Technical SEO is a comprehensive field of study. It encompasses everything from the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) to advanced techniques that will give you an edge over your competitors. Technical SEO is a rapidly changing field, meaning that staying current with the latest best practices requires constant diligence and attention to detail.
Technical SEO Audit Fundamentals
Technical SEO is a broad discipline encompassing the following key areas:
- Crawlability of your website and its content (including code quality, pagination, redirects, canonicalization)
- Indexing your site for search engines, which includes the structure of your internal links and the meta tags on each page.
- Renderability issues that affect how your pages are presented to searchers (including mobile usability and performance).
Speed is also important when it comes to ranking on Google and other major search engines.
Optimising The Speed Of A Website
Page speed is a metric that measures how fast your website loads. Optimising your website’s speed is one of the most important things you can do to improve your conversion rates.
A slow-loading website has a significant impact on how customers perceive your brand and how they respond to your service or product. If the website is slow, that leads to a poor user experience.
People who visit a page that takes over 3 seconds to load are more likely to abandon their website than those who visit pages that load in less than 1 second.
Tips for optimizing your page speed and website speed:
1. Use fewer images.
2. Reduce image sizes.
3. Reduce file size for CSS and Javascript files.
4. Move scripts and styles to the bottom of the page.
Unblock Search Bots From Accessing Pages
Bots need to be able to access all pages on your website, including those that are blocked from public view. Allowing search bots to crawl the hidden pages of your site helps make sure that you’re not missing any inbound links and traffic opportunities.
If a page is blocked, it won’t appear in search results. This means that Googlebot (and other search bots) can’t access the page — which means no link juice can flow through it and no one will see it! The same goes for links pointing to unindexed pages: if they’re coming from external websites and aren’t being crawled by Googlebot (or another search engine), they won’t help the authority of your site with Google’s algorithm—and neither will their anchor text or link juice do anything positive for you.
Crawling, Rendering and Indexing
In order to understand the technical side of SEO, you need to know what crawling, rendering and indexing are. Crawling is when a search engine’s robot visits your site and reads through the content. Rendering refers to how well it can read it. Optimizing these two factors helps improve your rankings in organic search results.
Indexing is when the crawler passes along information about your pages (such as URLs) back to their servers so that they can be added into their database for future reference as part of their indexing system. The more pages on your website that get indexed by Google or Bing, for example, means there are more opportunities for them to get found via searches done on those search engines’ platforms.
Meta Robots Tags vs. Robots.txt
Meta Robots Tags can be used to tell search engines which pages to crawl and index. For example, you might use a meta robots tag to tell Google that the home page should be crawled and indexed, but only the “blog” section of your site should be crawled and indexed. You can also use meta robots tags to tell Google which pages not to show in search results.
If you want to block a page from being crawled and indexed by Google, you can use the robots.txt file. This is a file that’s placed in your website’s root directory and contains instructions for search engines about which pages to crawl and index (or not). This is an important tool for webmasters, because it can be used to tell search engines which pages to crawl and index. For example, you might use a meta robots tag to tell Google that the home page should be crawled and indexed, but only the “blog” section of your site should be crawled and indexed.
Site Structure and Navigation
Site structure and navigation are two critical components of SEO. Users want to be able to easily find their way around your site, so make sure that it’s quick and easy for them.
- Site structure: Your site should have a clear hierarchy of pages and links leading from the homepage to other important pages like product pages or blog posts. A good example of this is Amazon, which uses an intuitive navigation bar at the top of its web page with links leading visitors through multiple levels of content (e.g., “Digital Music” > “Top Albums”). If you don’t have any sort of clear structure in place, search engines may not be able to determine what type of content each webpage contains—and if they can’t do that effectively, then they won’t be able to rank your website well in organic search results!
- Breadcrumbs: These are breadcrumb links underneath each webpage title on a website (e.g., “Home > Products > Widget”) so users can see where they are within the site’s hierarchy without leaving their current page or having multiple tabs open! They’re also helpful because they’ll let Google know what category each page falls under, so it can better categorize those results accordingly when ranking them against other sites within similar niches.
Create an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, including any sub-pages, and their corresponding URLs. It’s essentially a road map for search engine bots to use as they crawl through your site.
Why is this important? A well-built XML sitemap can help improve how fast and efficiently search engines find and index new content on your website. It can also help you identify gaps in the pages currently indexed—and make sure those new pages get indexed quickly so users don’t have to wait for them to show up when they type in a query.
Log into Google Search Console, go to your account and proceed to “Sitemaps” settings, then click “Add Sitemap.” You can submit your sitemaps to be indexed whether they are HTML, XML, or TXT! Afterwards all the important pages on your site will be easier for visitors and crawlers to find your pages and content easier.
Thin and Duplicate Content
Thin and duplicate content are two common types of search engine optimization (SEO). Technical SEO will not be effective with poor content. Thin content is content that doesn’t provide enough value to the user, and duplicate content is when the same piece of information appears on multiple pages.
What You Should Do About Thin Content
Did you know that not having enough content to fill your website can actually hurt its SEO performance? Thin content might be hurting your rankings instead of helping them. This means that if you want to make sure that your site is performing at its best, then you need to make sure that all of the content on your site is unique and relevant. That way, Google will know that your website is worth ranking highly in search results.
Here’s how to fix duplicate content:
Duplicate content can be a problem, especially if you have the same content on your website. It’s important to fix duplicate content because Google will penalize you for it.
- Find the duplicate content by using plagiarism tools like Copyscape or Sitebulb.
- Make sure each page of your site has a unique title tag and meta description. If not, it can be flagged as duplicate content on your site.
- Delete any existing copies of the duplicated content on your site and make sure that they no longer appear in search results or Google Analytics. The method you can use is either using meta robots tags on the duplicated page. However, you can disallow URLs using Google Search Console.
- You can use 301 redirects, which will redirect users from the old URL to the new one. This way, Google will know that the content has moved and will update its search index accordingly. Or, you can use canonical tags to tell Google which version of your content is the original and which is not. You do this by telling Google which URL you want to be the canonical version.
- Update your sitemaps so that only one version of each page is included and all other versions are removed from your site’s indexing. This will help ensure that Google only indexes one version of each page on your website so that users won’t see any duplicate content when they search for it in their browser or using Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Use Structured Data to Improve Your Search Ranking
Structured data is an essential part of technical SEO since it is a way of organizing information so that it can be easily understood by web crawlers and search engines. Structured data can be used by major search engines, like Google, to provide more accurate results. When you create structured data, you’re telling the search engine what your content is about and how it should be displayed in search results.
Why is Structured Data Important for SEO?
Structured data helps the search engine understand what your page is about so they can create a better search experience for users. It’s a way of helping them better understand your website so they can return more relevant results for users. Structured data has many uses, including improving search engine rankings, making it easier for users to discover your content and providing rich snippets in the SERPs.
How to Add Structured Data to Your Website
There are many ways to add structured data to your pages so that Google can better understand them and show them off in search results. In this post we’ll focus on one method: using schema.org mark-up language (often abbreviated as “schema”). Schema.org is a collaborative effort between Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo to create a common language(microdata) for structured data on the web. You can add structured data to your site’s HTML and tell Google what type of content each page contains.
Technical SEO is both challenging and rewarding. Technical SEO requires you to constantly be up-to-date on the latest trends in search engine optimization, master Google’s algorithms and keep track of your site’s performance. Technical SEO is a crucial aspect of an SEO strategy and can be the difference between achieving your business goals and falling short. In order to succeed in today’s competitive market, invest time and resources into ensuring your website has all the right technical foundations.
