Technical SEO relates to enhancing the technical aspects of a website to boost its page ranking in the search engines. Making a website faster, more candid for search engines to crawl, and readable for search engines are technical optimization pillars. In other words, technical SEO is an on-page SEO element that boosts your website’s feature to get rank higher. It is the reverse of what off-page SEO does, which is more about creating publicity for a website through other websites and platforms.
Why one should technically optimize his/her website?
The big search engines such as Google wants to demonstrate to their users the best possible query results. Therefore, the search engine’s robots crawl and assess a website page on an abundance of factors. Some of these factors are based on the experience the user is having, like how immediately a page loads. Some of the other factors endeavor to show the search engine robots what the website’s pages are all about. All of this what structured data does. So, by boost your site’s technical aspects, you benefit from search engine crawl and better understand your website. If this does well, you could receive higher rankings or even rich results, which is fantastic!
Apart from this positive side, there is a negative flip side as well, as if you make severe technical mistakes on your site, they can cost you a little to a whole lot. For example, we have people accidentally block search engines completely from crawling their websites by accidentally typing a trailing slash in the wrong place in their robots.txt file or turning crawl permissions off completely so that the crawl robots cannot find the website. But it is a mistake that you should only establish the technical aspects just to please the search engines. The website should role great – it should be fast, straightforward, and easy to use. It should be design for your users, no robots, in the first place. Luckily, developing a robust technical framework often corresponds with a better experience for everyone and things involved.
Parts of technical SEO
Different categories that unitedly make up a technical SEO are –
Indexability
Indexability is one of the primary objectives of technical SEO. As a website owner, you want search engines to determine and index your content. However, a couple of common indexability issues can prevent that objective from being achieved: canonical and no index pages.
Canonical Tags
A canonical tag tells a search engine to demonstrate the most authoritative (canonical) version of a page in search results. This tag is especially crucial for similar or duplicate pages. Without this tag, search engines may take their best guess or avoid indexing the appropriate page. Sometimes a canonical tag can point to a page that does not exist (404 error) or a page with a redirect. These tags should only be used for pages that return valid 200 (Ok) page versions to get indexed in the search results.
No index page
Including a “no index” Meta tag on a page will prohibit the search engines from indexing the content in the search results. This “no index” tag can be great for pages you do not want to appear in the search results, such as an “Archives” or “Category” page. But if you want a page to appear in the search results, then make sure that this tag is removed.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO benefit both search engines and site visitors to understand the content of a web page. We can achieve three on-page elements addressed within technical SEO such as title tags, Meta descriptions, and H1 tags.
Title Tags
Title tags briefly outline the content of a web page. They are advertised as the title of a result in a search engine results page, as well as the web browser tab. Common errors with the title tags can be that they are too long, too short, or missing altogether. A favored title tag length should be between 50 and 60 characters.
Meta Descriptions
Meta Descriptions provide a short snippet that represents a web page. These descriptions are advertised as a description on a search engine results page and can heavily impact whether a searcher clicks on a result to learn more. Google endorses that every page has a Meta description that is 110 to 160 characters.
H1 Tags
H1 Tags are not as critical as a page title tag, but they offer an opportunity to boost your on-page SEO. They assist as a top-level heading of a web page and help both search engines and site visitors grasp the content’s overarching topic. Since H1 tags are the strongest header tag, it is endorsed to use only one tag per page, with a unique H1 tag on every page.
Site speed performance
Site speed encounters both user experience and a search engine’s competence to crawl the content. There are many website speed performance aspects, including the HTML code of a website, server selection, and images. Your best bet is to run a website speed test on Google to create a custom report on issues impacting your performance.
Images
Images matter a lot in SEO. Five common images issues to watch out for in SEO are such as –
. Broken images
. Large file sizes
. Image redirects
. HTTPs page with an HTTP image
. Missing ALT text
The bottom line with images is to establish a great user experience, both visually and technically, and you will be alright.
Internal Pages
URLs of the internal pages can repeatedly produce errors. Some of the common page errors include 5XX pages, 4XX pages, and HTTPs/HTTP mixed content.
4XX pages – In this error, the URL cannot be accessed. 4XX errors may include errors such as –
401 – Unauthorized
403 – Forbidden
408 – Request Timeout
404 – Not found
5XX pages – In this error, the URL will return a 5XX status code when there is a server error. Some of the common errors of 5XX may include errors such as –
500 – Internal server error
502 – Bad gateway
503 – Service unavailable
504 – Gateway timeout
HTTPs/HTTP mixed content
This error happens when the website has a secure HTTPS connection, but files like images, CSS, or JavaScript are loaded over an insecure HTTP connection.
Conclusion
An adequate technical SEO is critical for the success of an SEO strategy. The internal linking and website loads should be done entirely to obtain a technically optimized website. All these technical SEO parameters should be tested frequently for errors and misconceptions so that they can be spotted and rectified quickly.
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