What is Technical SEO? 8 Key Elements to Boost Your Rankings

In today’s digital era, SEO is a vital element for any business striving to establish a strong online presence. While most people are familiar with the three main types of SEO—on-page, off-page, and technical SEO—it is technical SEO that forms the backbone of any successful strategy. Unlike on-page SEO, which focuses on content, or off-page SEO, which deals with backlinks and external factors, technical SEO concentrates on enhancing the structure, speed, and functionality of a website. 

It ensures that search engines can easily crawl, index, and understand your site, ultimately improving its visibility and ranking. By optimizing a few critical technical areas, website owners can significantly enhance their site’s performance and user experience.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website’s infrastructure to make it easier for search engines to crawl, interpret, and index its content. It involves improving elements like website speed, mobile-friendliness, secure connections (HTTPS), structured data, and crawlability. The goal of technical SEO is to remove any barriers that prevent search engines from understanding your site and delivering it to users in search results. A technically sound website not only ranks better but also provides a smoother, more satisfying experience for its visitors.

Website Speed: The Need for Speed

Website speed is not just about user experience; it also plays a key role in how search engines like Google rank your site. If a website loads slowly, visitors are more likely to leave before seeing any content, leading to higher bounce rates. In fact, research shows that even a one-second improvement in page load time can increase conversion rates by 7%. This means a faster website keeps visitors engaged and helps improve rankings and conversions.

To enhance the speed of your website you should begin by assessing it. Google PageSpeed Insights as well as GTmetrix tools can help you understand where your site needs to be optimized. There are several ways to boost site speed, including:

• Image Compression: If your images are massive, they will stall your website’s loading time. To reduce the size of images without compromising on quality use image optimization such as TinyPNG or ImageOptim.
• Minifying Files: Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript decreases the size of the page’s files, and therefore speeds up the loading time.
• Browser Caching: Since website resources such as images and scripts have expiry dates, users who come to your site, not only have to download lots of stuff the second time, or third time, but they also have to download even more.

Optimizing the fluidity of your website is to the advantage of the customer but also very crucial when it comes to your website’s SERP ranking.

2. Mobile-Friendliness: A Must-Have

Google released mobile-first indexing in 2018 and that made the mobile-friendliness crucial for ranking. This is to mean that Google mostly ranks the pages using the mobile version rather than the desktop version of the site. Today about 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, which definitively means that your website needs to be mobile-friendly.

For your site checking whether is mobile-friendly, you may use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. If your website doesn’t pass, here are a few tips to improve mobile usability:

• Responsive Design: Make sure that you make provision for one that optimizes depending on the display size that the visitor has. A responsive design simply means a design that is capable of accommodating itself to whichever device – smartphone, tablet, or computer.
• Touch-Friendly Navigation: Consumers on the other hand use touch gestures particularly when on their mobile devices. All the links menus, buttons, and links should be large enough to fit touch controls on the screen.
• Avoid Flash: Flash can potentially prove problematic when being used on portable devices such as mobile phones. Avoid getting involved with obsolete things such as Flash multimedia rather stick with HTML5 media.

By making sure your website is mobile friendly you are increasing user satisfaction as well as increasing your odds of ranking higher in search engine sites.

3. Secure Your Website with HTTPS

Website security is something that usually falls under technical SEO. As the risks of cyber-attacks increase gradually, search engines have begun considering web security as an important factor. It is particularly important to know that Google has stated clearly that HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a ranking signal. The HTTP Secure prevents hackers from accessing the information in transit from the user’s browser to your website including login information and payment information.

If your website is HTTP-based, you are losing on security and SEO optimization at the same time. That is, moving from HTTP to HTTPS involves the installation of an SSL certificate on your site. HTTPS once implemented will simply be written at the top of the browser then followed by https: or https:// and a lock icon that will assure the visitors that their data is secure.

In addition to improving your search engine ranking, HTTPS enhances the credibility of your site to users to enhance its interaction.

4. Structured Data

Schema is a method of data entry facilitated by organizing information on your site in a manner preferably comprehendible to search engines. It also enables the search engines to bring into the search additional and more relevant resources. For instance, in schema markup for reviews, the star ratings of the reviews will be displayed while for marking up an event, the date and time of the event will also be displayed in the search results.

Performing structured data effectively can result in rich snippets that earn higher click-through rates compared to normal search results. Schema can significantly improve search visibility for Google, Bing, and Yahoo! and generate better user experience.

In order to use the structured data, the schema markup is first introduced into the code base of the website. There is no HTML code that you need to write yourself to achieve this since there are tools such as Google Structured Data Markup Helper that can automatically create this field. Make sure that the implementation is correctly set by using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to avoid having any kind of mistakes.

5. Crawlability: Let Search Engines Explore

Crawlability is therefore that feat by which search engine crawlers can easily access your website, and index its content. More so, if search engines cannot crawl your site, they cannot rank it in any competition or whatsoever. However, to make your website crawl by search engine optimizers, you need to pay attention to the structures and routes that are taken during crawling your website.

Here are a few tips to improve crawlability:

• XML Sitemap: XML sitemap is a type of map of the website providing valuable information about the most crucial web pages, it is easier for a search engine to find out. An XML sitemap consists of URLs and can be made using Yoast SEO, Screaming Frog, or similar, which then can be submitted to search engines using Google Search Console.
• Robots.txt: This file instructs the search engines which of the pages it should crawl or rather avoid to crawl. Do not misconfigure your robots.txt file, so that it does not disallow useful pages from being indexed by search engines.
• Internal Linking: Link to other pages within your website so that the search engines will know which of your pages are most relevant. Authority of the pages should also be distributed internally and proper internal linking aids in the achievement of this goal.

Here it helps you make it easy for search engine spiders to get into your site, which could help your rankings.

6. Fixing Broken Links: No More Dead Ends

404 links are links that lead to a non-existent page this normally causes a 404 page not found error. These links are bad for usability and tell search engines your site is not properly cared for. Some search engines may demote your site if they realize that you have many broken links on your site.

To check and provide broken links, you can use the following tools, Screaming Frog or Ahrefs. These tools will spider through your website and easily identify those that are broken. Once such links are discovered, they should either be deleted or fixed with good ones.

While repairing links, it makes the overall experience smooth and has numerous positive effects on the business reputation as well as the site itself.

7. Canonical Tags: Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

Search engines know that different pages are copies of each other and this sometimes distorts search engine algorithms resulting in compromising your actual online marketing efforts. Canonical tags are a solution to this problem. These tags inform search engines which of the two versions of a website page is the primary one and should thus be indexed. This means you can give search engines instructions on which URL you prefer they use, for instance when you have two URLs for the same page such as www.example.com and example.com you can use the Canonical tag to inform the search engines that you prefer this one over the other.

When canonical tags are used appropriately, it guarantees an organized removal of content duplication problems and makes the right content to rank higher in the search engines.

8. XML Sitemaps: The Blueprint of Your Website

An XML sitemap is an important technical SEO component. It acts as a guide to crawler bots as to the pages on your website that you would like them to rank and index. An up-to-date sitemap makes it easier for search engines to locate content within your site especially if the site has many pages or a difficult navigation system.

In order to generate an XML sitemap, you can turn to Google Search Console, Yoast SEO plugin, Screaming Frog, etc. It is advisable to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console after you create one, for faster crawl.

The Bottom Line

Technical SEO also plays an important role in SEO and cannot be left out of any SEO strategy. If you improve the website’s speed and mobile friendliness along with security, crawlability, and usage of structured data, you can simultaneously get better the user-end experience and visibility of a website in search engine results.

At Shadow Infosystem, we are an expert technical SEO firm that offers quality technical SEO solutions. Our team guarantees that your website performs efficiently, is protected from hackers and malware, and will rank high in the search engines. If you need your site to meet the high technical SEO standard, feel free to contact us and we will assist you in enhancing the view of your website.

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