Welcome to our guide on the top 10 technical SEO techniques to boost your website’s online presence and visibility. While content is king, technical SEO is the foundation that ensures your website is optimized for search engines to crawl and index your pages effectively. By focusing on the technical aspects of your website, you can improve your website’s loading speed, user experience, and search engine ranking. In this guide, we’ll cover the essential technical SEO techniques that every website owner should implement to ensure their website is performing at its best. Let’s get started!
⚠ Technical SEO – What does this mean?
Not considering technical SEO is like having a beautiful home without pipes or having leaks everywhere. To make the water go to a shower, to your sprinklers or to your laundry, it’s important to make sure all the pipes are connected.
Top 10 Technical SEO
1- Site Speed
Site speed is a critical factor in SEO. A slow-loading website can negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings. To improve site speed there are many different technics, using a content delivery network (CDN) or optimize your code are just some of them. Google also provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights that can help you identify areas for improvement.
2- Crawl Errors
Crawl errors are issues that prevent search engine bots from crawling and indexing a website’s pages. For a responsive website, crawl errors can occur due to several reasons such as broken links, incorrect canonical tags, or incorrect URL structures. Fixing crawl errors can significantly improve a website’s SEO by ensuring all pages are properly indexed and visible to search engines.
3- Information Architecture
Information architecture refers to the structure and organization of your website’s content. A well-organized site with clear navigation can improve user experience and help search engines understand the relevance and hierarchy of your content. To improve your site’s information architecture, you can organize your content into categories and subcategories, use descriptive and keyword-rich URLs, and ensure that your site’s navigation is intuitive and easy to use.
4- Page Depth
Page depth is tight to the information architecture. It refers to the number of clicks it takes for a user to reach a particular page on a website. A website with a high page depth can make it challenging for search engine bots to crawl and index all pages. For a responsive website, it’s essential to keep the page depth as low as possible. A well-structured navigation menu, breadcrumb trails, and internal linking can help keep page depth in check.
5- Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website and helps search engines crawl and index your site more efficiently. It’s important to have a well-organized and up-to-date sitemap that includes all relevant pages on your site. You can create a sitemap manually or use a plugin or tool to generate one automatically.
6- SEO-friendly URL structure
A website’s URL structure plays a vital role in its SEO. For a responsive website, it’s essential to have a clear and consistent URL structure that is easy for search engine bots and users to understand. The URL should contain relevant keywords, and unnecessary parameters should be avoided. This is part of technical SEO but need to follow the content SEO strategy you’re developing.
7- Broken Links
Broken links or 404 errors occur when a page is removed or the URL structure changes, and the links pointing to that page are not updated. Broken links can negatively impact a website’s SEO as they can lead to a poor user experience and hinder search engine bots’ ability to crawl and index all pages. Regularly monitoring and fixing broken links is crucial for a responsive website’s technical SEO.
8- Canonical Tags
Canonical tags are HTML tags that tell search engines which version of a page to index when multiple versions of the same page exist. For a responsive website, canonical tags can be used to avoid duplicate content issues that may arise due to different versions of the same page for different screen sizes. Canonical tags help consolidate link equity and improve a website’s SEO.
9- Structured Data
Structured data is a type of code added to a website’s pages that provides additional information about the content visible on the page. For a responsive website, structured data can be used to improve its SEO by making it easier for search engines to understand the website’s content. Structured data can also help improve the website’s appearance in search engine results by adding rich snippets such as product reviews, ratings, and prices.
10- Mobile-Friendly Website
With the increasing use of mobile devices to access the internet, having a mobile-friendly website has become crucial for SEO. A mobile-friendly website is one that is designed to provide a seamless user experience on mobile devices. This includes having a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes, fast loading times, and easy-to-use navigation. A mobile-friendly website can significantly improve a website’s search engine visibility, as Google has stated that mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor.
Other technical SEO considerations include ensuring your website is responsive to have a good experience across any device, finding or fixing orphaned pages to help search engines understand your content, and implementing HTTPS encryption for secure browsing just to enumerate some.
Optimizing these technical aspects of your website will help improve the performance and visibility of your website on search engine results pages. Technical SEO is an ongoing process that requires ongoing maintenance and monitoring to ensure your site is optimized for both users and search engines. However, it’s important to do miss content SEO as part of your strategy.