We’ll discuss the fundamentals of technical SEO in this article. The distinction between a site that ranks highly and one that doesn’t can be made by having a rudimentary understanding of the more technical aspects of SEO. Although we’ll describe in simple terms the elements you should focus on when working on the technical foundation of your website, technical SEO is not an easy task.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO means making sure a website complies with the technical standards of current search engines to achieve higher organic rankings. Website architecture, crawling, indexing, and rendering are crucial aspects of technical SEO.
Digital Funnel, an SEO agency based in Ireland, will discuss some of the more important aspects of technical SEO.
What are the 6 aspects of technical SEO to focus on?
A website that is technically sound loads quickly for users and is simple for search engine robots to crawl. A good technical foundation enables search engines to comprehend the purpose of a website. Additionally, it doesn’t direct users or search engines to dead ends brought on by broken links. Here, we’ll briefly discuss some key traits of a website that should be technically optimised.
- Must be fast
Web pages today must load quickly. People don’t want to wait for a page to open because they are impatient. According to a 2016 study, 53% of mobile website users will click away if a page doesn’t load in three seconds.
More data from 2022 indicates that for every extra second it takes for a page to load, e-commerce conversion rates decline by about 0.3%. Therefore, if your website is slow, visitors will become impatient and switch to another website, costing you all that traffic.
Page experience, or how quickly users perceive a website to load, has been formally recognised by Google as a ranking criterion as of 2021. This makes having pages load quickly enough more crucial than ever.
But how can you check? You can easily check your website’s speed using tools like GT Metrix or PageSpeed Insights.
- Make it crawlable
Robots are used by search engines to spider or crawl your website. Links are followed by robots to find material on your website. The most crucial information on your website will be clear to them thanks to a strong internal linking structure.
However, there are additional techniques to direct robots. If you don’t want them to get to a certain piece of content, you can, for example, prevent them from crawling it. You can also allow them to crawl a page while instructing them not to include it in search results or to click any of the links on it.
The two ways to do this are through Robots.txt or meta robots tags.
- Have no dead links
People will see a 404 error page if a link on your site directs them to a page that doesn’t exist. Your thoughtfully designed user experience is now gone!
Since websites are always changing as a result of individuals adding and removing content, most websites, unfortunately, have (at least some) dead links. Thankfully, some resources can assist you in recovering dead links from your website.
When you move or delete a page, you should always redirect the URL to avoid needless dead links. Redirecting it to a page that replaces the previous page is ideal.
- Don’t have duplicate content
Search engines may become confused if the same content appears on several pages of your website or even on other websites. Since these pages, all display the same content, which one should rank higher in the SERP? As a result, they can provide a lower rating to all pages with the same content.
Unfortunately, you won’t be aware that you’re having duplicate content problems. For technical reasons, the same content may appear under several URLs. Visitors won’t notice a difference, but search engines will notice since they will view the same content on a different URL.
Fortunately, there is a technical fix for this problem. You can specify the original page, or the page you want to rank for, using the so-called canonical link element.
- Secure site
A website that has been technically optimised is secure. Making your website secure for users to ensure their privacy has become a fundamental demand in today’s world. There are numerous things you can do to make your (WordPress) website secure, but adding HTTPS is one of the most important ones.
HTTPS ensures that no one will intercept the information transferred between the browser and the website. As a result, when users check in to your website, their credentials are secure. An SSL certificate is required to enable HTTPS on your website. Google made HTTPS a ranking signal because it understands the value of security and prefers secure websites to their unsafe counterparts.
- Has an XML sitemap
A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. It provides search engines with a map of your website. You can use it to ensure that no crucial content on your website is missed by search engines. The latest edited date and the number of photos for each page are included in the XML sitemap, which is frequently organised into posts, pages, tags, or other custom post kinds.
A website should ideally not require an XML sitemap. Robots won’t require it if it has a good internal linking structure that ties all of the content together. Although not all websites are well-structured, having an XML sitemap won’t hurt.
Have a technically sound website.
After following these 6 aspects of technical SEO, you should have a technically sound website, allowing for quicker loading times and resulting in higher rankings, traffic, and conversions. Just to summarise, your website should be fast, crawlable, have no 404 links, shouldn’t have duplicate content, be HTTPS secure, and have an XML sitemap.
There are plenty more aspects to technical SEO, but these are the main ones you should focus on first.
