Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide [2024]

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There are two types of SEO: on-page SEO, which deals with content and page optimization, and off-page SEO, which establishes relations between websites. One has almost covered the SEO universe when these two are put together. But wait a minute; there's something more: technical SEO—the next big topic of discussion.

What is Technical SEO?

So, what exactly does technical SEO refer to? Does it somehow combine the on-page factors with the off-page factors? Well, partly indeed, partly not really!

Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes optimization of your website's technical aspects to improve its search engine visibility. It involves ensuring that your website is structured, coded, and crawled efficiently by search engine bots.

Technical SEO relates to all SEO activities, including content optimization and link building. In simple terms, it covers the following search engine requirements in order to improve crawling. These requirements are constantly changing and becoming more complex in order to keep up with the search engines, which are getting more and more sophisticated each day. So we can say that technical SEO is in a state of constant refinement.

Technical SEO needs to be optimized to make the necessary foundation that provides your content and links with the best possible marketing environment so you can shine in search engine results without any obstacles.

Well, this would be our short definition of technical SEO.

“If you think of SEO like building a house, then technical SEO is all about building a solid foundation. You can look at it as any work done to a site aside from the content itself.”

Source

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO might be overlooked because of content strategies, but it is indeed the backbone on which a successful online presence is built. This is the magic behind the scenes that ensures your website is found by search engines and provides a seamless user experience. Now, let us dive into the essential reasons why technical SEO matters:

1. Improved User Experience

A technically optimized website offers a superior user experience. Faster loading times, mobile-friendliness, and easy navigation contribute to positive user interaction. When visitors have a pleasant experience, they are more likely to stay on your site, explore further, and return in the future.

Technical SEO directly affects a user's engagement with a website. An optimized website will load quickly, offer a good experience, and function properly on any device. This leads to reduced bounce rates. Users are more likely to stay on a website that is easy to navigate and provides the exact information that they are looking for. This will also increase engagement because a positive user experience will keep your visitors wanting to stay longer and thus increase their session time on your site. A fast, user-friendly website speaks to professionalism and credibility, improving your brand's perception.

2. Increased Search Engine Rankings

Search engines like Google prioritize websites that are easy to crawl, index, and understand. Technical optimization ensures that your website meets these criteria, improving its visibility in search results. A higher search engine ranking means more organic traffic, leading to increased brand awareness and potential customers.

Moreover, Google indexes mobile-first. Hence, the mobile version of your website will be considered the main factor for ranking. A fast-loading page enhances the user experience. It may also help search engines understand that your content is worth spending time on. Technical SEO ensures that search engines' bots can easily access and move through your web pages.

3. Enhanced Conversion

When your website is technically optimized, it is more likely to attract and retain visitors. This increased engagement can lead to higher conversion rates, whether your goal is to generate leads, drive sales, or encourage sign-ups. You can optimize your website and convert visitors into customers by having call-to-action buttons. A technical SEO audit can ensure your CTAs are strong, clear, and in the right place. Also, technical SEO ensures that search engines understand the content on your website, allowing it to appear for searches with relevant search terms.

4. Lowered Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate indicates that your visitors leave your site immersively. Technical SEO can help lower associated bounce rates by working on your website content and load speed—both for relevance and speed of access, respectively. Lower bounce rates would indicate to search engines that you have a good user experience and probably improve search engine ranking.

5. Higher SEO Ranking

Technical SEO is one of the cornerstone parts of any comprehensive SEO strategy. You will increase your general SEO ranking by fixing a lot of technical issues and fully optimizing your website to appear for search engines. Obviously, the higher your ranking, the more organic traffic you'll get, and the better you will show up in search results.

6. Increased Website Traffic

Make your website discoverable. It helps bring in more organic traffic to your website—something so essential for all growth in business and revenue. This will ensure that wider traffic is channeled to your website, increasing chances of interactions with prospective customers and conversion to paying customers.

7. Improved Website Authority

Technical SEO can further affect the website's authority. A slow or nonmobile-friendly website can tarnish the status and reputation of your brand. Professional technical SEO helps show your visitors that your website is reliable and committed to the provision of a quality user experience.

8. Better Analytics

Better website analytics accuracy due to technical search engine optimization. When your website is well-structured and crawled by search engines, you stand a better chance of getting a proper view of it. You will get information from your website that allows you to make decisions based on data analysis and optimize your marketing resources.

Technical SEO Elements

1. Website Speed

Website speed can be a major influence on users' experience and search engine rankings. Users with short attention spans will exit if the site takes too long to load. Moreover, Google prioritizes sites that load most quickly in search results. To optimize website performance, one may want to consider optimizing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, leveraging browser caching, and using a content delivery network.

Brian Dean, founder and owner of Backlinko, is one of the most influential SEO experts to conduct extensive research into the role page load speed plays. In his case study, he analyzed more than one million Google search results and found that page load speed is among the top ten ranking factors. Websites that load faster are ranked higher in search results compared to their slower peers.

Reasons for the slow loading of websites could be a few, as follows:

• Large image files: A number of images not compressed tend to run down the performance of your website while loading. Compressed images go a long way in enhancing performance without losing quality.
• Unminified CSS and JavaScript: CSS and JavaScript files can either be big or bloated, adding extra overhead to your website. The minification of such files makes them small in size and hence enhances loading.
• Not using browser caching: Browser caching saves your website's resources on users' devices. If browser caching is used, it will reduce how often a user has to download files from your server. It can be one huge step towards improving page load times.
• Server issue: Slow servers or ones in congestion hamper the performance of your website, affecting load times. Consider upgrading your server or going for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) where your content is served through multiple dispersed servers.

2. Mobile Friendliness

In a mobile-first world, it is very important that your website is optimized for mobile. This is because Google has adopted mobile-first indexing, which indexes mainly from the mobile version of the website. Ensure your website is responsive, visually clear in layout, and fast on smaller screens.

If you're not sure whether your website is friendly, Google's tool called the Mobile-Friendly Test will do the job. This tool will crawl your mobile website and provide insights on how to fix any issues.

Moreover, for every screen size, your website should automatically adapt to fit. This means that it will be readable and navigable without scaling on every device. Images should be resized and compressed to load faster on mobile devices.

Mobile users are even more impatient than desktop users. Your site should load quickly on mobile devices, or you will lose visitors. Use a font size that is easy to read on smaller screens. Avoid using too much text, as it is hard to read on mobile phones.

3. Site Architecture

A well-structured site architecture is crucial for both user experience and search engine optimization. It allows users to navigate your website with ease and efficiency while also giving search engines a clear insight into its contents.

Here's a list of some key components of good site architecture:

• Natural Hierarchy: Make your site pages have a natural hierarchy. It's best to position the most important pages in the major category and the least important ones in lower-level categories. This will make it easier for users to understand how things on your website are structured, therefore easily finding what they need.
• Logical URLs: Using descriptive and keyword-rich URLs representing the content of every page and avoiding long, confusing ones that become hard to remember and understand.
• Internal linking: Use links to connect relevant pages within your website to make it easy for users to move from one portion of the website to another. This will also help search engines understand the relationships of your web pages and eventually structure your site in an organized way.
• Sitemap: An XML sitemap is where you'll list all the important pages of your site. It helps search engines discover and index your pages and improves your website's visibility in search results.

4. Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup gives search engines extra context about your web content. Through schema markup, you can directly teach search engines what content is on your page and sometimes trigger rich snippets in search. Rich snippets increase click-through rates and serve users better.

Google can identify the type of your resource by looking at its content and on-page optimization, but rich snippets will take it to the next level and help search engines a ton!

What are rich snippets? You can see rich snippets in the search results when you type in a specific query. For instance, ask your search engine: How to make a ricotta cheesecake or just type in ricotta cheesecake.

You will then see the search results along with the beautiful, rich snippets. Rich snippets provide you with information ranging from the star rating to the number of reviews. All the information is structured data markup.

And the best part is that you, too, can add rich snippets to your website! WordPress users can enjoy the easiest way to do so. All they need to do is add the schema.org plugin to their CMS and activate it. It will be ready to use right away.

How can structured data be added to schema.org? Schema.org will only ask that you give an accurate description to help Google categorize your page more quickly. If you aren’t using WordPress, you can use Google Markup Helper to guide you through the process of adding rich snippets to your resource by adding the missing tags.

It’s simple: When you see the missing data in the right margin, highlight part of the content and specify what it is. Then, click on the red “Create HTML” button and copy and paste the HTML into your page code.

The next step is to validate your code using the structured data testing tool by Google. This is recommended whether you generate rich snippets using Google or schema.org.

5. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the major woes in SEO. This is when identical or nearly identical content lives on multiple pages or websites. If the search engines detect duplicate content, they look at it as a signal of low-quality content and will thus penalize your website.

To avoid issues with duplicate content, perform the following steps:

• Use canonical tags: A canonical tag provides information about the preferred version of any page. It informs the search engines which page version to index. This helps in the case of content that shows up across several pages, as seen in product pages hosted by different e-commerce platforms.
• Redirect old URLs: While restructuring your website, it becomes important to take a step ahead and redirect the old URLs to a new structure. This helps the search engines avoid duplicate copies of content and direct site visitors to the appropriate page.
• Create unique content: Always strive to create original and worthy content that is unique to your website. Refrain from copying any content without adding a personal touch or perspective to it.
• Use a content management system: Most modern content management systems will help you manage your website and thereby avoid issues of duplicate content. In fact, most of these systems have inbuilt functions that prevent one from publishing duplicate content.
• Check for duplicate content: With Google Search Console, you can easily check for duplicate content on your website. If you get any duplicate content, take effective measures to resolve the problem.

Stay on top of any duplicate content issues. Check your website in order to detect any problems by using the Google Search Console. Go again into the Google Search Console dashboard, then Search Appearance, then HTML improvements, and check if there are any issues to fix.

If duplicate content is detected, get rid of it. You can accomplish this by removing duplicate content entirely, but you can also rephrase it. This will be more time-consuming, but it is better to put in the effort and not lose the content.

6. Robots.txt 

Robots.txt is a text file that instructs search engine crawlers which parts of your site are off-limits for them and which aren't. It is like a traffic police for search engine bots. You have this file to regulate how the bots reach your website. Understanding robots.txt and using it correctly means you can further improve your site's visibility and even avoid unwanted crawling.

Robots.txt is used for various reasons, but one of the most common functions includes blocking search engines from indexing certain pages or directories. That could be helpful for multiple pages under construction, sensitive information, or low quality. You block them so they will not appear in any search results and thus avoid negative consequences.

This is where you have to use robots.txt with care. You will end up blocking too many pages, which may make it very hard for your website to show up and for search engines to find the good stuff. You have to find the right balance between blocking unnecessary pages and letting the search engines find what's important.

Using robots.txt, you can specify directives instructing the search engine crawlers how to behave. Common directives include:

• User-agent: Specifies which user-agent the directive is for; typically, search engine bots.
• Disallow: Lists the URL or directory that the specified user-agent needs to avoid access.
• Allow: Lists the URL or directory to which the given user-agent has access.
• Sitemap: Specifies the location of your sitemap file.

When done carefully, the robots.txt file will ensure that search bot crawls actually bring in relevant and valuable content and show up in search results.

7. Sitemaps

The sitemap is a kind of XML file that delivers the list of the most important pages on your website to search engines. This is like a roadmap, which will help search engines understand the structure and content of your site. Thus, by submitting the sitemap of your website to popular search engines like Google, you make it more discoverable and will be assured that important pages are indexed correctly.

Primarily, there are two kinds of sitemaps:

• XML Sitemap: This is the most common type of sitemap, and it is utilized by search engines to crawl your website content and index it.
• HTML sitemap: A human-readable sitemap that can be created to provide users with a navigation menu of website pages.

Make a sitemap with ease. There are suitable online tools on offer or website builders providing an option to auto-generate an XML. After making one sitemap, the same must be submitted to Google Search Console and other relevant search engines. So, the search engines will find your site pages and quickly index them.

While sitemaps are not a guarantee to raise your website in search rankings, a site map does help improve the visibility of your site to search engines. This makes it easier for the engines to determine the structure of your website and its content, therefore indexing your pages much better. Furthermore, sitemaps can be useful in tracking the indexing status of your pages and perceiving any troubles that may occur with these indexes.

8. Crawl Errors

Monitor the crawl errors on your website to observe what is going wrong. Tools such as Google Search Console can help you get to grips with this issue. Crawl errors prevent search engines from indexing your page properly. Easily identify these issues and make relevant corrections very quickly.

In the case of 404 error pages, when there is a “page not found” issue that can’t be avoided, make sure that you come up with a custom one. Design it in a user-friendly and humorous way to at least entertain your visitors and guide them back to your home page or any other important and popular part of your website.

There are a few scenarios that may result in a 404 error. The page was moved, the page was removed, or the wrong email was linked. All these scenarios demand that you implement a permanent 301 redirect. If the page can’t be redirected to any existing or related resource, create a custom 404 error page that can mitigate the situation.

But never let a user hop onto the standard 404 error page because it will immediately make him bounce off your website and end the session.

Error pages can be found in Google Search Console. Go to “crawl,” then “crawl errors” to locate the “URL error” report, which is divided into the desktop, smartphone, and feature phone categories.

Conclusion

Indeed, technical SEO is complex, but it remains one of the most imperative parts of a successful online marketing strategy. By optimizing the discussed technical elements in this post, you're establishing yourself better for search engine rankings, as well as an improved user experience and overall website performance. Keeping an eye on your website's technical health will make sure your site remains updated with the latest best practices in SEO.

Technical SEO is a never-ending topic. It covers a broad range of subjects concerning the elements needed for optimizing according to the requirements search engines impose. We won’t be able to exhaust the topic today, but we hope this brief overview of the major issues will suffice for now.