We all know why SEO is crucial to your website’s Google search ranking. It allows you to optimize your website to make it more user-friendly, customer-centric, and easily crawlable.
But, there’s an even more important aspect of SEO, which requires your attention. We are talking about Technical SEO.
It isn’t easy, but we will help you understand and execute it for your business website. By the end of this post, you will know what exactly technical SEO is and what are all of the factors that are important for a successful technical SEO.
Let’s get started!
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO, as the name suggests, is all about improving the technical aspects of your website to increase its chances of getting ranked on search engines. It focuses majorly on website speed, ability to get crawled and understood by the major search engines on the internet.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Google and other major search engines want to provide their users with great results for their queries. While off-page SEO allows you to improve your business website’s exposure, technical SEO allows the search engines to crawl your website with ease and help them understand what your website is all about. If you do not pay attention to the technicalities, you will deliberately stop search engines from crawling or indexing your website. You should also execute technical SEO to make your website fast, simple and easy to use for your users.
Factors You Should Consider For Effective Technical SEO
Here are the most important factors you should consider by doing technical SEO for your business website.
Page Speed
Most online users are impatient and have a low attention span. They just can’t wait for a webpage to open if it takes more than 3 seconds to do that. If your website opens slowly, there are chances that your potential customer will quit yours to land on your competitors’ page. Google understands the fact that pages with slow speed don’t offer an optimal experience to its visitors. Therefore, it will make sure slow websites do not rank on its search engine and get any organic traffic. There are many online tools available on the internet that can help fix this issue on your website.
Make Your Website Crawlable
Ever wondered how search engines index your websites? They do that with the help of crawlers/spiders/robots that follow links to discover content on any business website. This makes it important for you to maintain a great internal linking structure so that the robots can index your website to perfection. Another way to guide the robots is by creating a Robots.txt file that provides them with proper directions. You can even make robots crawl a page on your website and keep it out of search results. You can do that with the help of robots meta tag. This is a piece of code you can find in the head section of any page.
Dead Links and Redirects
You know how a slow website frustrates users online, then imagine what will happen to them when they land on a page that doesn’t exist in the first place. If your visitors click on a link that leads to a non-existing page, all your efforts behind crafting a great user experience will go down the drain. Believe us, the 404 error is really annoying. Google doesn’t like to find these pages either. These dead links should be removed asap with the help of online tools. Or you can redirect the URL of a page when you are making changes on it or deleting it.
No Duplicate Content
The behavior of search engines towards duplicate content is very simple to understand. Let’s say there are two web pages that have exactly the same content. Which web page should the search engine rank higher? Well, instead of getting confused with the problem, search engines rank all the pages with the same content at the bottom. Therefore, you should make sure all the content on your website is original and have minimum plagiarism (less than 15%). You should definitely use SEO tools to check if your website has duplicate content.
Meta Titles and Description
The meta titles and descriptions are the elements that can be used to help search engines understand what the page or website is all about. You can put your targeted keyword in them and improve the probability of getting ranked on search engines. Your website will then be indexed accordingly for relevant keywords or search queries. The meta description should be 150-160 characters long, while meta titles should be under 70 characters.
Make it More Secure
When you set out to make your website technically sound, you will end up making it safer. Optimizing your website for security will help you keep your users’ privacy intact. One of the most crucial things that you can do is implementing HTTPS protocol that keeps your website away from getting breached. To make your website HTTPS-ready, you will have to install an SSL certificate for your website. This is an important ranking signal as well since Google will rank your website higher than your unsecured competitors.
Create an XML Sitemap
What is an XML sitemap? It is a list of all the pages that are live on your website. It acts as a roadmap for search engines. Once you create a sitemap, you can rest assured that search engines won’t miss any important content present on your website. If your website has a great internal linking and website structure, you will not need to create a sitemap. However, adding one doesn’t hurt your case.
Wrapping Up
There you have it. We have covered all the important pieces of information that you should know to carry out effective technical SEO for your business website. If there’s something you did not understand, we’d love it if you leave a comment on this post. We’ll reply to your queries as soon as possible. Also, since you are here, don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter as we bring all the important updates from the world of online advertising.
