide up your site’s content into separate pages. For example, if your hierarchy is composed of brands and products, it’s logical to use top navigation that follows that structure. If you’re selling products, you’ll also want to create an easy way for customers to find what they’re looking for by creating a breadcrumb trail on every page of your website.
Use of SSL
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and it’s a technology that creates an encrypted link between your web browser and the website you’re visiting. With SSL, communications between your computer and the site are encrypted, so they can’t be intercepted and read by third parties.
SSL is used to encrypt the traffic between your site and your users. It’s important because it prevents people from eavesdropping on your customer’s communications with you, and it assures that the website they are using is yours and not a fake site created by a hacker.
This technology is secure and easy to use. When you see a site’s URL begin with ‘HTTPS://’ rather than ‘HTTP://,’ it uses SSL. If a website is using it, you can trust that it’s safe to enter your credit card details or personal information on their site.
Mobile-friendly website
In today’s competitive world, it’s not enough to have a beautiful website that shows off your products or services. Your potential customers also need to reach you on their smartphones and tablets quickly.
Mobile-friendly websites are the new standard of Google, Yahoo! and Bing considering your site’s mobile experience in their rankings. A mobile-friendly website does not mean a simple mirror of your current website. It’s about thinking about the device and how a user will interact with it.
When you design your website with mobile devices in mind, you streamline your company’s online presence and make it easier for customers to view your products and services whenever they want.
Speed up your website
Speed is a big deal when it comes to the user experience on your website. Speed affects whether or not people leave your site, how long they stay on it, and even if they come back in the future. It is also an important ranking factor for Google, other search engines, and social media sites. If you want more traffic from search engines and social media, you need to make sure visitors can find your site quickly. By speeding up your website, you can increase engagement and drive more sales from every visitor.
If you want to speed up your site, you should use fast hosting and a fast DNS provider. It’s also worth avoiding overloading your pages with too many scripts and unnecessary plugins by deleting or minimizing their impact on page load times. If you’re not sure how to spot these, Google has a helpful tool that checks how your website performs across devices.
Use the right URL structure
Your URL plays a significant role in your search engine optimization. The better optimized your URL is, the more likely it will appear at the top of the search engine results page. Having the proper HTML structure will help search engines determine what your web page is about and what type of content they can expect to find on your site.
Use keywords in your URLs, but don’t overuse them. Over-optimized search terms in a URL can be flagged as spam by search engines, which may penalize your website or remove it from an index altogether.
Secure website
Google has upped its game to prioritize secure sites in search results in the last seven years. A modern website with secure encryption data is critically important for business, especially since customers are highly alert about cybercrime and cyberattacks. Most importantly, your users need to feel safe when they visit your site; they need to trust that it’s been designed with their needs and security in mind.
Securing your website is a significant first step to protecting your user data, and Google recently announced they would begin ranking sites that use HTTPS as more secure than those that don’t. If you’re looking to secure your site, there are many steps you can take. These include upgrading your CMS software, choosing a fast, safe and reliable host, creating strong passwords, limiting user access, backing up regularly by encrypting your information and using a secure server for registration and payments.
Address redirect issues
Redirects carry a powerful force in technical SEO because they let search engines know about changes you’ve made to your website. It allows the search engine and users to add value to your new information and index it according to the most updated version.
Redirects ensure that when changes are made to a webpage, search engines have the opportunity to find and index your new information without having to perform duplicate content penalties by identifying and fixing redirect chains and using 301 and 302 redirects correctly.
Identify and fix redirect chains:
Redirects are used to take visitors from one page to another. This is especially useful if you want to change the destination of a link or move an entire site. When this redirection takes place, you’ll need to set up redirect chains to keep from creating duplicate content issues with search engines like Google. Fixing Redirect Chains ensures that your website will run smoothly and be easy for users to remember.
Use 301 and 302 redirects correctly:
When you create a redirect from one page of your website to another page, it can be confusing because there is no way to tell if it is permanent or temporary. Moreover, if you misuse redirects, they can harm your website’s SEO performance and even make search engines think your new pages are spam sites. To avoid that, you should always use 301 redirects instead of 302 redirects when creating new pages.
Register website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Registering a website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is an essential step to dominating your search engine rankings. These tools will help you track the performance of your content, notify you if something goes wrong, and keep you updated on changes in the search engine algorithm, such as new trends or updates.
Using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools will ensure your site is registered correctly with the search engines. These services also allow you to watch your site’s general performance from a search engine perspective. The things you can do with the tools include:
- Testing your site’s mobile usability by accessing search analytics.
- Viewing backlinks to your site.
- Disavowing spammy link
Create an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap allows search engines to understand better what pages are on your website. These files help search engines crawl your website more effectively and improve page ranking by sending a clear signal out to the world that you want people to find your site.
XML sitemaps are a list of pages on a website. XML is short for extensible Markup Language, and it contains a comprehensive list of all the pages on your site and what files each page includes. The file is then submitted to search engines so they can crawl through your site more effectively.
Fix duplicate content issues
Duplicate content issues can be confusing for users and can also be used to manipulate search rankings or win more traffic. The critical thing to remember is that this practice is often frowned upon by search engines and could result in penalties such as decreased search ranking or even being entirely banned from the search engine.
Duplicate content is simply a page like another page on your website. In some cases, it can be due to mistakes and can be a big problem for your website – especially if you’re trying to rank well in the search engines. If a user comes across two identical content pages, they won’t know which one is the most relevant and will bounce from your site more than likely. This can give search engines the impression that you have low-quality content and negatively impact your rankings.
Winding-up
Technical SEO is the essential aspect of SEO with the primary goal of improving your website’s performance and ranking in search engines. As stated by a digital marketing consultant, it’s not enough to optimize what you see on the surface, like changing your meta tags or writing great titles for your pages. You have to dive deep into the code and ensure that everything is configured correctly for search engines to read it. Implementing technical SEO can be difficult and time-consuming. However, it is essential to the success of your website.
Also read: Link Building Strategies In 2022
