Technical search engine optimization refers to back-end optimizations that aren’t categorized as on-page or off-page SEO. These strategies largely result in either improving user experience or making your site easier to crawl and index. Both of which boost your position in the search engine results page (SERP). Technical SEO is crucial to a successful SEO campaign as it gives your website a solid foundation to then build on with on-page and off-page SEO techniques later. There are 4 keys to mastering technical SEO:
Link structure
Google uses a program known as a ‘crawler’ to scan and index your site. It does this by downloading the content of one page and following all the internal links on that page. This crawler dictates how Google indexes and understands your website. It is crucial to ensure Google crawls each of your pages. A clean link structure helps Google understand the content better and therefore rank higher for relevant search terms. The optimal site structure for optimizing SEO is a flat-site-structure.
This structure prioritizes needing fewer clicks to get a page over complex categories. This makes your website easier to crawl but also improves user experience as users can reach their desired pages quicker. If this structure creates too many menu options on a single page, then use drop-down menus to declutter a menu without removing options.
Sitemaps: What is Technical SEO?
Sitemaps are files that contain information about your website, including the URLs for all published pages. Crawlers use these files to navigate and map your website. WordPress users should install Yoast SEO. You gain more control over your sitemap with Yoast.
It allows you to exclude and include pages at your will, excluding old pages and ensuring important pages are indexed. Unfortunately page builders like Wix and Squarespace don’t allow you to alter the sitemap directly, however you can unpublish pages, and this will remove them from the sitemap. Ensure your sitemap doesn’t contain any old/irrelevant pages that will confuse the crawler.
Page speed
For every 1 second increase in load time your page receives:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
Web users are getting less and less patient with loading times and will often leave pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. A quick load time is crucial to increasing your pages per session and dwell time, metrics Google employs to analyze the value of your website. You can measure your page speed on sites like GTmetrix. The main cause of slow sites is large image files, increasing the time needed to transfer site data. Images can be optimized, reducing file size while maintaining quality.
You should optimize your images if you want to improve user experience and SEO. WordPress users can download the plugin EWWW Image Optimizer, this will automatically optimize all the images on your website. If you’re using another page builder, first investigate if they automatically optimize images, if not you can use an online program such as Optimizilla before uploading them to your site.
Responsiveness:Technical SEO
Mobile devices make up over half of global internet traffic, therefore it is imperative to your website’s success that you accommodate these users. Navigate to your website builders mobile view and make alterations as necessary, keeping the interface neat and intuitive. Users should be able to navigate your site without zooming or scrolling to the right or left, ensuring all the relevant content can fit within the phone screen. There are two things that often go overlooked when designing a mobile display:
- Touch-Friendly: Keep in mind people will navigate your UI with a touch screen, buttons should be large enough to press easily and spaced far enough apart that users don’t accidentally press the wrong button.
- Text size: Although it may look large when you’re designing on your monitor, remember the text will be scaled down to fit on a phone screen. Reading your text should be easy for most people; remember some people may have trouble reading smaller text.
Conclusion
Through implementing these technical SEO strategies, you are building a strong foundation to further implement more advanced SEO techniques. Steps 1. & 2. are mainly targeted towards Google and their crawlers to ensure your website is mapped and understood correctly, allowing your website to be ranked for relevant search queries. Steps 3. & 4. create improved user experience which will be visible to Google through site metrics, pushing your website higher in the SERP.
Once you have completed these steps you are ready to start optimizing content for keywords and more importantly start acquiring backlinks. If you are serious about improving your rankings, we recommend you hire an SEO expert. This will allow your SEO to flourish while you focus on what you do best.
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