Technical SEO is the optimization strategy and technique that ensures your website’s technical foundation is solid and search engine-friendly.
It involves changing your website’s backend structure and settings to improve its ranking in search engines.
This article will explore the world of technical SEO and its various components and benefits.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO can build or destroy your business. Search engines use web crawlers or bots to explore and index websites, and technical SEO ensures that these bots can easily crawl and understand your website’s content.
It helps optimize your website’s structure, navigation, and internal linking so the Search Engine bots can crawl and index your pages because improper indexation can cause missed opportunities for organic traffic.
How Crawling Works and How to Optimize for It
Crawling is the process of search engines like Google scanning and indexing web pages online.
It is the first step in determining how and when your website appears in search engine results pages (SERPs). To optimize crawling for your website, consider the following techniques:
Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file is a text file located in your website’s root directory. It instructs search engine crawlers which pages and directories to crawl and which ones to ignore.
By properly configuring your robots.txt file, you can ensure that search engines focus on indexing important content and avoid crawling unnecessary pages.
It depends on which files you want search engines to crawl and which they do not. If you visit https://facileway.com/robots.txt, you can see how I have optimized my robots.txt files for my website.
If you need help understanding how to create your Robots.txt file and submit your website, you can get help from your hosting support. I prefer Cloudways for this. They are supportive and help me whenever I need help on any technical issue.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a file that consists of all the pages of your website and provides information about their content, priority, and last modified date.
Creating and submitting an XML sitemap to search engines helps them discover and crawl your website more effectively.
You will get your sitemap in any of the following two:
- yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
- yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
A comprehensive sitemap ensures that search engines get all the essential pages. Here is the step-by-step guide you can submit your site to Google with XML sitemaps:
Access Google Search Console (GSC): If you still need to set up Google Search Console, follow the guide for your website.
Go to Sitemaps: After logging in to GSC, go to “Indexing” and click on “Sitemaps” in the side menu.
Submit Your Sitemap: In the “Sitemaps” section, there’s a box where you can paste your sitemap URL (like yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Then click “Submit.”
Confirmation Message: Google will start checking your sitemap. Once done, you’ll get a message in Google Search Console saying it’s been submitted successfully like the following image.
Internal Linking
A solid internal linking structure helps search engine crawlers navigate your website easily.
By linking relevant pages together, you provide a clear path for crawlers to follow and ensure that no page is left unindexed.
It would help if you used descriptive anchor text for your internal links. Internal linking helps search engines understand the context and relevance of each linked page.
If you have a lot of website content or news websites, The LinkBoss can be your best friend in automating this process.
Creating SEO-Friendly Site Architecture
The site architecture refers to how your website’s pages are organized and structured. A well-designed site architecture can benefit both users and search engines. Here are some tips for creating an SEO-friendly site architecture:
Logical Hierarchy: Plan your website’s structure logically, with the most essential pages accessible from the homepage and subpages organized under relevant categories.
This makes it easier for users and search engine crawlers to navigate and understand the content on your site.
URL Structure: Use a clean, descriptive, and easy-to-understand URL structure. Don’t use unnecessary numbers or symbols in your URLs. Instead, include relevant keywords to provide context and improve SEO.
Use Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are navigational aids that show users their current location within your website.
They reduce the bounce rate and provide a clear, hierarchical structure that makes it easier for Google Bots to crawl and understand the site’s organization.
If you notice this content of Backlinko on the content marketing, you will see that they have used Breadcrumbs for their content making it easy to navigate and understand where the content belongs to. If you are using WordPress, it’s quite easy to create breadcrumbs for your content.
How Indexing Works and How to Optimize for It
Indexing is the process by which search engines like Google crawl and analyze website content to determine its relevance and quality. When a website is indexed, it becomes available for search engine users to discover in search engine result pages (SERPs).
You can check yourself if your site got indexed by Google or not. For example, you want to check the indexation of facileway.com. Simply go to Google and write the following image:
You can see that Google properly indexed the facileway.com. If you scroll down, you will see all the posts and pages submitted to Google are indexed.
You can also check the individual page to check its indexation. Here is how to do it:
To optimize for indexing, follow these best practices:
Quality Content: Create high-quality, unique, and relevant content that provides value to users. Search engines prioritize well-written content that answers search queries effectively and satisfies user intent. If you are writing using AI tools, make sure it’s fact-checked and gives a human touch to make it more meaningful.
Metadata Optimization: Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags with relevant keywords. The data will give the search engine crawler an overview of your page’s content and help improve the search ranking.
XML Sitemaps Creation: Remember to create and submit your XML file to search engines. This document contains all the pages on your website that you want your Search bots to crawl.
Robots.txt: Use the robots.txt file to indicate which pages search engines should or should not crawl. This file helps prevent sensitive or duplicative content indexing, protecting your site’s overall SEO.
Some other SEO practices ensure no trouble in content indexing. Here are some key practices:
Using Noindex Tag Carefully
The “no index” meta tag is a directive in a webpage’s HTML code that tells search engines not to index that page.
Here is what it looks like that is placed on <head> section of your webpage :
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">It is helpful for content that may not be valuable to users or is duplicative. However, it should be used cautiously to avoid accidentally blocking essential pages from being indexed.
To use the noindex tag properly:
Identify Low-Value Content: Determine which pages on your website might provide little value to users or could be duplicative, such as landing pages with similar content or temporary pages that are no longer relevant.
Implement the Noindex Tag: Add the noindex meta tag to the HTML code of the identified pages, either manually or with the help of plugins or CMS settings. This commands the search engine bots not to index those pages.
Regular Monitoring: Keep track of your website’s indexed pages using tools like Google Search Console or Semrush. This helps ensure that crucial pages are correctly tagged with no index, adversely affecting your organic visibility.
Implementing Canonical Tags Where Needed
Canonical tags are HTML elements that help consolidate multiple versions of the same webpage into a single, preferred version.
This prevents issues with duplicate content, which can confuse search engines and impact your SEO efforts.
To implement canonical tags effectively:
Identify Duplicate Content: Analyze your website for duplicate content issues, such as multiple URLs leading to similar or identical content. This can occur due to URL variations, session IDs, parameterized URLs, or different webpage versions.
Select a Preferred URL: Determine the canonical or your preferred URL that search engine crawlers should index and display in SERPs. This is usually the URL that contains the original content.
Add the Canonical Tag: Find the duplicate pages and Insert the canonical tag in the HTML code of the duplicate pages by specifying the preferred URL. This tells search engines that the pointed URL is the primary version, consolidating search engine ranking signals for that specific content.
Monitor and Update: Regularly review your website to ensure that canonical tags are correctly implemented and that new duplicate content issues aren’t arising. When changing your website’s structure, updating canonical tags or creating redirects may be necessary.
Bonus Technical SEO Checklist
1. Use HTTPS
A critical aspect of technical SEO is ensuring that your website uses HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS encrypts the data transmitted between your website and the visitor’s browser to provide a secure connection.
This helps protect the user’s information and carries a ranking signal for search engines. Switching to HTTPS can improve your website’s credibility and visibility in search results.
If you see ‘not secure’ that means you are not using HTTPS on your website and you need to install an SSL certificate on your website.
Normally the SSL certificate comes with your web hosting provider. You can also get it free from this website.
Make sure you have redirected your HTTP version to the HTTPS version so that all the existing users will be redirected to your HTTPS version of the website.
2. Find and fix duplicate content.
Duplicate content will harm your SEO efforts by confusing search engines and diluting ranking signals. To address this, you must identify duplicate content issues on your website.
This can include multiple URLs leading to similar or identical content. Once identified, you can consolidate the content onto a single URL or use canonical tags to specify the preferred version.
Resolving duplicate content issues ensures that search engines understand which version of the content to rank, resulting in better SEO performance.
Simply run a site audit on your Semrush. You will come to know which duplicated pages are hampering your ranking. Simply solve the issue and you are ready to go! Semrush offers a free trial, you won’t be charged till the trial period. So grab it and fix your duplicate site issue!
Let’s find the Duplicate content issues together and fix it:
The next step is to find the duplicate pages through the search feature:
3. Improve page speed
Slow-loading pages cause high bounce rates and lower rankings. You can check your Page Speed Insights using this tool. You will see here 0-100 scores. You have to try to gain as much score as you can between 0-100.
You can see that facileway.com has gained a good page speed score in the eyes of Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool. I am using WP Rocket which helps me to optimize my web pages and images.
To improve your website’s speed, try these tips:
- Compress Image Sizes: Compress and resize images to reduce their load time. I am using Imagify. It’s pretty good.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript Files: Remove unnecessary characters and spaces to make these files smaller and faster to load. Choose a good Caching tool.
- Use Browser Caching: Store parts of your website on users’ browsers to load faster on repeat visits.
- Use CDN Services: Distribute your content across multiple servers worldwide to speed up user access. I am using Cloudways. It comes with premium CDN Services that help to offer a blazing-fast website surfing experience.
4. Mobile-friendliness
More than 90% of users use mobile phones to surf the Internet, so ensuring a mobile-friendly website is essential. Use themes that ensure a responsive web design that suits various screen sizes and devices, providing a better user experience.
Search engines favour mobile-friendly sites, so optimizing for mobile speed is crucial. Slow-loading mobile pages can negatively impact your SEO, making it essential to ensure quick load times on mobile devices.
5. Use of Pagination
Proper pagination is essential if your website contains content across multiple pages, such as blog posts or product listings. If you have chosen WordPress, it comes with the default themes. You don’t need additional coding to use pagination.
This ensures that all pages are indexed correctly and prevents duplicate content issues. Pagination also enhances user experience by allowing users to navigate the content easily.
6. Use of breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs help users understand your website’s hierarchical structure and their current location within it. They appear as a trail of links, usually at the top of a webpage.
Breadcrumbs improve user experience and provide search engines with additional context and understanding of your website’s structure.
7. Use Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is a text file that resides on your website’s server and commands Google crawlers, which pages to crawl and index.
You can use Robots.txt files to restrict access to specific sections of your website, such as private or duplicate content.
Properly configuring the robots.txt file helps search engine crawlers prioritize the most important pages and avoid crawling irrelevant or sensitive content.
8. Implementation of Structured Data
Implementing Structured data adds extra information to a website that helps search engine crawlers understand what it is all about by adding schema markup.
This helps to get featured in rich snippets in SERPs, such as star ratings, images, or event details, which make your site stand out. These eye-catching snippets can increase clicks and improve your site’s SEO performance.
Google supports tons of Structured data markups. You have to choose the one that is the best fit for your pages. If you are running an e-commerce store, adding product structured data to your product pages can be beneficial to increase your CTR.
9. Optimization of core web vitals
Core Web Vitals are specific metrics that measure a webpage’s user experience. These metrics include page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
Optimizing core web vitals is crucial for SEO as search engines increasingly prioritize websites that provide a smooth and efficient user experience.
To optimize core web vitals, you can reduce server response time, optimize code, minimize render-blocking resources, and improve overall page performance.
10. Use of Hreflang for content in multiple languages
If your website uses multiple languages, implementing Hreflang tags is essential. This indicates to search engines the language and geographical targeting of specific web pages.
Hreflang helps search engines deliver the appropriate version of your content to the readers based on their language and location preferences.
Using hreflang tags ensures that your website reaches the right audience for each language version, enhancing user experience and improving SEO performance.
For example, Semrush uses multiple versions of its homepage in multiple languages. Have a look at the Semrush homepage in English:
Semrush homepage in Portuguese:
For each different version of the language, Semrush uses hreflang tags to tell the Google search engine about their target audiences. Whenever someone from Portugal visits Semrush, the website content will appear in Portuguese.
As a newbie, it may seem difficult for you. But these hreflang tags are very easy to implement. All you need to do is insert the following tags in the <head> section of all the versions of your pages.
If you are planning to use your homepage in English, Spanish, German and Portuguese, simply add the following tags in your <head> section:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yourwebsite.com" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://yourwebsite.com/es/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt" href="https://yourwebsite.com/pt/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://yourwebsite.com/de" />You can check here different codes for different countries for your website hreflang tags optimization.
How To Solve All The Technical Issues
It’s crucial to know how to implement structured data, optimize core web vitals, and use Hreflang tags for multilingual content to enhance your website’s overall SEO performance.
Technical SEO is a complex process requiring continuous monitoring and updates. Implementing technical SEO best practices can greatly benefit your website by improving its crawlability, user experience, and rankings.
It would help if you did not overlook or consider technical SEO secondary to other SEO strategies. It is a fundamental aspect of any successful search engine optimization campaign.
So, focus on the technical aspects of your website that can efficiently crawl, index, and rank to drive more organic traffic.
Semrush site audit makes sure you are staying on top of your technical SEO issues. All you need to run a site audit
If you click on the About issue option, you will get a site note on how to solve these technical SEO issues without any hassle.
You can also use other tools like Screaming Frogs, and Ahrefs to find out the Technical SEO issues and fix them. I hope now you know how to get started with the Technical things of a website and fix the issues that are causing your website ranking.
Feel free to comment below if you have loved this article and share it with your friends who are struggling with Technical SEO.