In this competitive market, everyone wants to increase their website ranking on search engines and earn more revenue. Many website owners are utilizing search engine optimization services to improve the visibility of their websites. But, you need to understand that you can have the website with the best content. If your technical SEO is messed up, you are not going to rank on search engines. At the basic level, search engines such as Google need to be able to find, render, crawl, and index the pages on your website.
By focusing and improving the technical element of your website, you can assist search engines to crawl and comprehend your website. If you will do technical SEO properly, you might be rewarded with rich outcomes and higher rankings. Utilizing technical SEO means you can increase the chances to find your website by search engines. Before using this strategy, you need to learn the basics of technical SEO. In this article, you will understand what technical SEO is and what the best practices for higher rankings are.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a process of optimizing the website so that search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. can easily find it. In simple words, technical SEO is used to enhance your website’s technical sides to fulfill new technical requirements of search engines. The search engine constantly changes the way they crawl the site. So website owners need to regularly check the technical SEO requirements. With proper on-page technical optimizing, the site will be indexed more effectively and faster by Google and get a higher ranking. This optimization process concerns a site’s structure and not the link building or content of the website. The main aim of technical SEO is to improve the overall infrastructure of the website. With this process, you can assist Google and other search engines to access, interpret, crawl and index your site without any issue. Experts utilized this process to ensure that your website is fulfilling the technical requirement of advanced search engines with the aim of improved organic ranking.
Read: 10 Latest SEO Trends in 2021 for Digital Marketers and Content Writers
Technical SEO Contains:
Crawling:
Crawling is a process of checking and analyzing a page’s content/code by the bot. In this process, Google or another search engine sends a bot to a web post or web page to check. It is an essential process of having a search engine recognize your web post or page and display it in search results. To be in the query from the search engine, your page needs first be crawled and then indexed. Search engines unitize web crawlers to analyze the pages. Web crawlers are famous by different names such as spiders, robots, bots, or search engine bots. Web crawlers travel from link to link and check every page’s details.
Indexing:
Indexing is a process of storing and organizing the content found after the crawling process. Web crawlers render the code on the page in the similar manner a browser does. It catalogs every metadata, link, and content on the page. Indexing is not just data storage because it requires a huge amount of computer resources to render millions of web pages or posts. After the crawling process has been done, the outcome gets put onto the search engine’s index. After the crawling process, the result will be placed on the search engine index.
Rendering:
Rendering is a process of interpreting the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML on the page. This process helps to build a visual representation of accurately what you see in your web browser. In this process, Web crawlers retrieve your pages, run codes, and assess the content to understand the structure or layout of your website. Search engines collect the information during the rendering process to rank the value and quality of your site content against other websites.
Why is technical SEO essential?
In this advanced world, search engines have become very smart, however, they are programmed and robots to complete only prescribed actions. If your website has even a little technical issue, they can’t analyze and understand your website. And your website will not appear in a search query, even if your website includes all the required information and data. An established technical SEO means your website is easy to crawl for web crawlers and will be higher ranked on the search result page. Technical SEO is very essential because it allows search engines to understand that your website has high value. It also promotes the search engine to rank you higher.
You should optimize your website’s technical SEO for some reasons, following:
- It is a digital marketing strategy that increases ROI from SEO
- It assists your company to compete with the competitor that also utilizes search engine optimization.
- You can improve your website’s conversion rate with technical SEO
- It can increase leads and sales
- It influences your website’s ranking on search results
- It impacts your website visitor’s actions and decisions
Benefits of performing technical SEO on websites:
Technical SEO is the foundation of a site. The goal of technical SEO is to improve the infrastructure of your website and enable the search engines to crawl and index your WebPages. There are various benefits of using technical SEO and some of them are given below:
- Technical SEO provides faster web page loading.
- Technical SEO enhances the website’s position with semantic optimization.
- Technical SEO prevents duplicate content.
- Technical SEO offers XML sitemaps for easy access.
- Technical SEO increases a website’s security.
- It examines backlinks to increase the website’s ranking.
- It utilizes an internal linking structure to promote web pages.
- It makes it easy to crawl for search engine bots.
- It helps search engines crawl, index, interpret and access the website.
Best technical SEO practices to improve website’s ranking on Search Engine Result Page:
Some effective and reliable technical SEO practices that you should consider:
SSL Certificate:
SSL is known as Secure Socket Layer and is used to increase the security level of the website. It offers secure data transmission between browser and web server through the encryption process. SSL has been an essential factor in website ranking since 2015. With an SSL certificate, you can ensure that your website is safe from third parties or hackers. For this, you can install an SSL certificate. It allows you to redirect your website’s HTTP version to HTTPS.
Mobile-friendly website:
If you want to improve your website’s ranking on SERP, you have to focus on the mobile-friendliness of your website. Google has officially announced that those websites that don’t have a full mobile version will be avoided by Google. If your website is working perfectly for the desktop version but it doesn’t have a version for mobile, Google will not display your website on SERP. So your website should be mobile-friendly and fully responsive to rank on the search engine result page. Mobile-friendliness functionality allows the mobile user to access the website on small screens. Mobile users are growing very rapidly so the rates of mobile browsing are also increasing. You can use the following website to check the mobile-friendliness of your website
- GTMetrix
- HubSpot’s Website Grader
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Website Speed:
According to the survey, 60% of users leave websites that take time to load. If you want to improve your website’s ranking on SERP (search engine result page), you have to improve your website’s loading time. Slow websites can be frustrating for visitors so they can lead to a high bounce rate.
If your website is taking a long time to load, it can badly impact the user experience. You can improve your website speed by:
- Optimizing the images
- Using fast hosting provider
- Enabling GZIP compression
- Using a caching plug-in
- Utilizing CDN
- Using speed optimization service
Site architecture:
Proper site architecture is an important factor that helps web crawlers to index your pages. Some basic aspects of good site architecture are: breadcrumbs, robits.txt, and sitemap
1. XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is similar to path marking for Google or other search engines. It is an essential URL source for Google. XML sitemap includes all details about your site: how often you update it, what priority every page has when you last changed them, and every page of your site. Having an XML sitemap is very important for your website because it allows Google to find your web pages quickly, even if your internal linking is not good. According to Google’s documentation, an XML sitemap is perfect for new websites with few external links, websites with large activities, and large websites.
2. Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are important for navigating site visitors. It automatically includes internal links to categories and subpages on your website. It helps to understand the site search engines’ structure. Include Breadcrumbs to your website to enhance your website’s SEO.
3. Robots.txt: When search engines read your site, they target the robots.txt file. This file offers the details about which pages on your site should be crawled and which shouldn’t. So you need to create Robots.txt for better results.
Perform technical SEO audit weekly to find and fix your website error:
If you want to rank higher in SERPs on a regular basis, you have to perform a weekly technical SEO audit. It allows you to find and fix your website’s errors on time. There are various online tools available to perform a technical SEO audit.
Discover and fix broken links on your site
Broken links are not a big issue from an SEO perspective, but broken links can affect the user experience. Broken links can increase the bounce rate and create a bad impression. That’s why you need to check for broken links on your website on a regular basis and fix them. If your website is on a word press platform, you can easily find broken links by installing the free plug-in. Broken Link Checker is the best and reliable plug-in to check broken links.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is similar content on different pages of your website. Normal users may not see the difference, but the search engine can detect duplicate content on your website. It can lead to a low ranking on SERP. You need to remove duplicate content from your website or pages to increase the ranking of your website. You can use different online tools to check the originality of content on your website.
Enable AMP
AMP is known as accelerated mobile pages and it is used to enhance UX on mobile devices. By enabling AMP, you can make the site load faster on mobile devices. To enable AMP, you can use AMP HTML Code on your website. Fast loading pages can help you to decrease the bounce rate.
Schema markup
Schema markup is an additional part of code that helps search engines to understand your website’s content. You can get a positive result by implementing schema markup on your website.
Hreflang tags
If you have a multilingual website, Hreflang tags will be important for you. It assists Google or other search engines define which country you want to reach and which language you submit your content in. So Hreflang tags are an important element of technical SEO.
Internal links
Utilize internal links to improve your website’s ranking. Internal linking helps search engines to build our website’s structure and hierarchy. The internal link leads to other pages on the same website. So internal linking has positive effects on SEO.
Summary
Technical SEO is essential, not an option.
If you are awful at the technical stuff, it won’t matter how well your off-page and on-page SEO is. Focusing on some technical stuff is also important to improve your ranking on search engines. In the event that you have the specialized SEO covered, it makes everything simpler to rank high. An efficient technical SEO is important for the accomplishment of a search engine optimization strategy. The internal linking and website loads ought to be done consummately to acquire a technically optimized website. A website should be audited regularly to find and fix the error quickly. It’s important to keep in mind that technical SEO, alongside keyword-oriented SEO, works fine when executed hand-in-hand.
