Rashida
Comprehensive SEO (search engine optimization) strategies can help your site climb the search rankings and get you in front of your target audience.
Most people think of keywords and content as pillars of SEO. While these kinds of strategies are incredibly important, they are not effective without the right foundation.
Technical SEO must be the foundation of your SEO approach, as it supports every other strategy.
What exactly is technical SEO? How can you improve technical SEO to set the rest of your strategy up for success?
Let’s dive in.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is an on-page SEO strategy that’s all about the foundation of your site. Before you can start crafting compelling content around your keywords, you need the right base. It’s all about optimizing the structure and function of your site, and ensuring it’s easily tracked and indexed by Google.
Essentially, technical SEO handles the architecture, code, design, and functionality of your site.
The Importance of Technical SEO
Every solid SEO strategy must start with the technical component. Without it, Google may not be able to efficiently index your pages. If your own HTML code interrupts this process, it only hurts your overall SEO strategy.
When search engines decide what to show users, they crawl websites and assess several factors. They use algorithms to determine what your pages are about and how the user experience is.
Some basic, even minor, technical mistakes can cost you when it comes to SEO. Technical errors can keep search engines from crawling your site, which will prevent you from climbing the ranks.
Improving technical SEO is not just about search engines though. Improving the technical aspects of your website also helps improve the user experience, which can reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversions.
Key Factors of Technical SEO
Clearly, technical SEO plays a vital role in the overall success of your website. Let’s take a look at the primary factors of technical SEO:
Page Speed
How long does it take to open a new page? If the answer is a few seconds, then this is a problem. When a page takes 5 seconds to load, the chances of users abandoning it shoot up by 90%. Even if a page takes 1s to 3s to load, the bounce rate increases by 32%.
Fast pages are a basic requirement in the modern era. People expect for webpages to open quickly and for websites to offer a fast experience. They are not willing to wait, even a few seconds, for your site to respond.
Slow web pages provide a worse user experience, and Google knows this. They prioritize faster web pages.
Test your site speed. You can try Google’s tool, PageSpeed Insights, to assess your upload speed. This helpful tool also gives you advice for improving your speed.
In general, here are some best practices for improving your loading time:
- Limit the size of images.
- Remove unnecessary characters from the code.
- Leverage the browser cache plugins for returning users.
- Compress server files using Gzip.
- Remove unused plugins.
- Limit redirects, as they take longer to process.
- Use asynchronous loading to process script and HTML at the same time.
Mobile Friendliness
Optimizing your site for desktop is no longer enough. Many people now browse on their mobile devices. Way back in 2015, Google announced that mobile responsiveness would be a ranking factor
Here’s what you can do to improve your site’s mobile friendliness:
- Include the “viewport” tag to your HTML code header to automatically adjust page dimensions based on device screen size. Note that many website building tools include this.
- Use Google’s free mobile compatibility test to assess how mobile-friendly your website is.
- Implement the tool’s suggestions.
Avoid Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a major red flag for technical SEO. To avoid this, do not plagiarize text or images from other sites. Always create unique content.
However, you can accidentally have duplicate content of your own content. One example is when you update a page or URL without first disabling the old one.
Google prioritizes the original content, but it may not always know where the original content is from.
Examine your site for duplicate content. You can eliminate duplicate content in some cases. In others, you can direct Google to the proper page with a canonical tag.
Images
Images don’t just help your website look better, they can help it perform better. But, that’s only if they are used correctly. While site images are visually attractive for site visitors, they require technical SEO behind the scenes to function to their full potential.
Here are the key image optimization strategies to use:
- Change the image file name to something relevant. Instead of IMG281.png, try dogbowl.png.
- Alt text. The Alt text tells Google what the image is about. Use it to describe the image and include your keywords.
- Reduce image file size to ensure site speed. There are many helpful software tools that reduce image size without disrupting the quality.
- Upload images with the dimensions they need to prevent resizing.
- Only load images when the user reaches them on the page. One way to do this is with the Lazy Load plugin on WordPress.
Error-Free
Make sure your site does not show errors. Errors suggest a problem with tracking and indexing. Things like server errors, non-existent URLs, redirection errors, etc can prevent Google from indexing pages.
Evaluate your website for any of these indexing errors. Once you find them, take the necessary steps to fix them. This ensures proper indexing and will help the user experience as well.
Proper Site Architecture
Site architecture is critical for technical SEO. How are your page hierarchies organized? What are the connections between internal links?
You should implement a strategic architecture. The more pages your site has (or will have) the more important this becomes.
Factors of architecture that matter most include:
- URL formatting
- Sitemap to help guide the search engine bot
- The sitemap outlines all of the pages on the site and how they connect. Sharing this XML file with Google helps it figure out which page to crawl. You can send your sitemap using the Google Search Console.
- Internal linking to demonstrate the authority of pages
Security
Google does not want to send users to unsecured websites for risk of spam or hacking. Since 2014, HTTPS protocol has been a Google ranking factor. Without HTTPS, your site will have a very hard time ranking.
To get HTTPS, you need an SSL certificate. You can acquire this from the website hosting company
If you already have an HTTP site, you must carefully migrate it to HTTPS. Test the site to ensure it still functions properly after you migrate. If you need to migrate and don’t have a dedicated professional, you may want to work with one to ensure you can successfully migrate all of your data.
Consistent Tracking
Just like other aspects of SEO, technical SEO is not a one-time strategy. It’s something you should monitor and track consistently. If you notice your site is struggling to climb the search ranks, you may need to revisit and improve the technical aspects of your website.
Return to the important components described above. Check for site errors, duplicate content, and responsiveness issues. Look for ways to improve these aspects of your site and ensure you have a strong base for the rest of your SEO to stand on.
Build Your Technical SEO Foundation
As mentioned, technical SEO is the foundation for the rest of your SEO efforts to stand on. Ensuring a solid foundation gears you toward success and growing your business online. Whether you are just starting out with SEO or looking to improve your results, look for ways to improve the technical aspects of your website.
Understanding the qualities of good technical elements can also help you build a better site from the get-go. However, it’s never too late to improve the technical side of your website to provide an excellent base for your content-based SEO strategies.
