What Is Technical SEO? Your Ultimate Guide To Get Started With It

To speak directly- Technical SEO is pretty vital for your website. It doesn’t essentially rely on the content present on the website, but it has a lot to do in terms of the infrastructure of the website. It optimizes your website for better indexing so that the search engines can crawl and access your website without any hindrances. And precisely that is how it justifies the term “technical” in its title. The potential of Technical SEO is such that it can actually put all your SEO efforts in vain. Therefore, it is essential for you to run a Technical SEO audit so that you can tackle any potential problem ahead. It is generally noted that 95% of websites are prone to Technical SEO errors. And because of these significant/insignificant errors, your website’s organic ranking in search results can be greatly affected.

The most common Technical SEO errors that one has witnessed often are-

• 84% of websites include large-sized images
• 38% of images are broken in websites
• 78% of websites include broken internal links
• 23% of websites have been seen to include orphan pages

However, these were some basic stats and information that concern Technical SEO. Moving on, we’d learn the intricacies based on Technical SEO- the intricacies being the whats and whys of the subject.

Here’s how it goes:

Why is Technical SEO Important?

The best part about Technical SEO is that it instantly grants the search engines information about your website. It is the process of optimizing your website for crawling and indexing is. Technical SEO allows search engines to easily access, crawl, understand and index your website.

But, keep this in mind, the ways in which Technical SEO proves to be handy are mentioned below-

• Make sure you’re following Google’s best practices to optimize your website

When we talk about Technical SEO optimization- Google follows a few basic steps like- improving the server response time, conducting audits, implementing robot.txt files and fixing broken pages and links. Implementing such practices would prove to be beneficial to us.

• Your website displays great loading speed

The loading speed of a website directly depends upon Technical SEO. Page load time has been employed by search engines- particularly Google- in their algorithms that determine a website’s search engine ranking. As a result, they are more likely to direct internet consumers to sites that load rapidly. If your website takes time in loading, it can directly affect your Google ranking.

• Discards unnecessary pop-ups

Back in 2016, Google began to penalize unnecessary pop-ups on websites. Here is where Technical SEO enters the picture as it helps you to discard these pop-ups by constantly enhancing the user experience. These pop-ups degrade the user experience and have an influence on a website’s bounce rate, exit rate and even time on site.

Google also came forth with certain new policies concerning this, which were-

• • The main content should not be covered by pop-ups
  • The whole webpage shouldn’t be covered by pop-ups
  • It was made mandatory for any pop-up to not show up above of webpages.

• Make your website mobile-friendly

February 2021, mobile devices will account for more than half (56%) of all online traffic. Google intends to make mobile-first indexing available to all websites by the end of March 2021. At that time, the search engine will index all websites’ mobile versions rather than the desktop versions. This is why it is critical that you address mobile-friendliness difficulties.

• Include robot.txt for indexing

The thing with robot.txt is that it acts as a strict user manual for crawlers. Do not ever, consider discarding these entirely from your website as you’d prevent indexing. These instructions can be granted via Bing or Google. This way, you would prevent your server from unnecessary requests and unimportant pages.

• Sitemaps can be used as roadmaps

If you’re wondering what an SEO plan is and what it should include, you’re already on the right track. Because, according to a study- 61% of marketers say their top inbound marketing objective for 2020 is enhancing SEO and growing their organic presence. So, simply by knowing more about it, you’re following in the footsteps of cutting-edge marketers.

• Any broken links or 404 (File Not Found) should be removed

Broken links are not only inconvenient, but they may also harm your SEO efforts. Not only do people despise broken links, but search engines do as well. When visitors come across a broken link, they won’t want to investigate the additional sites since they can’t! When visitors spend less time on your site, search engines assume that you are not giving a decent user experience. Search engines will eventually give you a lower ranking.

• Optimizes the image size so that your website’s speed increases

If you use WordPress, you can upload full-size photographs and modify the display size. However, this is not a smart practice because it runs on numerous instructions, slowing down the site. What you can do is use an image editing tool to modify photos before posting them to your website? Open Microsoft Paint (Windows) or Preview (Mac) to resize the picture. After enlarging each image, the overall file size will be extremely enormous, slowing down the performance of your website. So, after resizing the picture, use the TinyPNG compressor tool. Simply click the link and submit your resized image, and this program will minimize the file size without sacrificing quality. Take this image and place it on your website. Your image will appear exactly the same and will help your page load quicker.

How is Technical SEO Different From ON-Page and OFF-Page SEO

There is a hairline difference between Technical SEO, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. To understand that basic fact with actual clarity matters. Follow below to understand this well-

• Technical SEO- Technical SEO- Server optimization and backend website
• On-page SEO- Frontend optimization
• Off-page SEO– Outside-website optimization like guest posting, social sharing and link building

Benefits of Technical SEO

There are endless benefits of Technical SEO.

• If your website is fully optimized, then the chances of you getting organic traffic would increase.
• Greater mobile traffic that renders higher reach
• Better rankings
• Site security assurance
• Stunning brand image

Conclusion

Through all that we’ve mentioned- it can be claimed that Technical SEO plays a vital role in terms of determining the overall ranking of your website because of which, your website remains relevant in any case. Whether it’s indexing, metatext, or keyword placement– all of these strategies assist to optimize the number of visits on the page. All of this is possible because of Technical SEO.