Search engine optimization is a very broad term. It refers to the process of assessing and improving the website ranking on relevant searches on search engine organic search. Search engine optimization, also known commonly as SEO. encompasses many elements such as on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. In this post, we will discuss technical SEO in detail for beginners, including what it entails and the crucial role it plays in improving site performance and ranking.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO simply refers to the process of optimizing a website for search engines. It focuses on indexing and crawling the site. It thus helps various search engines such as Google to crawl, interpret, and index your site with ease. Remember that if the search engine cannot crawl your site, then it won’t be indexed, meaning it will not rank on search results. Therefore, technical SEO plays a crucial role in website ranking.
It is referred to as technical because the role it plays is not in any way related to website promotion or the actual content of the site. The main role of technical SEO is to optimize the website's infrastructure to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index the site.
Why Technical SEO Is Important
Most people often focus on other elements of SEO and forget about technical SEO. According to SEO experts, technical SEO is the backbone of SEO because it determines whether your website is indexed by search engines or not. Regardless of how impressive your site looks or the quality of the content inside, if it is not indexed by the search engine, then everything that you have worked so hard for will not be seen by your target audience. If you don’t get it right on technical SEO, then everything else will go wrong.
Elements Of Technical Search Engine Optimization
Website Load Time
Website load time is a major ranking factor, especially for mobile pages. The reason why site speed is an important ranking factor is that it a sign of quality user experience. Research has shown that over 90% of online users skip websites with slow loading speed. Therefore, if your website has a slow loading speed, its ranking on the search engine will be negatively affected. Technical SEO helps to ensure that your website has a fast loading speed to help improve user experience and ranking on the search engine result page
HTTPS Status Code
Your users cannot access your website if your website is running on HTTP code. Technical SEO ensures that your website is online all the time by ensuring that it is running on HTTPS. In addition to that, technical SEO will help you spot potential errors from the search console before they affect your site performance. Keeping your search console error-free is a good step towards ensuring that your site is well optimized.
Mobile-Friendliness
An update replaced by Google many years ago gave more preference to mobile-friendly websites. This is a direct result of major improvements in smartphone technology and more mobile web traffic taking place than desktop traffic. This means that your website’s rank will improve significantly if it is mobile-friendly. Technical SEO helps to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly in 2023.
XML Sitemap Status
You need to submit your XML sitemap to Google to guide Google bots to crawl and index your site. Technical SEO helps to ensure that your XML sitemap is properly formatted, follows the XML protocols, and also ensure that Google has crawled all necessary pages and rank them accordingly. Determining whether your site passes all the prerequisites is now easier as you can test your structured data.
Fix Orphaned Pages
Orphaned pages are site pages that are not linked to any form or any other section of your website. It thus means that web users will not know where to go next or where they can search for more information because the page is not linked to other pages on your site. Orphaned pages cannot be indexed by the search engine crawler because it cannot be found, or at least not found easily. Orphaned pages are not good for crawlers and users. Technical SEO helps to identify orphaned pages and fix them with internal links and calls-to-action to ensure that they don’t affect your overall website ranking on Google and other top search engines.
Take Your Technical SEO To The Next Level
Technical SEO has been rated as one of the most important aspects of SEO. On-page SEO is one of those things that make it easy for the search engine to crawl and rank your website. Technical SEO is complex and needs to be done by someone who is experienced and knowledgeable about technical SEO. If it is done by a search engine optimization novice, it could end up damaging your SEO instead of helping it.
