Introduction.
While you were looking for SEO strategies, the term ‘Technical SEO’ got stuck in your mind. So, can you implement these services yourself or you’ll need a technical SEO expert? you wondered.
Well, I would say that if you are a tech-savvy individual then you can perform the technical SEO by yourself. In the other case, you’ll need to hire a technical SEO expert. As the term represents that these strategies will need a technical mind and skills.
But, don’t worry. After reading this blog, you’ll gain enough insights into technical SEO. It covers everything from the basic definition to the important factors and tools.
However, if you want to go back and have a quick revision of SEO and on-page SEO. Then here go:
- Role of SEO Services in Digital Marketing
- On-Page SEO Tactics
For now, let’s get started.
Beginning with Technical SEO.
Technical SEO deals with optimizing the infrastructure and technical details of your website.
How Does It Work?
Technical SEO works by aligning the different factors of your website with the preferences of search engines. It does this to make it understandable to the search engines. Eventually, following these strategies help in the efficient crawling and indexing of your website.
Is Technical SEO Important?
The role of technical SEO is highly essential in ranking your website higher in the SERPs. Listed below are a few points that emphasize its importance.
- It assists in better optimization of the overall structure of your website
- It considers the important website files and certificates
- It prepares the website for rich snippets
- It focuses on the speed of the website
- It works with the URL tags and errors
Now, as you’ve known the importance of technical SEO, let’s have a look at its essential factors.
Crucial Factors of Technical SEO.
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Well-Organized Site Structure:
‘Your site must have a well-organized architecture’, says a technical SEO expert.
Regardless of the number of web pages, the crawler and your users would prefer a site with an understandable architecture. That’s how they will be able to jump from one page to another, decreasing your bounce rate. On the other hand, having complex linking between the pages can harm user experience and it won’t do any good to your ranking.
Generally, there are two types of site architectures:
- Flat Site Structure
- Traditional Pyramid Structure
Choosing among the above two depends on the purpose of your website and the categories if any. To determine the right structure for your site, give it a read: Pyramid or Flat Site Structure? Ask the Digital Expert.
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Technical SEO Outlook – Logical & Consistent URLs.
The URLs of your web pages matter!
When we look at them from the perspective of technical SEO, they are far more than links to our website.
They say that well-planned and consistent URLs inform your visitors about their present location on the site. For instance: a URL structured as site-name/blogs/blog-topic can easily tell your customers that they are currently reading under the blogs category of your website.
Besides that, categorizing your web pages under subfolders also helps the crawler in identifying the web pages that are related to each other. Hence, there are chances that the search engine will recommend similar pages and facilitate more traffic.
Therefore, creating logical URLs constitutes an important part of the technical SEO services and needs to be implemented for better ranking.
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Use Breadcrumbs – Technical SEO Service.
Breadcrumbs are the little navigation aids that help both the search engine and the visitors. Although they are smaller in size, their implementation is vital in terms of technical SEO.
The importance of breadcrumb navigation somehow relates to the concept of a well-organized site structure in technical SEO. This is because breadcrumbs also facilitate better navigation which proves to be beneficial even for the new visitors on your site. Moreover, the users won’t lose their way back to the first page that they visited. This allows them to have a safer and longer trip around your website while reducing the overall bounce rate.
Also, the breadcrumbs help the search engines to visualize the structure of your site efficiently.
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XML Sitemap Is Crucial to Technical SEO.
An XML sitemap plays an important role in the ranking process. This is the reason that it is one of the crucial factors of technical SEO. These both aim to satisfy the search engine.
The sitemap informs the search engines regarding the structure of your website. It includes the pages and the links between them. Eventually, it results in increasing the efficiency of the crawling process. The better crawled website, the higher it ranks in the SERPs.
Additionally, the XML sitemap lets you identify the essential pages along with prioritizing them. This will also enable the search engine to know the important pages of your website. And then it will display them to the audience accordingly.
See how it works: XML Sitemap – Beginner to Advanced Level Guide
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Noindex Tag on Duplicate Pages.
Having duplicate pages on your website is not harmful. However, letting them get indexed is something that might concern your organic ranking factor. This is why technical SEO stresses adding no-index tags on duplicate pages.
This will inform the search engines that the respective pages don’t need to be indexed.
The example that relates here is that if you have a huge site such as an e-commerce website. There might be multiple pages with duplicate content like the pages for reviews of a single product, paginated reviews. So, you can implement the noindex tag there and save your site from being claimed as the one with duplicates.
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Canonical URLs Are Important!
It is important to learn about canonical URLs when performing the technical SEO of your website.
Canonical URLs are a solution when neither you want to rewrite your content to make it unique nor do you feel the noindex tag is a suitable choice. Hence, when you have various pages with minor differences then you can use the respective URLs. They will inform the search engine by differentiating the main page from the child pages.
For example, when you have created multiple pages for color variations of a single product. You can mark a specific product page as the main page by using a canonical tag in its URL.
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Optimized Page Speed – Essential Technical SEO Factor.
Optimized page speed forms an integral part of the technical SEO services. However, it depends upon many sub-factors, its implementation is achievable.
By using compressed and responsive images, no CDNs, minified CSS files, and reducing the size of your webpages, you can make the pages load faster.
Indeed, both the search engines and your site visitors prefer websites that load faster and don’t waste any of their time.
So, don’t forget to check your website speed before publishing it and presenting it to the world.
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Technical SEO Services Involve Enabling AMP.
Technical SEO best practices involve enabling AMP, a Google-based project. It helps in the quick delivery of website content on mobile devices as it uses AMP HTML instead of traditional HTML.
The projects make this happen by disabling the extra content such as comments, scripts, and forms. However, it keeps the text, videos, and images at their respective positions.
Hence, the design of your website won’t be distorted but only the speed will be optimized on mobile devices.
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Technical SEO Services – No Dead Links.
Dead links are never encouraged!
Although adding internal links is a part of on-page SEO, the errors come under the category of technical SEO.
It imposes a very bad and unprofessional impression when your clients reach a specific page of your site and that shows a 404 error. Oops! The page that you are trying to reach out to couldn’t be found.
Do you think that the visitors will try different URLs? No, they will simply go and never come back. Hence, it would be best to resolve this issue beforehand.
Check for any dead links then either redirect them to the right pages or simply remove them. The choice is all yours. Moreover, these dead links block the way of the crawlers as well. That’s another red signal.
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Technical SEO Uses 301 Redirects.
Either you have moved particular web pages or your complete website to a different hosting, let the crawler know about it.
According to technical SEO, 301 redirects are helpful when you want to redirect the crawler and the visitors to the new location of an already existing web page. This will strengthen the navigation flow and it won’t break along the way.
For example, you had created an about us page and then you moved the similar content to another page with more details. In that case, it would be best to redirect the visitors to your newly created page instead of simply removing the about us page.
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Zero Crawl Errors – Best Technical SEO Practice.
Having zero crawl errors is one of the best technical SEO practices. Because it is believed that crawling errors block the way of the crawlers. And they become unable to crawl and index your pages. Eventually, this results in a low ranking of your website as the crawler doesn’t understand its structure.
Therefore, it can’t display something in the SERPs that it doesn’t know enough about.
You can use various tools such as Coverage Report in Google Search Console and Ahrefs Site Audit to discover and fix any crawling issues.
Moreover, for professional technical SEO services, you can contact our experts at Plan Z. We’ll do the complete technical SEO of your website and make it ready to rank higher in the SERPs.
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Site Encryption – Technical SEO Recommends.
The SSL certificate of your website plays a vital role in meeting the requirements of search engines. Therefore, technical SEO experts always recommend ensuring that your website is fully secured.
It has been often observed that the security features of browsers block access to websites that aren’t SSL certified. Moreover, the users prefer making HTTPS requests rather than HTTP because their security is critical to them. Also, search engines opt for secured websites over unsecured ones.
Hence, complete your site encryption process to have a command over the technical SEO services.
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Structured Data Markup.
Structured data markup or schema markup is an important technical SEO factor. Because this piece of machine-readable code can help the search engine to efficiently understand the content of your website. As it will be easily understandable, it will get effectively indexed. Eventually, your chances of matching with the desired results will increase.
Moreover, structured data can be used to add rich snippets. For example, adding prices to products or star ratings to reviews can enhance the visual appearance of your website in the SERPs. As a result, your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) will increase.
Surprisingly, a website with high CTR is more preferred by the search engine than its competitors. Hence, this is the reason behind adding structured data markup in the crucial factors of technical SEO.
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Technical SEO Considers Robots.txt File.
A website contains a huge number of pages depending upon its functionality. However, it isn’t the best practice to let the crawler crawl through all the pages. The reason can be to maintain the privacy of your data or to determine the unimportant pages.
Also, a large number of requests will overload your site making it slower to load. So, to avoid this issue, you can use the Robots.txt file. It contains the data that tells the crawler about the restricted pages.
And technical SEO suggests creating a Robots.txt file because this practice simplifies the working of the crawler. The more satisfied the crawler, the higher the rank.
Best Technical SEO Tools.
We’ve come quite far while discussing different factors of technical SEO. Now, use the tools given below to improve the respective aspects of your website.
Google Search Console is a free tool to assess and troubleshoot the appearance of your website in the SERPs. Certainly, you can use it to submit the XML sitemap and find and fix technical issues. Also, you can look for structured data errors if any.
This is a built-in page debugging tool that comes with Chrome. You can use it to improve rendering performane of the web pages and debug any issues related to page speed. Indeed, this tool quite helpful in enhancing your website as per the rules of technical SEO.
Ahrefs Toolbar is a free extension for Firefox and Chrome that aims at providing important SEO details about the website that you visit. It has enormous features that help in better optimization of websites such as showing SERP positions, etc.
This is a test to check the overall look of your website on mobile devices. It looks for the provision of the best user experience when accessed through cellphones. And warns about the issues if any. Certainly, it shows the website as it will be shown to Google while crawling the page.
PageSpeed Insights determine the loading speed of a web page and monitor its performance. Moreover, it displays the recommendations to improve the load time and eventually, enhance the user experience.
Conclusion.
Technical SEO deals with the technical aspects of your website that are noticed by the search engines. Therefore, understanding and correctly implementing the technical SEO strategies can help in the organic ranking of your website. Regardless of the visually attractive website with great content, neglecting the above-mentioned factors can result in a great loss. Hence, use this guide to check the optimization level of your website and improve it accordingly. We hope that it will help you!
