In this technical SEO course for beginners, you will learn what is technical SEO and its aspects in digital marketing, why is it important, and what does technical SEO include?
Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more efficiently to improve organic ranking.
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What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO consists in improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable to search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving the elements of your website to achieve higher rankings. It is the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about making a website known through other channels.
What does Technical SEO Include?
Technical SEO is the practice of ensuring that a website satisfies the technical requirements of modern search engines in order to improve organic ranking. Key aspects of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist
Search engines give preferential treatment in search results to websites that have certain technical features - such as a secure connection, responsive design, or fast load time - and technical SEO is the work you need to do to ensure your website does the same.
Below is a checklist of important steps you can take to ensure your technical SEO is up to snuff. By following these guidelines, you can help ensure that the security and structure of your site meet the expectations of search engine algorithms, and are rewarded accordingly in search results.
Technical SEO Examples
Use SSL
SSL is a security protocol that provides an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can spot a site using SSL fairly easily: the website URL starts with "https://" and not "http://".
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
A responsive website design automatically adjusts to allow for easy navigation and reading on any device.
Google is clear that a responsive site is considered a very important ranking signal by its algorithms. And, with the introduction of Google's "mobile first" approach to content indexing, a responsive website is more important than ever.
So it makes sense to make sure your website is fully responsive and will display in the best possible format for mobile, tablet, or desktop users.
Speed up your site
Search engines favor fast-loading sites: page speed is considered an important ranking signal.
Below are several ways to make your site load faster:
- Use fast hosting.
- Choose a fast DNS ("domain name system") provider.
- Minimize "HTTP requests" - reduce the use of scripts and plugins.
- Use one CSS (the code used to tell the web browser how to display your website) instead of multiple CSS or inline CSS.
- Make sure your image files are as small as possible (without being too pixelated).
- Compress your web pages (you can do this with a tool called GZIP).
- Reduce your site's code - remove unnecessary spaces, line breaks, and indentations in your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (check out Google's Minify resource page for help with this).
Resolve duplicate content issues
Duplicate content can be confusing to users and search engine algorithms; it can also be used to try to manipulate search rankings or get more traffic.
As a result, search engines don't like this type of content, and Google and Bing advise webmasters to fix any duplicate content problems they find.
You can solve duplicate content problems by:
- Prevent your CMS from publishing multiple versions of a page or article (for example, disabling session IDs when they're not essential to your website's functionality and getting rid of printer-friendly versions of your content).
- Use the canonical link element to tell search engines where the "main" version of your content is located.
Create an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that assists search engines in understanding your website as they crawl it. It's like a "search roadmap" that tells search engines exactly where each page is located.
It also includes useful information on each page of your site, such as:
- When a page was last modified
- The priority it has on your site
- How often it is updated?
Consider enabling AMP
AMP is a Google-backed project that aims to speed up the delivery of content to mobile devices through the use of a special code called AMP HTML.
AMP versions of your web pages load extremely fast on mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code down to the bare bones, leaving text, images, and videos intact, but disabling scripts, comments, and forms.
Because they load so quickly, AMP versions of pages are much more likely to be read and shared by your users, which increases visit time and the number of backlinks pointing to your content - all good things from an SEO perspective. In addition, Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in prominent carousels in search results, giving you a significant search advantage.
Add structured data markup to your website
Structured data markup is code that you add to your website to help search engines better understand the content of your website. This data can assist search engines to index your site more effectively and provide more relevant results.
In addition, structured data improves search results through the addition of "rich snippets" - for example, you can use structured data to add stars to comments, prices to products, or information about reviews (example below).
Because they are more visually appealing and highlight information that is immediately useful to searchers, these rich results can improve your click-through rate (CTR) and drive additional traffic to your site. Since sites with higher click-through rates are generally considered to receive preferential treatment in search engines, it's worth the effort to add structured data to your site.
Add your Site to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools offered by Google and Microsoft respectively that allow you to submit your website to their search engines for indexing.
When you are ready to launch your website, you need to submit its XML sitemap (see above) to both Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools so that they can crawl your new site and start displaying its results in search results.
These services also allow you to keep an eye on your site's overall performance from a search engine perspective.
Other things you can do with the tools include:
- Test your site's mobile-friendliness
- Access search analytics
and much more.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO is important because it basically guarantees that your website is easy to navigate and is free of any technical issues that prevent it from being understood and ranked by search engines. You need to implement technical SEO to attract organic traffic and turn that traffic into customers.
Technical SEO Examples Summary
Technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO work together to open the door to organic traffic. While on-page and off-page techniques are often the first to be deployed, technical SEO plays a vital role in getting your site to the top of search results and your content in front of your ideal audience. Use these technical tactics to complement your SEO strategy and watch the results.
