Technical SEO 67% of domains using Hreflang have issues that lead to a negative impact on overall SEO. (Yikes)
Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical issue of the website to improve its search engine ranking and usability.
But that is just the topping of the cake. There is more you need to know about the technical SEO.
Google considers various factors for ranking that come under three main areas of SEO.
On-Page SEO: It refers to the factors that are directly related to the content and structure of websites. Elements such as content quality, keywords, meta tags, etc.
Off-Page SEO: It refers to the activities performed outside the content to improve the ranking and user experience. Elements such as backlinks, domain authority, brand mention, etc.
Technical SEO: It refers to the technical aspects of websites such as site structure, speed load, and crawlability for effective ranking.
However, technical SEO lays the foundation of websites for indexing and ranking. Imagine a website has issues in loading or appearance and it creates problems for you. Do you like it?
The straightforward answer is NO. You immediately skip and get over to somewhere else.
That’s why technical is considered the pivotal part of SEO. To make your site valuable for both search engines and users you should have a deep understanding of technical SEO.
In this guide, I am going to show the essential things and checklist to pay attention to. They will improve the crawlability and ranking and make technical SEO a lot easier for you.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for the search engines to find, understand, and index it easily.
For example, Site structure, robot.txt, website speed, and creating XML sitemaps. To make your site accessible to Google crawlers to index and be user-friendly this part should be done accurately.
Google simply loves those sites that follow webmaster guidelines. The best practices include creating a site that is relevant, easy to access and provides a positive user experience.
Why Technical SEO is Important?
Technical SEO plays a crucial role in the ranking of a site by optimizing all the technical aspects. While on-page and off-page SEO focus on content generation, quality, and backlinks.
It includes various elements that come under Google ranking factors. Let’s say your site has a sitemap with a complex set of links and not easily accessible to Google crawlers to navigate. What’s the result? Delays in indexing, which ultimately decrease organic traffic and loss of potential leads.
Moreover, if your website speed is slow it signals to Google that the site is not optimized for user experience.
A study shows that a 1-second delay in loading causes a 7% reduction in organic traffic. And also reported that 72.3% of sites on Google have slow-speed sites.
Think of it as you eagerly waiting for your favorite TV show but when the time comes, what have you got? Only to WAIT.
I am sure most of you already understand what I mean by that. No one wants to wait. They simply leave with great disappointment.
To avoid this fate (92% of sites on Google do not get any organic traffic) make your you carefully optimize every element of technical SEO.
Technical SEO Checklist:
- Website Speed Check
- Site Architecture
- XML Sitemap
- Crawlability and Indexing
- Robot.txt
- HTTP Security
- Using Hreflang
- Mobile Friendliness
- Technical Errors
Website Speed Check:
The passion for the fast loading speed of Google will only increase in the future. The priority of Google is to give their users the best experience.
About 59% of website traffic comes from mobiles and authority reveals that 53% of mobile users leave the site if it is slow on loading.
Look, people are impatient and they want immediate results. That’s why page speed load is considered a huge factor of SEO.
In 2021, page speed officially became the ranking factor of Google, so it’s more important to pay attention to it than ever.
Pages with longer load times mean a high bounce rate and it also negatively impacts ranking and conversions.
How to fix it?
47 percent of people expect to take 2 seconds to load of website. To attain this speed you have to optimize the following factors.
Optimize Images:
Large-size images take a longer time to load. It directly affects your site ranking as page speed is a crucial factor in ranking.
Compress your image size by using tools like Gzip and optimizing techniques. The format(JPEG, PNG) of images also matters, use JPEG for photographs and PNGs for graphics with colors.
You can also use compressing tools like TinyPNG, JPEG optimizer, or compressnow without compromising on quality.
Minify Codes:
Minifying codes means removing all the unnecessary stuff from codes such as space, commas, or characters.
When you minify the codes, they become more compact, leading to a reduction in bandwidth usage and faster loading time.
It is usually applied to CSS, HTML, and JavaScript and you can also use tools like CSSN and Uglify JS.
Using too many Plugins:
A web page with too many plugins increases server load and slows down your website. Each plugin you install comes with its own Javascript, and CSS file which hold greater space.
This means each plugin makes its own server request and increases the time of page loading.
Use lightweight, well-coded, and limited numbers of plugins. Keep plugins updated and monitor site performance with Google Insights and GTmetrix.
There is another way to reduce server load is by using caching plugins. Caching plugins store copies of all web pages, images, and additional resources on the user’s device, reducing processing time and database queries.
Caching plugins are a perfect solution for effectively optimizing page speed and speeding up website performance.
Site Architecture:
The foundation and most important factor for ranking (crawlability) depend on site structure. Site architecture refers to how your site information is connected with each other.
The more logical flow the more chances of quick crawlability and ranking. As 34.6 percent of people leave due to poor site structure and 73.1 percent said they do because of non-responsive design.
So what should be the effective site structure? An effective site structure that is easy to navigate for search crawlers and users.
It should follow the site hierarchy so all web pages must be in a logical flow. For example, Home page>category>subcategory.
Each page should be connected through proper linking. Make sure there is no orphan page( pages with no links), this also leads to a drop in ranking.
Believe me, the Google crawlers are not so smart to go and solve the puzzle of your site. They simply leave it if they find the structure confusing.
There could be any type of site structure but mostly preferred is hierarchal and database structure.
The pro tip is to optimize your site first for people, not for search engine bots. People are the main assets of your website if they leave your site, it signals to Google that this site doesn’t care about user experience.
Breadcrumbs Navigation:
You also might experience, that some sites are not easy to navigate and leaves confusion only. These sites lack clear navigation and making difficult for users to find what they are looking for.
How to fix it? Breadcrumbs navigation is the easy yet effective way to resolve this technical issue. In simple words, breadcrumbs help the user locate their current location on the site and make it easier to find the information.
Especially if your website is large like an e-commerce site you should use breadcrumbs.
It acts as a tail of breadcrumbs that is typically displayed near the top of the page, linking each page back to a higher-level category page or Home page.
XML Sitemap:
An XML sitemap is the list of all the information related to the web pages. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language.
Gary Illyes from Google said that XML sitemaps are the second most important source for Google to discover new URLs.
Sitemap acts as the roadmap for bots to crawl and index your site. It includes all the URL data, meta information, custom post types, number of images, and last updated data.
Does every website need a sitemap? Well, no if a site has a well-organized structure with proper linking you don’t have to spend time creating a sitemap.
But unfortunately, many sites have no optimized site structure and linking guidance which is why having the sitemap is important.
Crawlability and Indexing:
Let’s ask Google what is crawlability.
Crawlability is the most important component, or you can say that without this there is no existence of your site.
Let’s say, you publish content on your site, now what? You obviously want your content to be shown in SERPs this is where crawlability comes in.
But the question is how do they crawl websites? Google has special crawlers or spiders that are used to find updated or fresh content.
Whenever you want to submit your site to Google, you have to go through this indexing process. Otherwise, your site will never shown in search results no matter how great it is.
They simply follow up on the links understand the data and add them to the Google large database set.
Find and Fix Dead Links:
As I said Google bot follows links for indexing, if your site has dead links it might lead to hardness in indexing and lower search ranking.
These links lead to pages that no more exist and create 404 pages. This frustrates the user and negatively impacts their experience.
To avoid this you have to carefully play with them because crawlers are more likely to find dead links than humans even if they are hidden.
Look, every website has dead links but the successful ones are those who find and fix these issues on time before they create bigger problems.
There are several tools available that redirect the URL when you delete or replace it. Use these tools to identify these links and retrieve them.
Robots.txt:
A robots.txt is a file created to instruct web robots (Google crawlers), how to interact with web pages.
It’s like giving directions to Google robots. It has two main directives “Allow” and “Disallow” followed by specific URLs and patterns.
For example, if you want Google crawlers to not index your certain you simply use the “Disallow” directive to specify it.
One more thing, if you want bots to crawl your site but keep it out of the search results, you have to use a meta robots tag. It simply allows Google to crawl and index your site but prevents them from following the page links.
HTTP Security:
HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol. They are responsible for storing all the confidential and authentic information of users in encrypted form.
It ensures that the data transmitted between the user browser and server is secure and makes it difficult for hackers to manipulate or intercept data.
Google has such features that if the site is not secure it alarms the users, or prevents opening it sometimes in browsers.
For a positive user experience, it’s important to make sure that all the credentials information (password, credit card details, etc) is private.
In 2016, Google added this to its 200 ranking factors. In case, you don’t use HTTP, there are some steps to follow.
- Obtain an SSL/TLS certificate from a trusted authority.
- Install the certificate with the support of hosting providers.
- After successfully installing the certificate configure the webserver to redirect all the HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
- Update internal links and implement security headers.
- Test and Monitor thoroughly.
Using Hreflang In Your Content:
Hreflang is a special HTML attribute used when you target multiple countries with the same or different languages.
In short, you are helping search engines to understand the languages of different countries, you are trying to reach.
The major components of this:
link rel=”alternate” indicates that this link is the alternate version of the original one.
href=”url_of_page” means the point where you can find the alternate version of the page.
hreflang=”lang_code” is the main point that shows the type of alternate language.
One thing to note is Google and Yandex only use Hreflang attributes while other search engines (Bing) rely on content-language HTML attributes.
Mobile-Friendliness:
In 2021, about 7.1 billion of people are mobile users. The pressure for mobile optimization for users is increasing (crazy).
Google takes mobile indexing first and ranks your website on the level of optimization a website does for mobile users.
Most people take 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) to decide whether the site is good or they should leave.
Design websites in a way that will adjust to different sizes and devices(laptops, tablets, smartphones). Make sure your site conforms with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG) and is accessible easily to mobile users.
Track the performance with Page Speed Insight Tools, and carefully audit performance indicators (bounce rate, conversion rate, and loading time).
This way you can use these results to refine your strategies and work on areas that need improvement.
Technical Errors:
Canonicalization:
It is not directly considered a technical error but I want to add this here because it’s a very common mistake websites make.
If your site has more than the same content more than one time even on different sites it confuses search engines and leads to lower search ranking.
It’s like give and take. When you provide ease to search engines, in return you get great results. Indeed, Google does not penalize those with duplicate content but it wastes your crawl budget, by negatively affecting the ranking.
Fix Errors:
First conduct a thorough audit through SEO tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, Moz, and Screaming Frog. Find if your site has broken links, 404 errors, and redirect chains. If so take a step forward and resolve these issues.
Broken Links: The real headache is to find them. But luckily, online tools are available which makes it easy to find and fix those links.
You can either replace them or permanently delete them to prevent visitors from stumbling upon those frustrating page errors.
404 Errors: These errors come when a user clicks on a specific URL, a request is sent back to the server normally, but in this case server cannot find the requested page and shows a 404 error.
There could be any reasons, maybe the page is deleted or moved without setting up redirects. To avoid this regularly check the page insights and broken links. You can also create a 404 custom page for lost visitors to provide information and navigation.
Redirect Chains: This occurs when a URL is redirected multiple times before reaching its final destination.
Let’s say you click on a link, instead of taking you to your intended page it moves from one URL to another. It has adverse effects on page speed, SEO, loss of link equity, and poor user experience.
FAQs:
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of making your site compatible with search engines by optimizing all technical aspects.
What are the major technical SEO issues?
- Uncompressed Files
- Broken Redirects
- Slow Page Speed
Conclusion Of Technical SEO Guide:
I hope this blog will help you a lot in understanding the technical SEO aspects and issues.
Remember, it’s a final piece of the puzzle that you need to fix to get significant results.
I know in the start you get overwhelmed by looking at the big terms of technical SEO but calm down once you know how to do it it becomes easy to resolve every issue.
Have you done technical SEO on your site before, if so what are the results?