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Technical SEO: What It Is, How It Functions, And Tips For Getting Started
SEO Isn’t All Keywords And Backlinks. Technical SEO Is An Important Part Of Your Strategy!
When you think about SEO, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you probably think about critical aspects of a traditional SEO strategy like keyword research, backlink profiles, and proper formatting. However, there’s another aspect to SEO you may not know about: technical SEO.
But what exactly is technical optimisation SEO, and how does it differ from other areas of SEO that your business needs to focus on in order to boost your rankings on SERPs? This technical SEO guide will help you better understand what this type of SEO is, what it achieves, and which tactics you should prioritise when you implement it.
What Is Technical SEO?
Aptly named, technical SEO focuses on the more technical aspects of your SEO strategy. Rather than focusing on making sure you implement the right keywords or get enough backlinks, this type of SEO is focused on ensuring that search engines can properly crawl and index your website.
Technical SEO plays a somewhat minor role in your overall SEO strategy, but failing to take the right steps when you’re creating your website or publishing new content can prove detrimental to your progress. Without technical SEO, you might be missing out on greater online visibility.
Put simply, technical SEO is the part of your on-page SEO strategy that focuses on the technical aspects of helping search engines find and index your content.
Why Is It Important?
Technical on-page SEO is important for a number of reasons.
Imagine this: you’ve created a vast array of compelling and informative blog posts. You’ve got all your marketing materials together and you’re ready to make your mark on the world. The problem? No matter what type of content you’re publishing, you’re still not getting the organic traffic that you need.
Why? This can often be due to a poorly developed website or mistakes in your technical SEO strategy, if you have one.
As much as content and copy matter, so too does your website setup. Things like user experience and duplicate content can actually play a major role in your rankings on search engines. If you have a site that’s difficult for Google to browse and index, you’re not going to see the rankings that you anticipated.
Basically, if you’re a business that wants more traffic, you have to put a greater emphasis on technical optimisation SEO.
What Is The Best Technical SEO Strategy?
A technical SEO strategy is one that focuses on the usability, design, and behind-the-scenes technical aspects of your business’s website. Whereas other SEO tactics will be centred around the things you publish, this SEO strategy will be focused on all of the setup and work that goes into your website.
Long before you start publishing content or fully investing yourself in other on-page or off-page SEO strategies, you need to make sure that your website is suited for the web as well as for the audience that you’re trying to reach.
In the section below, we’ll talk about some of the major items you need to focus on in order to get the best results from your technical SEO strategy.
How To Do Technical Optimisation For SEO?
Up to this point in our guide, we’ve covered technical SEO extensively. But while we understand the definition of this form of SEO, those who don’t quite grasp it may be looking for solid examples that they can use to see what goes into a technical SEO strategy.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important things to focus on when you decide that you need to put more into your technical SEO for better SERPs.
- Use SSL for your website: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) might sound extremely technical and difficult to understand at first sight, but you’re likely already familiar with it. SSL, which is displayed as https:// in your web browser rather than http://, serves to create an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. Security is one important focus in your technical SEO strategy, and Google has made it known that they will prioritise websites with SSL over those without it.
- Improve website speed: User experience is something Google takes into consideration when ranking websites. This is because Google often reacts in a similar manner to your website as a live person would. If your website is slow to load and use, Google is going to find it hard to crawl and index your website. Taking care to optimise your website so that it’s quick to load and use should be a major objective.
- Get rid of dead links and duplicate content: Have you ever been on a website, only to find yourself reading the same content on multiple pages or clicking on a seemingly important link and being brought to a page greeting you with a 404? If you have, you likely didn’t trust the website that much. Search engines want to see no duplicate content and no dead links when they’re crawling and indexing your pages. Redirect your URLs after you delete or move pages and use canonical link elements to reduce duplicate content issues.
- Make sure your website is crawlable: This sounds like a very broad suggestion, but there are specific items within this point that you should focus on. This includes enhancing your internal linking structure to make sure that spiders are reaching each page and creating flawless XML sitemaps and robot.txt files that you can use to ensure the search engine successfully crawls and indexes every page.
- Add structured data: Structured data is designed to help search engines better understand your website. How? Take, for example, the snippet that shows up on SERPs. Let’s imagine that you were running a blog that covered cooking. Rather than just a picture, title tag, and meta description showing up on SERPs, it might also feature the cooking time, the number of calories in your dish, or the overall rating that that specific dish has received. When search engines can better understand your website, you’ll find greater success on SERPs.
- Have your website translate well to mobile: We’ve discussed mobile SEO in the past, and for good reason. If your website isn’t able to translate well to mobile devices, you’re missing out on a massive audience. While this is likely something that’s already highlighted in your SEO strategy, it’s important to mention here as it does fall in the category of technical SEO.
- Check up on your progress every once in a while: Your work with SEO is never done, even if you have a high DA. The key to keeping everything running smoothly is to make sure that you’re regularly analysing your website for any problems with the above. If you spot any issues that need to be addressed when you conduct regular checks, make sure to take care of them immediately!
Technical SEO sounds a lot harder than it is, although there are some components of a technical SEO strategy that can be a bit more difficult for some to navigate. The good news? You don’t have to tackle technical SEO on your own! Getting the help of a great SEO agency in Sydney can be the first step towards a flourishing website.
