TECHNICAL SEO

Do you think that SEO is all about content, keywords, and link-building? If yes, then you may not be doing SEO the right way.

How a site is structured, its technical elements and components, all of which need to be in the best order to get the site indexed, crawled and ranked on search engines is a significant part.

Technical SEO relates to the technical facets of a website, which makes it accessible to search engines, easier to load, convenient to navigate through, and more understandable, and thus helps to boost its ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). It is about getting in order the technical components of the website which Google and other search engines assess to decide whether to rank a webpage and at what level. You can consider technical SEO as the pillar of your optimization strategies, on which you lay your on-page and off-page practices.

Technical SEO is all about enhancing the site’s structure and architecture, making it search-friendly and with enhanced user experience. Any SEO process needs to be done starting with a comprehensive technical SEO audit and implementation.

Technical SEO is the first step of overall optimization strategies. While on-page and off-page are more of ongoing strategies, technical SEO needs to be done thoroughly the first time, and then revisited time and again specific to changes in search algorithms, or to address issues and make necessary changes and updates.

Technical SEO works to:

• Make the pages indexable by Google and other search engines
• Improve the crawlability of the site
• Increasing the page load speed
• Making the site mobile-friendly
• Improving user experience with fast and easy navigation
• Ensure keyword targeting with an optimized site structure
• And much more

It is important that the technical aspects of the site are sound; otherwise, your entire SEO strategy runs a risk of failing.

Search engines don’t work the same way always. They are continuously changing and evolving, which does affect all the SEO factors of a site, including the technical ones. So, how your site’s technical SEO is affected by search engines:

• Your site’s pages need to be indexed and crawled by search bots or crawlers, so as to appear in search results. Therefore, any new page addition or changes in content means you need to implement technical SEO.
• Your site’s page load speed is one of the biggest ranking factors. You need to optimize that to improve your chances of higher search rankings.
• Your site’s overall structure, navigation, and all other site elements should be optimized as per guidelines which improves user experience and helps in increasing the ranking and inbound traffic.

You must have gained insights into why technical SEO is a core strategy of the overall SEO puzzle. However, we list down some more reasons to make you realize this well:

• The first and foremost importance of this is that it makes your site accessible to search engines as well as users. Otherwise, it won’t get crawled and won’t be visible in search results.
• It makes the search engines understand the site, and move through easily to find information, which helps in indexing the pages right and ranking those for relevant search queries.
• It makes the site pages load fast. A slow-loading site means high bounce rates, negative user experience, and low rankings.
• Another important feature of technical SEO is it makes the site highly secure, which improves the business’s or brand’s credibility and trustworthiness.
• Overall optimized site structure and architecture work to improve the user experience of the site, a key component to boost search result rankings.

Fast loading, easy to crawl and understand, no dead-end links, no content duplicacy, and quick and easy navigation; all these are traits of a technically optimized website.

• Improved Crawlability

Your website needs to get crawled by search engine robots in order to be eligible to get ranked. Also, your internal linking has to be strong for quick and easy crawling. And you may also want to keep certain pages or content of your site not crawled. All this can be done by optimizing your site using robots.txt file and meta robots tags.

• Fast Loading Site

An ideal website or webpage is one that loads within 3 seconds. If it takes more time, then it leads to an increase in bounce rates. Not just that, but studies show that conversion rates also drop for any extra second that the site takes longer to load. Slow loading site leads to frustrated visitors, low user experience score, and a negative impact on ranking and traffic.

• Reduction in Dead Links

Your users won’t feel pleased if they are to land on a page that doesn’t exist. This is a hit on user experience. And finding these dead links isn’t good for your ranking signals as well. Redirecting these dean links can effectively solve the issue.

• Safe and Secured Site

Site safety and security are one of the biggest concerns of users, especially when they are sharing their info. This also leads to enhanced user experience. Implementing HTTPS, thus, is a needful step, that technical SEO practice adheres to, which improves ranking probability also.

• There is No Duplicate Content

When you have content duplicacy – pages or even sites having the same content, search engine bots will get confused about which one to show. And in consequence, it may lead to all those pages getting penalized also, with a lower ranking. This can be effectively addressed using canonical URLs.

• Structured Data

Implementing Schema.org helps in structuring your site content, which works to tell search engines what your website is about, and what you sell, along with adding relevant and informative information about those products, services, or else. An ideal example of structured data is the page section or blocks containing – How-To, or FAQs content. This helps in ranking structured data content as a rich result on search results.

• XML Sitemap

Navigating through the website easy to find relevant information is a requirement of search engines as well as users. This ensures that all the key information is easily accessed by search engines, and users find the cote convenient to move to related information to seek answers to their queries.

• Target Multiple Language Audiences

For websites that target users across different locations and countries, presenting content in their native language is critical to stand out amongst the competition. This can be effectively done using Hreflang tags which tell Google about the region, and language the page is intended for, and it also solves content duplicacy issues.

Best SEO Practices for Optimizing Technical Aspects of a Website

What does Technical SEO cover? What different technical elements of the site do we optimize? Let’s dive down to know all those factors:

• Define the Preferred Domain

A domain name, by default, can be accessed using www, and without www as well, appearing in front of the domain name. However, it can make search engines confused as they infer these as two different sites. This can lead to issues related to page indexing, content duplicacy, and a hit on the page rank as well.

This is where it becomes important to pick one preferred method. Don’t worry; it doesn’t affect the overall SEO of the site, whichever mode you go with. We set this up and clear at the first stage itself, so there is no issue later on.

• txt File Optimization

This is the file present in the site’s root directory which tells search engines which site pages they can crawl and index. It is easy and pretty simple to add. However, we take full care so as to ensure there is no false blocking which can lead to certain pages getting indexed.

• URL Structure Optimization

The format of the URL has to be right and in accordance with the SEO guidelines. We ensure that the URL is:

• Short and concise
• Included with targeted keywords (but no stuffing)
• Has lowercase characters
• Has ‘-‘ to separate words

Some CMS like WordPress takes the post/page title and creates the URL automatically based on that. But we refine that, and make it more SEO-friendly, by making some changes, keeping it shorter, easy to remember, and more targeted.

• Site Structure and Navigation Optimization

A site should be structured to provide ease of use to visitors, easy crawling and indexing capacity for search engines, and should not be made with an objective of only conversions.

We understand the importance of a structured website, optimize the category pages accordingly, plan the navigation page according to the homepage, and ensure that Google finds and accesses important information fast and early.

• Breadcrumb Menu Optimization

Breadcrumb is a navigation architecture that allows an easy move to the previous page, or the home page, without pressing the back button on the browser. We know how user-friendly this aspect can make a website and ensure that we enable effective and practicable breadcrumb with a proper schema for ease of navigation.

• Canonical URLs Optimization

When you have different pages containing similar information, how to tell search engines which page version to index and rank? By using canonical URLs. We ensure to add the respective tag to each page of the site, which ensures the best and preferred content page is picked, and the duplicate content issue is also avoided.

• Fixing Broken Page Links – 404 Page Optimization

There can be times when a certain page may not exist anymore, because of page content being moved, URL being changed, misspellings related to URLs, and more. We optimize the 404 pages by keeping the same navigation and structure of the site, providing info about the alternative page, and making it easy for users to go back or to the home page easily. It is important that if a page is deleted or the URL is changed, it does show a 404 page with proper issue info for users.

• Mobile-Friendliness Optimization

Since Google has introduced mobile-first indexing, it has become pretty much important that your site should be mobile-friendly or responsive on different screen size devices so as to improve the site ranking chances. We conduct a thorough site analysis, use tools to check for the mobile-friendliness of the site, make it fully responsive, and ensure it loads fast on all devices.

• XML Optimization

XML sitemaps can be the navigation guide that search engines use to crawl the site pages. An optimized XML file must contain the pages and posts listing, along with the published and last updated date of the post. We include only the important pages of the site in the XML file, and not author pages, tag pages, and pages that have duplicate content, and this sitemap is updated regularly when a new page is updated. We add your site to Google using the Search Console and Bing Webmaster tool for different browsers.

• Site Security Optimization

For your site security, SSL and HTTPS are two of the most important implementations. Installing an SSL and enabling the site to get accessed through HTTPS only and not HTTP is one of our core activities that improve site security and improves higher ranking chance.

• Site Load Speed Optimization

It is a well-known factor that website load speed is a big ranking signal. To ensure that each page of your site loads fast, there are several changes and optimization processes that need to be implemented across the site and infrastructure. We make use of different tools, consider each element of the site, including images and multimedia content, and optimize them all to improve the site loading speed. This includes upgrading the server, minimizing plugin use, integrating light themes, optimizing server response time, minifying the CSS and JavaScript files, using caching, and much more.

• Core Web Vitals Optimization

In recent times, Core Web Vitals (CWV) has become all the more important, as it provides insight into user experience metrics, which becomes critical to define the page and site ranking.

We optimize different CWV factors that include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It is the time taken by a page to load the largest element. It is optimized to below 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID) – It is the time taken to respond to the first interaction of the user. It is optimized to below 100 mili-seconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – It tracks the shifting related to the various elements’ layout on a page. It is optimized to 0.1 or lower.

We consistently check with Google Search Console, and other suitable tools, the CWV performance metrics of a site.

• Structured Data/Schema Implementation

Structured data can be said to be the piece of information on a page that enables search engines to identify the context of the page content. It enables search engines to understand the content in a much easier way. While it may seem like a content part, structured data is a technical process for which a code is added to the website, and adding data definition has to be done only once.

We ensure that we follow the best practices to add structured data through Schema Markup, which enhances the listing presentation in the form of a knowledge graph, and featured snippets, which can lead to increased click-through-rate (CTR). We use structured data across different content forms, including articles, recipes, how-to content, job postings, events, local business info, and much more.

• Site Pagination

We assess your site, business, and content and then decide if pagination is required or not. We break long pages into shorter ones, enable categorizing of pages, and use ‘rel=”next”’ and ‘rel=”prev”’ to tell Google about the continuation of the main page in the subsequent pages, which ensures the right indexing.

• Multi-Lingual Site Optimization

We use the ‘hreflang’ tag or attribute to tell search engines about the pages that correspond to a certain region and target audience. This helps to avoid the duplicate content issue and also indexing concerns.

• Registering with Webmaster Tools

We register your site with webmaster tools, the most important being the Google Search Console. It helps to carry out different tasks including finding and fixing crawling errors, testing robots.txt files, submitting the sitemap to Google, and doing much more. We also register the site with Bing webmaster tools, specific to Bing browser ranking aspects.