What’s Technical SEO? 8 Technical Aspects Everyone Should Know

All of the work that goes into building an SEO strategy, like keyword research and link building, only focuses on organic traffic. However, you still need to give Google access to your site to check how the technical stuff plays out.

SEO revolves around keyword research, meta titles, descriptions, and link building for content publishers. These SEO elements are precious on web pages and can drive organic traffic to sites. However, focusing on improving these elements may sometimes leave technical areas of the site failing. When the technical part is overlooked, most sites are not mobile optimized, have broken links, or lack designs. While these do not determine traffic, they provide Google with a path into your website to index pages. Here are eight technical SEO aspects that can help your site thrive and be on the top of search engines.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO consists of improving technical aspects of a website behind the scenes to boost page rankings on search engines. Elements such as site architecture, loading speeds, and mobile optimization contribute largely to technical SEO. Improving technical SEO starts with an audit of your website and includes identifying areas that are failing and restructuring them.

Technical SEO Aspects for Publishers

Faster Loading Time

Internet users expect web pages to load faster, and they might leave a site if it is loading slowly. Every extra second a page takes to load results in reduced traffic. When these users move to other websites, there will be no conversions. Google understands the inconvenience of slow web pages and only prefers the ones that load faster. Therefore, page experience has become one of the most significant ranking factors for Google. You can use SEO services to test your site speed and identify areas that need improvement.

Crawl Enabled

Search engines employ robots to crawl through websites and follow any available links to check content on your website. With a proper internal linking framework, you can help the robots to learn about critical content. Making minor adjustments on your site can help guide the robots by blocking crawling to specific sites if there is content you do not want to be indexed.

• txt file

The robots.txt file gives robots directions to your site, and since it is a powerful tool, it should be handled carefully. In most cases, publishers block CSS and JS files on their sites, preventing proper measuring of your website.

• Meta robots tag

The Meta robots tag lets you inform search engine robots that they can crawl a page but keep it out of the SERPs. It is also possible to instruct them to follow a page without following any links on the page.

No Dead Links

404-error pages will easily turn visitors away from your website, and that ruins your user experience. Furthermore, search engines also do not like landing pages that do not exist. They can also discover more dead links than visitors considering they follow every link they come across, even hidden ones. There are tools that assist in the retrieval of dead links on websites. Further prevention of dead links involves the redirection of page URLs that you move or delete.

Duplicate Content

Having the same content appear on multiple pages on your website can confuse search engines. Plagiarism can be penalized which can lead to lower rankings for all of the pages. Unfortunately, duplicate content may be hard to notice due to technical reasons. While it may not be significant to a site visitor, the search engine will pick it up. There are various ways to identify duplicate content on your website and select the page that should rank as original content.

Website Security

Technical SEO involves website security, and considering a safe website guarantees users of privacy. Implementing HTTPS is a great way to secure your website to minimize the interception of data being sent between the site and the browser. You will need an SSL certificate for HTTPS implementation, and Google has an HTTPS ranking signal that only ranks safe websites higher.

Structured Data

For a search engine to understand your content, website, or business, you need structured data. It allows you to tell search engines the kind of products or contents you post on your site. It also allows you to provide details about your products. Schema.org provides a fixed format for delivering this information for search engines to understand it better. Your content can then be placed in a bigger picture. Implementing structured data helps search engines understand your content and makes it eligible for rich results.

XML Sitemap on Website

An XML sitemap lists all the pages on your website, and you can use it as a guideline for search engines on your site. It ensures that search engines capture all the important content on your website. The XML sitemap is labeled as pages, posts, and tags and can display data modifications and the number of images on all pages. A website that has an internal linking structure connecting perfectly does not need an XML sitemap. Websites that lack an appealing structure can benefit from SEO services building an XML sitemap.

Hreflang

If your site has different languages to target various locations, you need to help your search engines understand the languages and countries you want to reach. When you assist search engines, people can view the appropriate website for their location in the search results. Hreflang tags can help you define the country and language you intend each page to target. It also prevents content duplication issues by distinguishing the regions.

Conclusion

All the information contained above covers only the basics since each aspect can be further explained in a single post. Remember, your technical SEO aspects do not need to be perfect; they just need to be streamlined to minimize issues on your website. Everything else will fall in into place, but you still have to check your website regularly for the performance of the technical elements.