What is Technical SEO? Technical SEO is about improving the technical aspects of your website. This way you increase the user experience and thus the ranking of your website and pages in a search engine. When the technical SEO (search engine optimization) of your website is not in order, it will be difficult to get your content to rank optimally in the Google search results.
Technical SEO can be difficult and what should you take into account? I give you 10 technical factors that you should look at when optimizing the technology of your website.
You want to avoid that your informative pages are not being indexed. Simply creating new pages or blog posts does not always mean that they will be indexed right away. There are four well known methods that make sure that your pages will get indexed:
Your website navigation contains links to the most important pages of your website. If you have a small website with only a few pages, you can put all pages in it, but once your website gets bigger and contains tens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages, this is no longer advised to have all links in your menu.
That is why you should also add internal links in your blog articles and informative pages to other pages so that all desired pages can be found and indexed. Let me explain:
When the Google Crawler visits your website and “reads” an article, it will also follow the links in that article and “read” those pages. When you keep linking from one article, to the next, to the next, to the next, you kind of keep the crawler busy with indexing your pages. If all your blog articles link to the same page (your most important one), the crawler will keep coming back to your most important page. This is why internal link building is so important. We SEO-ers call this LinkJuice.
It’s about navigating search engine crawlers through your website. Keep in mind: if you make it easy to navigate for your visitor (human) it is probably also easy for the crawler. Visitors first, crawlers second.
With a robots.txt file you can indicate to a search engine which pages you would rather not have indexed, while a Sitemap.xml file contains precisely the pages that should be picked up. The free program Google Search Console helps you to check whether your website and pages are already properly indexed.
Javascript and CSS are two big factors when it comes to improving page speed. Heavy Javascript-based websites are most of the time a headache to SEO managers and freelancers. Make sure you always use clean code, try to reduce your plugins (if WordPress) and optimize your <head> as much as possible.
The rule of thumb in SEO (and with many other things) remains: ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. In other words: if your most important content is visible in the source code and only your less important parts are loaded via JavaScript: so be it. Not everything has to come back in your source code. So you don’t have to ban all JavaScript from your website and it doesn’t have to be a disaster even for the most important parts. With a little delay, your most important pages will be fine. It can only become problematic if you have a large number of optimized pages that rely largely on JavaScript. Of course, it is still a good idea to take stock of how dependent your website is on JavaScript.
The mobile device has become so important that Google has switched to mobile-first indexation for almost all websites (2020). Mobile-first means that the mobile version of your website is the starting point instead of the desktop version.
Google, therefore, ensures that the mobile version is viewed first and determines the indexation and positions on that basis. It is therefore important to take into account that your content on mobile is correct and complete and that it is also shown on your desktop version.
Of course, you don’t want your website visitors to drop out after loading the first page (bounce rate). If your page loads slowly, visitors will bounce faster (high bounce rate). Google will have trouble ranking your website if you continuously have a high bounce rate. That is why loading speed is essential for the ultimate user experience of your website. You can test the loading speed via Google Pagespeed Insights.
With the introduction of Core Web Vitals, Google has also found a way to better link loading speed to the user experience. Google Core Web Vitals are part of your loading speed, with which Google is able to map the user experience even better.
They are all elements that influence the user experience. Does your website score poorly on the speed tests? Then there is work to be done!
By ensuring that your URLs are not too long and contain the correct search term, your website will be easier to find and will be displayed correctly in the algorithm. So the URL would rather not contain strange punctuation marks or /item=123, simply because this does not help determine the content of the page. What works?
[domain].com/women
[domain].com/women/shirts
or
[domain].com/services
[domain].com/services/technical-seo
BAD EXAMPLE:
[domain].com/blog/category/item=12432
Google says the following about URL architecture: “A search engine friendly URL is short, descriptive, readable, and consistent. The structure of the URL must be logical.”
There are still stories circulating that duplicate content is being penalized by Google. Meaning: a punishment by Google that results in lower or no ranking. Fortunately, it’s not entirely true, Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content anymore. But that doesn’t mean that duplicate content is good, not at all. Let’s dive a bit deeper into this.
Duplicate content is interpreted in two ways.
I will briefly discuss the second variant, which is part of technical SEO. You should NOT want a page to be indexed in different ways. A website without www and with www are two websites to the Google algorithm. This also applies to capitalized and uncapitalized URLs, or with and without a trailing slash at the end of the URL. So make sure that these variants are not possible.
[domain].com/services
the above are two different websites to the Google algorithm.
[domain].com/services/
If you have a page with content that resembles the content of another page, but both pages have to be shown, you can suffer from cannibalization. Meaning: both pages are about the same subject and search engine algorithms will only pick one to show in the SERPs. This is also a technical issue, which you can solve with a separate tag, the canonical tag.
A canonical tag indicates to the search engine what the original page is and will ensure that only the desired page is indexed, while both pages are accessible to your visitor.
So pay close attention to your content and make sure the right pages are picked up by the search engines.
Not all websites are safe yet. A website that starts with https:// has a security stamp, while a website that starts with http:// does not.
If a website is not secure or safe, would you visit it? Exactly, didn’t think so. Google thinks the same. Not safe? Not going to crawl it.
https, the s stands for secure, ensures that any personal data is secured when it is sent. Think of login details and/or a form. If your website is not secure, you urgently need an SSL certificate. You can request this from your hosting provider. Depending on the security level, the costs for this are usually zero.
Nothing is more annoying than a non-working image on a website. This does not give the right impression and you want the page of your website to look attractive. When you place an image on your website, it is smart to take a good look at the image size and whether it loads properly on the page. An image that is too large will have a negative effect on the experience of your visitor and the loading time of the website, so do not upload images larger than necessary. Don’t forget to match the filename and ALT text with the content of your page, so that the search engine will appreciate the page even better.
Uploading images in WordPress:
Blogpost images should be set to 1200 x 630 pixels. WordPress header image size should be 1048 x 250 pixels. The featured image should be 1200 x 900 pixels in landscape mode or 900 x 1200 pixels if in portrait mode. Background images should be 1920 x 1080 pixels.
according to Raidboxes.io
My best advice for images is to have a plugin that compresses images and converts them to next-gen formats like WebP. This improves site speed and is an easy step for technical improvements.
The main goal of Google is to provide the user with an answer to the entered question as quickly as possible. Structured data helps the search engine better understand and display the content of your website and pages in search results. It also helps with getting the most-desired position in the SERPs, position 0:
When a URL changes, you need to take action! All old referring links to the old URL will not automatically change and therefore you need to redirect the old URL to the new URL. This is called a redirect. By placing a redirect you tell both search engines and visitors that the URL being visited has been replaced by another URL. When you want to launch a new website, a good website migration ensures that your findability remains good.
Interesting read: The top 6 most frequently asked questions about Redirects!
Most of the time it’s the SEO Specialist who finds out about important improvements for the technical SEO parts of a website and the development team needs to help improve it. You can search for a Technical SEO Specialist, but in my experience, a good SEO Specialist also knows all the ins and outs on technical SEO.
The SEO-er scans the website’s page speed for example and finds out that there are too many render-blocking resources like javascript or CSS. But, most of the time, the SEO Specialist does not have access to the code of a website (for good reason!) and a developer is needed to help optimize a page or website.
You need to focus on technical SEO at the beginning of building a website, preferably. In a lot of cases, websites are built to look great first, to find out later that it is actually super slow due to animations or large images and videos.
You also need to focus on technical SEO if your website is slow or if you have a high bounce rate. Let a professional SEO consultant or specialist run a technical SEO audit and inform you about all the aspects you can improve to get better rankings.
So no worries, even if your website is built years ago and you’re only now thinking about improving it, there is still hope!
