Technical SEO

When you hear about SEO most of the only On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO comes to mind. Most don’t bother about Technical SEO. And few will be there who doesn’t know literally what is technical SEO? So, if you are curious to kn0w about what is Technical SEO, then you are in the right place. 

Keep reading. I will explain to you all about Technical SEO, why to do this and how to do Technical SEO?

In On-Page SEO we usually do all the changes on our website related to the content. And in Off-Page SEO we try to create backlinks and do all the Social Media and Social Bookmarking things.

But when it comes to changing something on your website, which will be made by your development team or if you are doing everything by yourself then by you only. You have to know some technical aspects of the website to develop it properly or convey it properly to your dev team.   

So, if you want to understand from basic then Technical SEO is all the technical things you are doing with your website for good SEO or to rank higher in Google. Most of the time we do proper On-Page SEO so that humans will easily understand your website but we forget to make it easy for different crawlers. 

And one of the most important things is Google is coming up with different algorithm changes every time. At that time you should have good technical skills to understand the changes Google wants to make properly.

So first question first what is Technical SEO?

What Is Technical SEO?

How to do technical SEO?

Technical SEO is all the technical things we do to rank better in SERP. When we write any new post the main basic steps are Crawling, Indexing and Ranking. The first two steps to some extent are done by Technical SEO which is Crawling, Indexing. For example, for the 1st step to Crawl, we can add sitemaps and Robot.txt. Likewise, for indexing, we can use Meta Robots. To make the search engines better understand your content you can use Structured Data.

To make the search engine better understand which page to rank or not, what I mean is if you have more than one page with the same content as copied content, then you have to add proper Canonical tag in the copied page. Because you can’t rank many pages with the same content so you have to mark anyone one Canonical. 

Then comes about content, which should be relevant. The website should be mobile-friendly. The website loading speed has to be awesome, it should be less but as per Google, there is not any particular standard for speed.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

If you have the best website in the world, and you have done On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO properly but you have not done Technical SEO properly.

Then there is a chance that your website will never rank in search engines. As you know for ranking your website, search engines need to find your website, crawl the website and render the website and finally index the website.

So, in these cases if your website is not reachable by the search engines then how can it index your website.

Image Source – Backlinko

Its not only about indexing your website in search engines, for better ranking of your website you have to see if your website is structured properly, your website is mobile optimized, your website should be secure, you should never use any copied content try to write unique and original content, your website has to load really fast.

There are many steps you can follow to optimize your website technically:

Site Structure

Your website structure plays a vital role in technical SEO like your menu bars have to be simple and easy to use. Your every page should be reachable. The sidebar has to be there. Keep in mind you are doing a good amount of internal linkings to increase your pages/session. 

Your website should be properly structured that will help search engine bots crawl your website properly.

According to Backlinko your website should have a Flat structure that will make it easy for search engines to crawl.

Flat Structure Website

Image Source – Backlinko

XML Sitemap

When you have a page added in your website, all search engines will eventually crawl your website index them.

But when you want to make search engines crawl your website manually then its better you should add an XML Sitemap to your website.

You can make search engines crawl your website by adding an XML file or HTML sitemap. You should add all your webpages in your XML Sitemap which you want to index in search engines.

You can add sitemap in Google search console:

Robots.txt File

At times when you want to hide some pages from search engines, you can block all those webpages by adding in a page which is called Robots.txt file.

Many times there might be some web pages which are private and we don’t want search engines to crawl or index them.

You can also prevent search engines from crawling some of your webpages which you don’t want to show in SERP by using Robot.txt file and meta tags.

Mobile-Friendly

We already know Google ranks all the websites on mobile first indexing basis.

What mobile first indexing means?

Before mobile-first indexing update Google used to rank websites by taking into consideration the desktop version of the website. But after the mobile-first indexing update came Google started ranking websites on the basis of the mobile optimization of the website.

So, for ranking better in the search engines your website has to be mobile optimized.

Your website has to be mobile-friendly. You can use AMP for loading your website on mobile very fast. You have to keep in mind that you use a mobile-friendly theme that is responsive to mobile and tabs.

Now you can also check your website performance in mobile version using Google Search Console.

URL Structure

When it comes to the URL, it has to be short, it has to be 17-25 characters, not more than that. Most of the time try to use a Domain name with fewer characters in it. While writing any post just use “your domain name”/”main keyword”.

Your URL should properly show the user where s/he is in your website. It will be more helpful if in your URL, you are only using your domain name and the main targeted keyword on which your content is based.

Try not to use any lengthy URL. And also try to avoid any unnecessary text in your URL.

Structured Data

Structured data will help your website get featured in rich snippets. You have to add schema to your website that will help in showing a rich snippet.

Adding schema markup may not help you in directly for SEO but if your posts start showing in search engine’s rich snippet that will increase your website’s CTR.

When you start ranking in rich snippet or Zero position you will get more and more clicks that will increase your click through rate.

SSL

If you want to have a secure future for your website and prevent it from any outside interference or hacking then you have to use SSL. https is much more secure than just HTTP. So try to use a good SSL.

And also Google will not rank your website if it is not secure. Google came up with an update and started down ranking all those websites that don’t have https.

When you use SSL in your website it will add more layers for your users to reach your website that will increase your security. 

Content

Content is the king.

As we know content is the most important thing when it comes to SEO. If you don’t have good, unique and original content then there is no point of doing SEO.

When we talk about content both quality of the content and quantity of the content matters. 

Thin Content

You have to see that there is no thin content issue on your website. According to Alexa a content with less than 250 words is treated as thin content. So, try to write content with a minimum of 800 words to avoid the thin content issue.

But nowadays if you go to any reputed website for digital marketing like Neil Patel or Backlinko, those guys write their content with 3000-4000 words. Don’t add just random words for the sake of making your content big instead of trying to write in depth and through content.

So that the user need not to go to another website to find the answer. In short you have to write content that covers everything related to that topic.

Original Content

If you have any duplicate content on your website as you have just copied the content from one page and pasted on another page as it is, then duplicates content issues will arise. 

Never ever copy and paste content, try to write original and unique content that provides value to your user.

If you use any duplicate content search engines can catch those easily and will never rank any copied content.

Canonical Tag

Canonical tags you have to use when you are copying your content from any other website.

In the canonical tag you have to mention the URL from which you have copied the content from. 

It is a good practise if you are using a self canonical tag for your original and unique contents. So, if any one copies your content and uses it on his/her website the values will come to your website.

404 Pages

404 Pages may not play a huge role in SEO, but when any user comes to your website and by mistake s/he goes to URL that is not present there in your website. At that time it will ruin the user experience.

So, to improve your user experience you should have to have a proper designed 404 pages. 

You should create a beautiful 404 pages where it’s better if you add some of your content to the page. There should be links to some content in your website so that when a user comes to the 404 page, instead of bouncing back from your website the user has something to look for.

301 Redirects

301 redirects are very important to keep the link juice of any old URL in your website that you have deleted.

For example if you have a web page with some good backlinks to it. But for some reason you have to remove that URL from your website, that time you have to redirect the old URL to any of the existing URLs in your website. 

If you don’t redirect the old URL and you remove the URL then you will miss your valuable backlinks. 

So, whenever you remove any of your old URL you should redirect the old URL to any existing URL for a minimum of 1 year.

And the same you can do with your website also. If you want to redirect your one website to another website permanently you can do with 301 redirect.

Page Speed

Page speed plays a vital role in ranking a website top on SERP. If you talk about content there is good competition and everyone tries to provide some awesome content. In this case, Search Engines will rank those websites on top which take less time to load, in other words, it should load very fast. It’s better if your website loads in less than 2.2s. 

Most of the time if your website takes more time to load on desktop or mobile it will ruin user experience. So, to improve user experience you have to make your website load fast.

To make your website load really fast on mobile devices you can use AMP.

AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages, that will load your website in mobile devices really fast. 

To achieve a better speed you can compress your scripts, you can use CSS Sprites, you can use CSS minification. And also you must have to use CDNs and caching.

Conclusion

These are some of the best and proven techniques for doing proper technical SEO. Never ever neglect your technical SEO part or else it will be very difficult to rank your website.

Give a try to all the steps explained above and let me know if I miss any technique.

Do you know anything other than these in Technical SEO, please leave your views in the comment section.