What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the out of site structure of your website intended to help improve your sites organic rankings and visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves making sure that your website is easy for search engine crawlers to find, crawl, index, and render.
Why Technical SEO Is Important
Technical SEO is important because it helps search engines understand your website and its content, which allows them to rank your pages more accurately in SERPs and can lead to more organic traffic to your website.
What Are Some Important Aspects Of Technical SEO?
- Site architecture: Your site architecture should be well-organized and easy for search engines to navigate. This means using a logical URL structure and creating clear internal linking between your pages. How do you do this? Think, where would I go to find a page or information? What makes sense? Take some time and check out you competitions websites and find out what they did to structure their sites.
- Mobile-friendliness: Optimize your site for mobile devices, which means making sure your site looks good on your phone, that it loads quickly and can handle all screen sizes. Web designers can make your website mobile friendly, but if you are doing it yourself, there are plugins in WordPress.
- Page speed: If your website loads slowly, people will leave and go to another site. I know I do. Plus, search engines give preference to websites that load quickly allowing your site to appear higher in search engine results.
- Structured data: Structured data is a way to markup your website’s content so that search engines can better understand it. This can lead to richer search results, such as featured snippets and knowledge graphs.
- XML sitemap: An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of the pages on your website. It helps search engines to find and index all of your pages more efficiently. XML sitemaps are tricky so I usually use the Yoast XML sitemap feature and submit it right to google search console for indexing.
In addition to these essential elements, there are many other technical SEO factors that can affect your website’s performance in SERPs. These include things like …
- Duplicate content: Identifying and fixing duplicate content issues. This means the content of your webpages as well as your meta data i.e.: site title and meta description. Copying content from one page to another to make a post or page longer can hurt you. If coming up with new information is too hard, try rephrasing a few sentences through out the section.
- Canonical tags: Telling search engines which version of a page is the preferred version. I always use SEMRush to detect these and then use an SEO wordpress plugin to set the Canonical URL. No need to get fancy, the plug is quick and effective.
- hreflang tags
- Robots.txt files: To control which pages search engines can crawl.
- 404 pages.
How Do I Improve My Site’s Technical SEO?
How do you get started? Run a technical SEO audit. This will help you to identify any technical issues that are affecting your website’s performance. There are a number of free and paid tools that you can use to do this. Use the audit to Fix any technical issues, such as page speed, mobile friendly and the other issues described above as soon as possible. Some can be fixed with a quick google search and others may involve working with a developer or SEO specialist.
Technical SEO Expert
Technical SEO can be a complex topic and is important in improving your website’s SEO. By following the tips above, you can improve your website’s technical aspects and attract more organic results. Or, contact me for help!