Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines, although it may also incorporate user experience activities.
What Is the Importance of Technical SEO?
Technical SEO may have a significant influence on a website's performance on Google. No matter how great your content is, if pages on your site are not accessible to search engines, they will not appear or rank in search results. This leads in a loss of website visitors and possible income for your company. Moreover, Google has acknowledged that a website's page speed and mobile friendliness are ranking considerations. Users may get irritated and quit your site if your pages take too long to load. Such user behavior may indicate that your site does not provide a great user experience. As a consequence, Google may not give your site a high ranking.
Crawling Understanding
The first step in optimizing your site for technical SEO is ensuring that search engines can crawl it properly. Crawling is an important part of how search engines function. Crawling occurs when search engines follow links on sites they already know about to locate new pages. For example, whenever we publish new blog entries, they are added to our blog archive website.
Thus, the next time a search engine crawls our blog page, it will notice the newly added links to fresh blog entries. It is one of the ways Google finds our new blog content. If you want your sites to appear in search results, you must first make them search engine friendly.
Design an SEO-friendly Site Architecture
Site architecture, also known as site structure, refers to how pages on your website are connected together. A good site structure arranges pages so that crawlers can discover your website's information quickly and effortlessly. Hence, while designing your site, make sure that all of the pages are just a few clicks away from your homepage.
All of the pages in the site structure above are ordered in a logical hierarchy.
The homepage provides access to category pages. Then, category pages connect to each site subpages. This arrangement minimizes the amount of orphan pages as well. Orphan pages are ones that lack internal links, making it difficult (if not impossible) for crawlers and users to locate them.
If you utilize Semrush, you can simply determine if your site has any orphan pages. Crawl your website by creating a project in the Site Audit tool. After the crawl is finished, go to the "Issues" tab and search for "orphan," which will show you whether your site has any orphan pages. To resolve the problem, add internal links to the orphaned pages on non-orphan pages.
Upload Your Sitemap to Google
Utilizing a sitemap might assist Google in finding your websites. A sitemap is often an XML file that contains a list of your site's essential pages. It informs search engines about the pages you have and where they may find them. This is particularly significant if your website has a large number of pages. Or if they aren't well-connected.
Your sitemap is often found at one of two URLs:
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yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
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yoursite.com/sitemap index.xml
After you've found your sitemap, submit it to Google using GSC.
Quick note: If you haven't already, follow this instructions to enable GSC on your site. Navigate to GSC and choose "Indexing" > "Sitemaps" from the sidebar to submit your sitemap to Google.
Indexing Fundamentals
After crawling your sites, search engines attempt to study and comprehend the content of those pages. The search engine then puts those bits of material in its search index, which is a massive database comprising billions of websites. Search engines must index your site's pages in order for them to appear in search results. A "site:" search is the easiest approach to see whether your pages are indexed. To check the index status of semrush.com, for example, enter site:www.semrush.com into Google's search box. This number indicates how many pages from the site Google has indexed. You may also check whether particular pages are indexed by using the "site:" search on the page URL. A few factors may prevent Google from indexing your website:
Tag: noindex
The "noindex" tag is an HTML snippet that prevents Google from indexing your sites. Ideally, you'd want all of your critical pages to be indexed. Use the "noindex" tag only when you wish to prevent particular pages from being indexed. Read our guide on robots meta tags to learn more about utilizing "noindex" tags and how to prevent typical implementation issues.
Canonicalization
When Google discovers comparable material on several pages on your site, it may be unsure which pages to index and display in search results. When this happens, canonical tags come in helpful. The rel="canonical" tag indicates a link as the original version, telling Google which page to index and rank.
Best Technical SEO Techniques
Making your site structure SEO-friendly and uploading your sitemap to Google should have your pages scanned and indexed. Consider these extra recommended practices if you want your website to be completely optimized for technical SEO. After your website has been converted to HTTPS, be sure to include redirects from the HTTP version to the HTTPS version. This will redirect all visitors that view your HTTP version to your safe HTTPS version.
Having both versions available causes duplicate content problems. Also, it lessens the efficiency of your backlink profile—some websites may link to the "www" version, while others link to the "non-www" version. This might have a detrimental impact on your Google ranking. As a result, just utilize one version of your website. Then point the other version to your primary website.
Page speed is a ranking criteria for both mobile and desktop searches. As a result, make sure your site loads as quickly as possible. To examine the current performance of your website, utilize Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. It assigns a performance score ranging from 0 to 100. The greater the value, the better. Image compression – Pictures are often the largest files on a website. Compressing images using image optimization techniques like Shortpixel reduces their file size, allowing them to load in as little time as possible. Utilize a CDN (content delivery network) – a CDN keeps copies of your websites on servers all around the world. It then links users to the closest server, reducing the distance traveled by the requested files. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files – Minification reduces file sizes by removing extraneous characters and whitespace from code. This reduces page load time.
Google indexes mobile-first. This implies that it indexes and ranks material based on mobile versions of websites. As a result, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. To see whether this is true for your site, see the "Mobile Usability" report in Google Search Console.