Among the many SEO methods, technical SEO is one you can’t miss to improve your business. But you might be confused about where to start and be discouraged when looking at the word “technical.” Fret not, this is what the article will solve.
Through this beginner’s guide, you will learn all the technical SEO basics along with implementable strategies. Read along.
What Is Technical SEO?
As a part of digital marketing strategy, technical SEO focuses on optimizing your pages to improve the search engine results page ranking. Technical SEO strengthens your other marketing and SEO efforts, like content, on-page, and social media SEO.
The foundation for a good technical SEO is your website. Therefore, it’s important to prioritize building a high-quality website. This is achieved through reliable web WordPress hosting, a site optimized for speed, and other factors.
So, research and find the best hosting and domain name registrar to ensure that your website is capable and scalable for all of your technical SEO efforts.
Benefits of Technical SEO
Technical SEO provides benefits that cover both the website and business aspects, including sales. They include:
- Improve site visibility. Your website will appear more often on search engine results when searchers look for keywords related to your niche.
- Higher search engine rankings. Websites with a high search engine ranking are more likely to gain clicks and visits – which takes us to the next point.
- Generate more leads. With more people clicking and visiting your website, you’ll generate more leads for your business.
- Increase conversion. More leads mean a better chance to increase conversion, sales, and ROI.
10 Technical SEO Strategies
Now, let’s get into the ten strategies of technical SEO you should know. Implement these strategies on your website for maximum benefits.
1. Website Crawling and Indexing
Website crawling and indexing are at the core of technical SEO. Crawling is the process of analyzing your web pages, while indexing is organizing those pages to make your website eligible to show up in Google’s search results.
The aim is for Google to index your website instantly. To achieve this, first, check if your website is indexed already. Type site:yourdomain.com on Google to check.
If it’s indexed, your website appears like shown in the example above. If not, set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console for your website.
Google Analytics helps manage your website analytics, while Google Search Console helps the indexing process. Go to the URL inspection tool, paste your URL for indexing, and click the “Request indexing” button.
The following strategy will support the indexing process for your website.
2. Use XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps make the crawl and index process faster by creating a roadmap for each page and how they’re structured together. This roadmap lists all URLs on your website and organizes them for search engines to find and navigate easily.
Having this sitemap is helpful when you have thousands of pages or intricate site architecture and also when you’re adding new pages.
To create an XML sitemap, you can either use a sitemap generator or use your CMS. Go to this page to use the generator.
If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, use plugins like Yoast SEO, Jetpack, or Google XML Sitemaps.
3. Pay Attention to Site Architecture
It’s important to always keep the site architecture simple, especially for new pages. This is because search engines can crawl and index your website better with a clear architecture.
To achieve it, start by making every page reachable with four clicks or less from the homepage. Alternatively, use a Category page to ensure each page belongs to one category.
In the following part, I will show how to further improve the site architecture through URL structuring.
4. Optimize Website Speed
Through technical SEO, you’ll understand that website speed doesn’t just please your audience, it also provides great support to optimize website quality. Aside from having capable web hosting, it’s also essential to practice better website speed.
Some practices you can use are using a Content Delivery Network, optimizing image size, compressing your files with Gzip. Alternatively, you can also use website caching and optimize your database in CMS.
After applying these steps, it’s also important to test your website speed with Google PageSpeed Insights.
5. Apply Mobile-Friendly Practices
With more than 3.8 billion mobile device users, making your website mobile-friendly becomes a requirement. Applying these techniques is about using a responsive website template or designing the site with a mobile-first approach.
A mobile-first approach is when you design the website based on the mobile layout instead of the traditional method of designing the desktop layout first.
Ensure you’re using clear, simple site navigation, designing your content within the thumb area, and keeping things minimalistic.
To make the development more effective, plan everything and assess all the technical aspects before coding or adjusting. Create the prototype and test it before launching the changes. Use tools like Google Mobile-Friendly Test to help.
6. Use Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumbs navigation helps users identify what page they’re on and the pages they’ve been to, and it works the same for search engines. They make navigation easier, especially for first-time visitors.
There are different types of breadcrumbs navigation: hierarchical breadcrumbs, history-based breadcrumbs, and attribute-based breadcrumbs.
Whichever type you use, always start from the home page and show the whole path. Place the breadcrumbs on top of the page and the footer area. Additionally, use a small font size, add full page titles in breadcrumbs, and use “>” or “/” to help navigate.
Check out the breadcrumb navigation example below.
7. Improve URL Structure
A URL is your website’s identifier and can help improve your website by simply fixing the structure. To structure the URL, let’s understand the five parts of every URL – the scheme, subdomain, top-level, second-level, and subdirectory.
Start by making your URL in lowercase letters to avoid errors, and include relevant keywords for visibility. Separate the words in your URL using hyphens.
For the subdirectory of your URL, use subfolders compared to subdomains as the search engine will identify the subpages as a part of your website, not an entirely different one – thus improving SEO score.
Finally, tie every part of your URL with a trailing slash. A trailing slash looks like this “/” and it represents a directory or category section.
8. Add 301 Redirects
Still related to URL, this next strategy is about adding 301 redirects. This strategy works best when you move a web page to a new URL. Doing so helps the search engine to remove the old URL from a search engine’s index.
To add 301 redirects, access your .htaccess file and manage your domain. On the domain management page, click the domains you want to redirect and save all the changes.
If you’re using WordPress, use the Simple 301 Redirects plugin to help the process.
9. Check for Broken Links
Besides structuring your URLs better and adding 301 redirects, check for any broken links within your website. Having broken links lowers technical SEO effectiveness and also reflects poorly on SEO and site health.
To check for broken links, you can either use Google Search Console or use online tools available, like this one.
For Google Search Console, click the site to monitor, then click “Crawl” and “Fetch.” After that, access the crawl results and click “Crawl Errors” to see the broken links.
10. Avoid Content Duplication
As the name implies, duplicated content is the content that appears more than once on a website. It impacts the search engine results because the crawlers cannot decide which page is more relevant to the search query.
Therefore, avoid content duplication at all times. Start by maintaining consistency on internal linkings, standardized all of your URL structurings, and avoid writing copied content.
Conclusion
To conclude, this article has covered the beginner’s guide to technical SEO. Implement these SEO strategies to improve your website and server. Good luck!