Technical SEO Explained
Technical SEO
How to learn technical SEO (search engine optimization)? We will teach you about it based on the following
- Why is Technical SEO important
- What is Technical SEO
- How to Do a Technical SEO audit
Why is Technical SEO important
Search engines are an important aspect of your traffic unless you have lots of money to use paid traffic like Adwords and FB Ads. Search engines rely on bots to crawl your website and it is not easy (information overload). As much money as Microsoft have, do you know even Bing is recommending that you tell them what website pages you have rather than crawl themselves?
The absolute worst thing to happen is search engines choosing not to index your pages. Without search engines, nobody can find your site unless you are relying on social media such as FB, Twitter. Even on social media, only friends' updates, and paid advertisement are taking the bulk of user attention. Do you know that even with a million fans, probably only 0.1% of fans will see your update?
Therefore, technical SEO is a good-to-have step that every site owner should have and works well in the whole SEO process. This means ensuring your page are indexed without orphan pages. Orphan pages not linked by your websites unintentionally (e.g. incorrect link with an extra character such as - or _) and forever hidden from search engine bots.
What is Technical SEO
Technical SEO simply refers to website and server optimization. It is aimed at helping search engine spiders crawl and index a particular site more effectively. The indirect effect is improved organic rankings as your site is fully crawled and updated. (Although Google is smart and renames our lousy title to optimize for clicks, it is still better to rely on your own).
It is very imperative to know what technical SEO is and how to get it right. One good thing that most of the people don’t know is that once you do technical SEO audit and fix some of the problems that your site has been undergoing, you will not have to do it again.
In this brief, we will cover aspects of Technical SEO and learn the best practices to follow. We will talk about how to do a technical SEO audit using the checklist that we will eventually provide.
Before we proceed, we have to ensure that you are very versed with what is Technical SEO and the best practices.
In simple terms, technical SEO relates to all the SEO activities excluding content optimization and link building. Most of the requirements that technical SEO are covering are changing drastically to keep up with the changes in the search engine. Search engines are getting more and more sophisticated each day and for these reasons, technical SEO is in a constant state of refinement.
Technical SEO best practices
The best time to practice technical SEO is when the site is being developed. If you fail to take technical SEO into consideration, then there are several problems that your site will have to encounter. If you fail to do it at this point in time, then lengthy and involved technical SEO audits may be needed. The main reason for this is to identify the root causes and look for possible solutions. You have to identify and fix problems. You will also have to undergo possible periods of uncertainty as changes are made on your website.
How to Do a Technical SEO audit
There is no one way to perform SEO but an audit is a good start and how SEO companies would start. We recommend having a technical SEO checklist for an audit.
Technical SEO checklist
In most of cases, site owners focus entirely on SEO but one thing that most of them forget is that SEO isn’t either off-or-on page. You also have to pay some attention to the technical part of the site. As I have already indicated, if you don’t get the technical part of your website right, there will be possible problems to encounter.
Now we have a chance of focusing on the main aspects of technical SEO that will at all cost help you maximize every aspect of your website.
#1 Review your sitemap
This is the first thing that you are supposed to do. The sitemap is very important because it tells the search engines more about your site structure. It also lets them discover fresh content. If you don’t have a sitemap, then you have to make some efforts and get one right away (e.g. just use Yoast SEO for WordPress or other tools in your platform). There are several things that you have to check when you are reviewing your sitemap. You have to ensure that the sitemap is clean, up to date, concise and registered in search console.
Make sure all important resources are crawlable
This is another very important thing that you have to bear in mind. What this means is that you have to check through robots.txt to be sure that the important pages that you have are crawlable. The fact is that robots.txt is just one of the ways to restrict pages from indexing.
#2 Page Load Speed
Another criterion is the page load speed. Only do this if you have plenty of time as it about optimizes your website to be fast. The reason why people love Google is that it is really fast. There is also an AMP project that Google is pushing that let you see AMP-supported news article in a second (the lightning icon). However, it is really hard so we recommend not doing this unless necessary.
Conclusion
As simple as sitemap review sounds, it is the most important aspect of Technical SEO. We hope you done yours and ensure your pages are not indexed yet. Do contact us at Vertical Template if you require our Technical SEO services.