Why is Technical SEO so important?
Aside from keeping track of the UX/UI design when creating a website, you should always take into consideration Google’s guidelines from a technical point of view. Technical SEO helps not only search engines to understand and better crawl your website but also ensures that it is loading faster and that the customers can be easily navigated from one section to another.
What does technical SEO Consist of?
Technical SEO encompasses all the elements that contribute to the speed, mobile responsiveness, user-friendliness, and functionality of your website. If neglected, your website may appear visually appealing but may load slowly, lack compatibility with mobile devices, have an unclear user interface, and encounter issues while users attempt to communicate with you or purchase your products.
Technical SEO applies for the following benefits (but it is not only limited to them):
- Adhering to the best practices recommended by Google for optimizing your website.
- Offering a mobile-friendly website that can be accessed by users on any device.
- Ensuring that your website loads quickly for all users.
- Making your website easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank.
- Maintaining the safety and security of your website.
- Designing a search-engine-friendly URL structure.
- Removing broken links and 404 pages from your website.
- Incorporating a robots.txt file that indicates to search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl.
- Establishing a sitemap as a "roadmap" to your website to improve indexing.
Following Google’s recommendations and applying them will not only make your website more responsive but will also generate more organic traffic by keeping your customers staying longer on the site.
How does it helps to rank higher?
Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of a website to enhance crawling, indexing, and ultimately rankings. This article outlines the key elements for optimizing Webflow websites. One such element is site structure, which refers to how website pages and categories are organized.
Having a clear and defined site structure will help Google understand, crawl and rank your website more effectively. Additionally, optimizing your site structure will also improve the user experience by making it easier for visitors to navigate your site. It is important to begin building your site with an optimized structure, as it becomes more challenging and risky to make changes as your site grows.
To create an optimized structure, categorize your pages and prioritize your core pages, such as the homepage and contact page. Then, map out the secondary structures of your website, with individual services sitting below parent services pages in a logical hierarchy. The URL structure for this should follow a similar pattern, with the primary services page being at the core, and the individual services pages sitting below it.
The structure should be similar to this:
Key Components of Technical SEO
1. Site Structure and Navigation
The structure of your website plays a pivotal role in SEO. A well-organized site not only makes it easier for users to find what they're looking for but also helps search engines understand your content. Here's what you need to consider:
1.1 URL Structure: Ensure your URLs are clean, concise, and descriptive. Avoid using long strings of numbers or symbols. For example, "www.example.com/blog/technical-seo" is more SEO-friendly than "www.example.com/page123456."
1.2. XML Sitemap: Create an XML sitemap to provide search engines with a roadmap of your site's pages. This helps them index your content more efficiently.
13. Internal Linking: Use internal links to connect related pages on your site. This not only aids in navigation but also distributes link equity across your site.
2. On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization goes hand in hand with Technical SEO. It involves optimizing individual pages to maximize their SEO potential. Here's what you should focus on:
2.1. Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Craft compelling title tags and meta descriptions that accurately reflect your content and include relevant keywords.
2.2. Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.): Use header tags to structure your content logically. Search engines pay attention to these tags to understand the hierarchy of your information.
2.3 Image Optimization: Optimize images by using descriptive file names and alt tags. This not only enhances SEO but also improves accessibility.
3. Technical Performance
The technical performance of your website can make or break your SEO efforts. Here's what you need to address:
3.1. Page Speed: Minimize page load times by optimizing images, using browser caching, and reducing unnecessary code.
3.2. Mobile Optimization: Ensure your site is mobile-responsive and offers an excellent user experience on smartphones and tablets.
3.3. SSL Certificate: Secure your site with an SSL certificate to build trust with users and improve your search engine rankings.
What's Next?
As you embark on your journey to master Technical SEO, here are some topics you should explore:
Schema Markup: Learn how to implement schema markup to provide structured data to search engines, enhancing your search results.
Site Security: Dive into advanced security measures like content security policies (CSP) to protect your site from potential threats.
International SEO: Explore techniques for optimizing your website for international audiences, including hreflang tags and geotargeting.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO is important because it helps search engines like Google, Bing Yandex and more to understand and index your website better. This can lead to higher rankings in search results pages (SERPs), which can bring more traffic to your website.
Technical SEO also includes making your website faster, more mobile-friendly, and easier to use. This can improve the overall experience for your visitors, which can make them stay on your website longer and come back more often.
Frequently asked questions
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website to meet all the current best practices that the search engines want as a benchmark. While doing that you increase your website's rankings in Google search results.
Technical SEO is part of On-Page SEO which is the opposite of Off-Page SEO. On-Page is all about optimizing your website and his pages to meet the current Search engines guidelines.
You can do technical SEO with the help of various tools which can speed up your process a lot, or by manually inspecting pages code of a website.
It can be considered an IT job, but for the time beign is more of a marketing job, because of all the strategies, that need to be created before actually applying the technical aspect.
