Do you pay importance to your site’s technical SEO part? You would. But How?
Most will answer that this requires optimizing the technical components of your website as per guidelines. On the surface, yes; this is what needs to be done. However, it isn’t easy as said.
Technical SEO, while being in the control of the webmaster, takes a lot to manage. And it has to be dynamically managed and improved as your site grows and scales.
What precisely is Technical SEO?
While many will say technical SEO is what on-page SEO is. While both are correlated, there is a bit of difference between both. On-page SEO is all about improving the site elements to make it better to rank high and attract traffic. Technical SEO is a much core part, wherein the site factors are optimized and implemented to make the search engines crawl, index and render the site pages.
Technical SEO doesn’t stop at the indexing level. When you work on the entire Technical SEO components, then it helps to boost the site’s capability to rank high.
Technical SEO Components
These include:
- Site Architecture
- URL Structure
- XML Sitemaps
- JavaScript
- Structured Data
- Duplicate/thin content
- 301 redirects
- 404 pages
- Canonical tags
- SSL Security
- Broken Links
- Page Speed
- And many more
Importance of Technical SEO
If your site isn’t crawled and indexed by the search engines, how it is going to rank in search results. So, in order to be found by Google and other search engines, and to rank well, your technical SEO has to be top-notch.
How to Improve the Site Technical SEO?
1. Work on the Site Indexing Factor
Your site should be easily crawled and indexed. If this isn’t right, than other things can’t do any good for your SEO. Make use of the Index Coverage Report tool of the Google Search Console. This will help you get a clear idea on which pages are fully indexed and which pages are experiencing indexing issues. Ensure that you create the XML sitemap, have internal links developed for ‘deep pages’. Also, using the Search Console’s ‘Inspect’ function will help you in resolving indexing aspects.
2. Improve the Site Architecture
Site structure is one of the most important aspects of a site’s technical SEO. It refers to the organization and structure of your site pages. It should be flat, with a hierarchical structure making it easy to navigate. Google prefers breadcrumb navigation technique.
3. Have Consistent URL Structure
The URL structure has to be consistent and logical. It should give a detailed info to where the users are on the site. The pages should be organized in a/category/subfolder mode that makes the pages neatly organized and the URL straight, easy to understand.
4. Remove Content Duplicacy
Content duplicacy is a crime in the view of Google and other search engines. And rightly so. The content is the king for any site when SEO is concerned. And it all starts with your site. It is better to use a good SEO audit tool to find the thin and duplicate content. Remove or change that. Any indexed page with duplicate content results in negative effect for the site. Sometimes, for some sites duplicate content is non-avoidable. Then you must add no-index tag to these pages, so that Google doesn’t consider these. Using canonical URLs is a also a good strategy for pages with similar content. eCommerce sites having similar content on different product pages apply this method.
5. There Should be No Broken Links
Links that broken or dead after some time is something that happens with all sites. It might not be a big deal, as per Google. However, broken internal links isn’t something that is good for your website. It makes Google unable to crawl the site pages, which can negatively affect page’s indexing and ranking.
6. Your Page Speed Matters
No one wants to wait ages for a site to load. They instantly move to another site or page. This results in higher bounce rate and it negatively affects your site ranking. Reducing page size, optimizing images on the pages, eliminating 3rd party scripts, and much more; there are so many things that you need to work on to improve page speed.
7. Make it Mobile-Friendly
As more and more people are now accessing webpages through their mobile devices, the better people are view to access your website on their mobile devices the better it will rank in search results. Use Google’s ‘Mobile Friendly Test’ to assess the responsiveness of your website.
8. Implement Schema
Schema is more and more becoming a must-have implementation for any website. It helps Google to understand the relevancy and type of content on a particular page. It also improves the site’s chances to rank for snippets. This can be implemented using Google’s structured data tool.
Conclusion:
As a general rule, you should be running technical SEO audits more often, coz it will help you gather insights into the technical SEO aspects of your site. The quicker you are able to resolve any issues pertaining to this, the better you are able to keep the technical SEO optimized for your site.
