To succeed in this cutthroat competitive world, merely having an online presence is no longer enough. You must optimize your content for search engines to stay ahead of your competitors. This process, called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), enhances your visibility and drives more traffic. There are multiple types of SEO that you should know about, one of which is technical SEO.
This blog will dive into technical SEO basics and the best practices to follow.
What is Technical SEO, and Why is it Important?
Simply put, technical SEO involves optimizing the technical elements of your website for search engines to achieve higher rankings in the search results. It is all about improving the performance of your website, and involves various disciplines to help websites load quickly and enhance user experience. Technical SEO is more complicated than traditional SEO, and many brands use technical SEO agencies for better search engine rankings. Main technical SEO services include SEO audit, site load speed optimization, file size optimization, removing broken links, etc.
Technical search engine optimization is essential as it greatly impacts your website’s search engine performance. If your site doesn’t meet the technical requirements, the search engine won’t even know that your page exists. A lack of SEO optimization might make the search engine believe that the website offers a bad user experience. As a result, your site won’t rank in the search results, which will lead to less traffic, leads, and sales.
Technical SEO Best Practices
Now that we know why technical SEO is important let’s learn about the best practices to follow to optimize your sites for better rankings.
Improve your page speed.
Did you know that 47% of customers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less? Your website should be fast, and your pages should load in seconds. If a user visits your website and it takes too long to load, they will leave the page. This creates a bad experience and hurts your rankings and traffic.
Ensure your website is secure and accessible.
Website security is a major technical SEO element that you can’t ignore. If your website isn’t safe, search engines won’t index your site. Thus, you must implement HTTPs to ensure that no one can intercept your website data. Apart from security, you also need to focus on website accessibility. Add alt text, captions, clear labels, and write transcripts to make your website more accessible.
Regularly submit sitemaps.
A sitemap is a roadmap that lists all the pages for your website and makes it easy for search engines to learn more about your site pages. You can submit your XML sitemap to Google and other search engines simply by adding the URL. As new pages are added to your site, it’s essential to regularly submit sitemaps so that search engines have an up-to-date roadmap.
Keep the robots.txt file optimized.
A Robots.txt file is a plain text file in your site’s root directory that helps manage bot traffic and prevents your website from being overrun with requests. It is used to tell search engine crawlers how you want them to crawl your website. While these files are handy, they are seriously tricky to optimize. If you’re new to these text files, hire a technical SEO agency to ensure your robots.txt file is in proper shape.
Focus on your website’s architecture.
Your website’s architecture is another important technical SEO element. It determines how users will navigate your website and plays a huge role in how search engines crawl and index the site. A logical site structure provides a positive user experience as they can seamlessly navigate from one page to another. Your website structure must include a site hierarchy, URL structures, breadcrumbs, and internal links.
Include Internal Links.
As discussed above, all your pages should have internal links. For instance, you can add links to relevant pages while writing blog posts on a particular topic, product, or service. If your pages don’t link to the other site pages, search engines will find it difficult to crawl and index them.
Ensure mobile responsiveness.
As per statistics, 58% of searches are conducted on mobile globally. Thus, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll miss out on traffic and rankings. Conduct Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check your website’s mobile responsiveness. Implement a responsive design, so your website displays well on smaller screens and all functions work properly.
Fix Broken Pages.
Broken pages or links give a bad impression because customers can’t find the content they are searching for. There are various tools available to find broken links by simply adding the website URL. You must find the broken links and update or remove them to ensure users have a seamless experience.
Wrapping up
These are some of the best technical SEO practices to optimize your website and increase traffic. You can read our detailed guide to learn more about increasing website traffic. Implement the information given in this blog and keep brushing up on your SEO knowledge to enhance your website performance and increase your search engine ranking.
