Technical SEO: Everything You Need to Know
In the ever-evolving digital landscape, search engine optimisation (SEO) has become a crucial element in ensuring online success. As businesses and websites strive to improve their visibility and rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), understanding the intricate world of SEO has become essential. One fundamental aspect of SEO that lays the foundation for organic search success is technical SEO.
When it comes to technical SEO, there are many factors at play. It can be overwhelming at times, and feel like a complex world of code and rules that you can’t quite get your head around. But wishing it away isn’t going to help, and clueing yourself up on technical SEO is paramount to your website's performance and is vital when it comes to success in the search results.
Technical SEO is the backbone of a well-optimised website, encompassing a range of practices and components that directly influence search engine crawling, indexing, and overall website performance. In this blog, we're going to cover the fundamentals of technical SEO, from crawlability, the importance of internal linking, site speed and more.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimisation that focuses on the technical elements of a website to enhance its visibility and ranking on the SERPs. Unlike on-page SEO, which deals with optimising content and keywords, technical SEO refers to the website's infrastructure and backend configuration.
The primary goal of technical SEO is to ensure that search engine crawlers can efficiently access, crawl, and index your website's content. In essence, it’s about providing search engines with a clear understanding of your website's organisation and relevance. As well as this, technical SEO helps to create a smoother user experience by optimising technical aspects such as website speed and mobile responsiveness.
A well-executed technical SEO strategy not only boosts your website's chances of ranking higher in search results but also lays a solid foundation for other SEO efforts, making it an indispensable part of any successful SEO campaign.
Crawlability
Crawlability is the foundation of technical SEO. Search engines crawl websites with what is referred to as robots or search engine spiders, which are types of bots that are instructed by the search engines themselves to essentially look through the content and pages on your site and index them to help them appear in search results.
Whilst it is the search engines that send out the spider to crawl your website, it is our job to help out and make their journey an easier process. The easier it is to crawl your website, the more likely your pages are to rank well on search engines.
When we refer to crawlability, we are referring to the level of ease at which a search engine can crawl your website. A solid internal linking structure is one of the main ways that a website can improve their crawlability, allowing the spiders to easily follow links to new pages in a way that seems organic and makes sense.
Having a good understanding of how search engines crawl websites is important, because as well as having pages you certainly want search engines to crawl, you may also have one that you don't want them looking at. We have several different options available to us in this instance, with two of the most common being meta robot tags and robots.txt.
Understanding important technical SEO components
So your website's crawlability is good, but doesn't mean your job is done. Whilst crawlability is an essential step, it is the foundation for technical seo for a reason. There are a lot more components to technical SEO, from site speed to mobile friendliness and more:
Site structure and internal links
A well-organised site structure and effective internal linking are essential components of technical SEO that significantly impact a website's search engine visibility and user experience. Site structure refers to the hierarchical arrangement of web pages, while internal links are the hyperlinks that connect one page on a website to another.
The importance of a clear and logical site structure cannot be overstated. A well-designed structure helps search engine crawlers understand the relationships between different pages and content categories, making it easier for them to index pages and rank your website appropriately.
To create a well-designed structure, your internal linking strategy needs to help create a user-friendly site structure that allows visitors to navigate your site more effortlessly, as well as search engine spiders. For example, if you are an e-commerce business, the homepage should link to the category pages which then link to the individual product pages.
Creating a sound site structure also helps to reduce something called orphan pages. Orphan pages are those that have no internal links pointing to them – this means that they’re hard for search engines to find and understand. Ensure that every page on your website is linked from at least one other page, preferably from the main navigation or relevant sections.
Site speed
Site speed is the speed at which pages load on your site, and in a world of ever increasing impatience, having fast page speed is essential. People don't want to wait, and expect pages on your site to load fast. When they don't, people can quickly decide to look for that information elsewhere.
Because of this, site and page speed is an important factor for user experience. When a search engine sees users quickly leaving a particular website, it signals to them that the user experience isn't so great.
In May 2021, Google announced page speed as a part of their Core Web Vitals to help improve overall user experience, making it an essential part of their ranking factors. There are many different factors that can influence website speed, from drawn-out, messy code, image sizes, the speed of the server that hosts their website and the number of HTTP requests a particular page makes.
Search engines, such as Google, are aware that a slower page speed means a less than optimal experience. When a website's speed is slower, they will rank lower in the search results whereas faster page speed will help your site's page to appear higher.
Using Google's PageSpeedInsights allows users to test their current site speed to identify where any issues may lie.
HTTPS implementation
An important aspect of technical seo is having a secure website. In today's digital landscape, security is of utmost importance for both users and search engines. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure version of HTTP that encrypts data transmitted between a user's browser and the website's server. Websites using HTTPS display a padlock icon in the address bar, assuring users that their data is protected.
Search engines, like Google, have made HTTPS a ranking factor. Websites with HTTPS have a slight advantage in search results over non-secure sites. This ranking boost is to encourage website owners to prioritise user security. Implementing HTTPS involves obtaining an SSL/TLS certificate and configuring your web server to use it.
XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of all of the different web pages and URLs that exist on your site. Search engine crawlers use an XML sitemap to understand the structure of your website and better rank your website's pages. You can also use XML sitemap to include additional information such as the last modified date and how important the page is in relation to other pages on the site.
By submitting your XML sitemap to search engines like Google through the Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, you can ensure that search engines discover and index all your important pages. This is particularly helpful for websites with complex hierarchies, large archives, or dynamic content that may not be easily discoverable through regular crawling.
Regularly updating and maintaining your XML sitemap is essential, especially when you add new pages, modify existing ones, or remove outdated content. This ensures that search engines are aware of the latest changes on your site and can reflect them in search results promptly.
Mobile friendliness
Ensuring your website is mobile friendly is now an essential aspect of technical seo. With 55% of traffic now coming from mobile devices, it is more important than to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.
Google now uses mobile-first indexing, meaning Google will primarily use the mobile version of your website for ranking. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, you may see a significant drop in search rankings and organic search traffic.
A mobile-friendly website is responsive and adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes and devices. This ensures that users can navigate, read content, and interact with your site effortlessly, regardless of the device they use. To check if your website is mobile-friendly, Google provides a Mobile-Friendly Test tool that evaluates how your website performs on mobile devices and offers suggestions for improvement.
Structured data
Structured data is any data that exists on a web page that is structured in a particular way to help search engines better understand the information on the page and its purpose. With structured data, you can tell search engines crawlers exactly what each element on your webpage is, whether it's an image, a recipe, a product or a video.
Whilst users see the information on a webpage appear in words, images and videos, search engines do not. Instead, search engines read and interpret the information on a website through code.
For search engines to be able to accurately understand what is on your webpages, it uses what is known is a schema markup. This is the accepted language that search engines use to read, interpret and understand the different content that exists on any given web page.
Embedded tags of code, otherwise known as the markup, are used throughout the code to help better organise the content on your page and tell the crawlers what each piece of information is and its purpose.
When a search engine can easily understand all the many different aspects of a webpage, it is able to more accurately place this web page in the SERPS and improve its chances of becoming a rich snippet.
Duplicate content
Identifying any duplicate content that exists on your website is a crucial step of technical SEO. Duplicate content refers to content that is identical or almost exactly the same as other content that exists on multiple pages.
According to Google, duplicate content 'refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that match other content in the same language or are appreciably similar'. The problem with having the same content on multiple pages is that it confuses search engines as they don't know what should take priority and rank the highest. When this happens, you run the risk of lowering the rank of both pages as it simply doesn't know what is more important – hurting both pages even if the content is great.
To prevent this from happening, it's important to use canonical tags. When you have multiple pages using the same content, it's important to identify which of them is the page you want to rank the highest and use canonical tags accordingly. This canonical tag tells search engines which page it should prioritise and rank. You can also use a robots meta tag to prevent duplicate content from being indexed, keep private pages hidden from search engines, or designate certain pages as canonical versions to consolidate ranking signals.
Broken pages
Broken pages, also known as 404 error pages, occur when a user tries to access a page that doesn't exist on your website or has been moved without proper redirection. These pages can negatively impact your SEO efforts and user experience.
When search engines encounter numerous 404 errors, they may assume that your website lacks valuable and relevant content, which can lead to lower rankings. Additionally, users who land on broken pages are likely to leave your site, increasing the bounce rate and reducing the time spent on your website.
Regularly monitoring and fixing broken pages is crucial for maintaining a healthy website. You can use various tools, such as Google Search Console or third-party crawlers, to identify broken links and 404 errors. Once identified, either redirect the broken pages to relevant ones or create custom 404 error pages that guide users back to your site's main content or suggest related pages.
Use hreflang tags
When a website offers content in multiple languages or you have multiple versions of the same web page but in different languages, search engines need to understand which version of a page to display based on the user's language and location.
These tags provide valuable information to search engines about the language and regional targeting of your web pages. By implementing hreflang tags correctly, you can ensure that the right content is shown to the right users in the appropriate search results.
Is technical SEO important?
In short, yes. In order to rank higher on any search engine, you want the site to be strong when it comes to technical seo. Not looking after your website's technical SEO can have a noticeably negative impact on your website's performance, and for those who aren't aware of this (or weren't, before reading this), you might have been scratching your heads as to why your website isn't getting any traffic despite the great content that exists on it.
That's because no matter how valuable or authoritative the content on your website is, it will suffer lower rankings and less traffic if your site is not technically sound.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a website's technical aspects to identify and address any issues that may be affecting its search engine performance. It is a crucial process for understanding how well a website adheres to technical SEO best practices and how it can be optimised to achieve better search rankings.
As an SEO agency, this task is undertaken by yours truly where we will take a look at your site and evaluate all of the important aspects mentioned above, giving you a clear insight into what your own website looks like behind the scenes.
Conclusion
So there we have all of the technical SEO fundamentals. Mastering technical SEO is vital for any website owner seeking to excel in search engine rankings and provide a seamless user experience. A well-executed technical SEO strategy lays the foundation for successful on-page and off-page SEO efforts, resulting in increased organic traffic, higher search visibility, and ultimately, improved online success. As the digital landscape evolves, prioritising technical SEO remains essential to stay ahead of the competition and secure a strong online presence.
If you’re not sure whether a complete technical SEO audit is right for your business, don’t worry! We offer a free SEO audit to help you get a clear overview of how your website is performing, in both its strengths and its weaknesses. Get in touch to book yours today.
