We all know SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but do we know something beyond ON-page and OFF-page SEO? Yes, there are many factors apart from On-Page or Off-page SEO which together form a crucial weight for your website to rank in Google and other search engines like Google, Bing, and many others. Very few know this term – Technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to improving the technical parts of a blog or site so as to expand the positioning of its pages in Search Result. It aims at making it easy for web crawlers to understand and position the page. We know that fast-loading speed is loved by search engines. So, it aims at improving the speed, remove blockages (which hinders crawling) are the mainstays of technical optimization. Technical SEO is a piece of on-page SEO, which centers around improving components on your site to get higher rankings. It’s something contrary to off-page SEO, which is tied in with link building or producing exposure for a site on multiple platforms.
Why Technical SEO is Crucial for You?
We all know that Google and various other search engines need to give their clients the most ideal outcomes for their questions. They are continuously focusing on improving the results. In this way, Google’s robots (crawlers) creep and assess site pages on a huge number of elements. A few elements depend on the User Experience, similar to how quick a page loads. Different variables help robots handle what your pages are about.
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In this way, by improving technical perspectives, you help Google and other search engines creep and understand your site. Understanding its structure is of utmost importance before your page gets ranking.
In the event that you do this well, you will surely get higher rankings.
It likewise works the reverse way around too. For Example, If you will have Technical errors on your site, they can cost you. It will have an impact on rankings for sure.
You focus here on various aspects like simply checking the robots.txt file if you have accidentally blocked Google Bots to crawl your site.
Technical SEO helps you to please search engines and bargain better rankings. While you aim your site function admirably – quick loading, clear and simple to understand– for your visitors in any case.
Ensuring better Technical SEO is a win-win situation for Visitors, Search engines and finally you (You get noticed and more traffic on the way).
Key Pillars and Steps to Optimize Site for Technical SEO
So, as we understood until now that Technical SEO is crucial for your website to perform well, following key Pillars are to be noticed –
- Make sure the website speed is fast
- Secure it with HTTPS
- Site-Map (XML)
- Make it crawlable for Google Bots
- Check for broken links
- Avoid Duplicate Content
So now let us discuss each one in detail.
Step 1 – Make sure the website speed is fast-
It is a no brainer that a slow website means higher bounce rates. Website when loads fast, it ensures low or almost zero bounce rate. The recommended speed is less than 3 seconds.
Search engines will automatically give preference to the website which will load quickly.
After all its all about user experience as we discussed it earlier.
So what you need to do for that?
- First of all check your web hosting, it shouldn’t be killing your site. If you have no or little idea on how to find a good web hosting, consider visiting one of the best web hosting review site.
- Install Cache Plugin like Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache. Cache plugin creates the static HTML copies of your website to make it available as and when requested for. This decreases the direct load on Server.
- Decrease the request count– Combine the number of requests to minimize the browser tasks. Combine your Java and CSS through the plugins mentioned above.
- Image Lazy Load – Not every image is to be loaded at once. Images are heavier in size and asking the browser to load all images together will block the page load. Lazy load aims at loading the images only when the frame of the page is visible to the user.
- Use CDN – Cdn (Content Delivery Network) helps in sharing the copies of your web pages on multiple servers situated at multiple geographies. If you have your server in India, your site will load fast here. But if someone will open in the USA, it will load slow. CDN solves this issue. Consider the Free Cloudflare plan, to begin with.
Step 2- Secure it with HTTPS
Greenspan locks are loved by Google these days. You must secure your site by installing an SSL certificate. SSL certificate ensures encryption and makes transactions on the website safe for browsing.
SSL certificates like LETSENCRYPT are free and your hosting can easily install it for you.
Once the SSL certificate it installed, you will see all your URLs will begin with HTTPS (earlier it must be HTTP only).
Step 3- Make it Crawl able for Google Bots
Many times we keep focusing on our On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. We keep writing guest posts and are too busy in link building.
What if you are doing a disaster by simply blocking the Google Bots? What if your site is not accessible to Google or any other search engine?
Yes, for example you need to check your Robots.txt. You can allow or disallow any of the external bots to crawl your page.
Further for your website, you may want to allow or disallow a particular post to be indexed or not. Use Meta Robots Tags like – Follow, No-follow, Index, or No-Index them.
Step 4- Check for broken links or 404 Pages
Broken links lead to 404 errors. While in Technical SEO, we are discussing user experience, isn’t it a bad experience for your Users?
Certainly Yes, someone visiting your website is landing on pages which no more exists!
Here is the solution – find out manually or through Rankmath 404 Monitor.
Once you have identified the broken links, fix them manually, or redirect them to existing pages.
Sorted! Cool! It’s an easy but critical step you must take care of.
Step 5- Avoid Duplicate Content
So, this is the last but one of the important aspects for the website to score high on Technical SEO.
In this step, we need to ensure that every single page of your website has Unique Content.
Search engines get confused when you have similar or identical content on multiple pages.
In fact, that serves no purpose actually to have multiple pages with the same content.
Search engines often treat them as duplicate pages and may lead to de-rank.
- The solution to this problem is to add a canonical URL on such pages. In case you have similar information on multiple pages, you can simply add a canonical page which will tell search engine, which page to rank actually.
- A simple tip– Identify a high ranking page and low ranking pages. Similarly, identify the pages with less traffic and importance. Give Canonical tags to your main page through the supporting pages. This will further boost your rankings as internal linking provides juice to linked pages.
You can manually re-align the content or simply redirect 301 to the main page.
Conclusion
Fixing Technical issues like speed, Https, avoiding duplicate content, and removing 404 errors as mentioned above will surely help you rank better. While it is important to have wonderful content, properly optimized for On-page SEO, we always focus on Link building as well.
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But from now on, let’s focus on Tech-SEO as well to ensure great user experience.