Technical SEO: A Definitive Guide to Follow
What is Technical SEO?
In our SEO blog series, we are currently discussing the main types of “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)“, and Technical SEO is the last type. We have already discussed the “On-page SEO” and “Off-page SEO”, one must read those blogs to get the best understanding of this Technical SEO blog.
Technical SEO refers to “the process of meeting the technical requirements of search engines in terms of SEO for improving the organic traffic and organic ranking of the website”. Speed optimisation and making crawling easy for search engines are the major elements of Technical SEO. It is somehow related to the on-page SEO for improving the website ranking but different from the off-page SEO, which includes the various channels for exposure of the website.
Why is Technical SEO important?
Technical SEO importance is evident because if you have the best off-page and on-page SEO practices. But your website is not properly indexed and crawled, the search engines will not rank it. Your audience will not be able to find you, which will lead you to nothing in terms of financial and moral terms. One must not think that only indexing is enough for technical SEO; many factors like speed optimisation of the website on mobile and desktop, unique content free from duplication, and the website’s security.
Characteristics of Technically Optimised Website
Crawlable for search engines
For crawling websites, search engines use robots. For discovering the content on your website, these robots follow the links. So, an optimised and understandable internal link structure is required to make it easy for robots to understand your website’s content. You can set instructions for robots to guide them about crawling certain pages. If you disallow a page, then robots will not crawl them. For providing directions to robots, the file named robots.txt should be there.
Speed optimisation
In today’s world, people are very busy with their stuff and don’t have time to wait. If your website is slow and not loading fast enough to make people stay on your website. You are already losing customers without even getting an opportunity to show them your content. When visitors leave your website due to this issue, search engines will start determining that your website is not worth it to show people in this specific query and will drop your rank.
Minimum dead links
This factor will even affect your website’s ranking and user experience more negatively. If your website has dead links, it will lead the customers to non-existing pages, resulting in a bad user experience. The visitor will get annoyed by this inconvinence. You often see the 404-page error on websites that is an example of dead links. There may be a chance that visitors may not find all dead links on your website. But robots will discover each of them and drop your rating organically. This issue is increasing day by day because the website is a continuous work, and people usually don’t give attention to it, which ultimately affects them negatively in the long run.
Unique content
If your website pages have the same content or different websites have the same content. This will confuse the search engines to rank the websites. Ultimately the search engines will rank the websites lower if they have the same content. For visitors, this thing doesn’t matter because they are just looking for good content. But for search engines, this matters a lot because they are determined websites technically.
Security
If you are not secure, people will not trust you, and people don’t visit those websites which are not trustworthy. So make sure you have a safe website, and protecting users’ privacy is an essential requirement. One must ask what type of privacy, so for making it more transparent. Let’s have an example if someone is logging in to your site. Then his/her credentials must be kept safe and protected from any security risks.
XML sitemap
The XML sitemap is the roadmap for search engines to crawl the website. It is the list of all the website pages to ensure search engines will not miss important content. If your website has a robust internal linking structure, you might not need a sitemap. But if you don’t own a setup like that, you should have this XML sitemap.
Optimise URL structure
For good technical SEO practice, it is essential to have an optimised URL structure. A proper guideline for a good URL structure is given below:
- It must be short and descriptive.
- Avoid unnecessary characters and words.
- Avoid keyword stuffing but include the targeted keywords naturally.
- Use – to separate words.
- Use lowercase characters in the URL
