What is Technical SEO and why is it important?
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the optimization of the technical foundation of a website for Google and other search engines. When you optimize your website a search engine can crawl and index your website faster and confidently deliver your pages as a result in a search query.
Technical optimization is as important to your SEO plan as on-page and off-page SEO initiatives. In fact, before you even begin executing your content publishing, guest posting and overall keyword optimization you’ll need to ensure your sites technical functionality is optimized. Factors such as loading time of your pages, navigation, responsive design, security and more are considered instrumental to the technical optimization of your website.
One important distinction between Technical SEO and your on-page / off-page SEO initiatives is that you don’t have to optimize it over and over again. Either you build a technically optimized website or upgrade your existing website and that will server you well until you decide to make a change. You’ll have periodic updates to make as technology changes but the bulk of it is done once and you’re good to go. There are elements we can control and then there are elements we need to adapt to. If you website is built on a platform that has updated to its framework then you’ll likely need to make some tweaks to your website to keep it running smoothly but that’s not just a technical SEO consideration, your ultimate goal is to deliver the best user experience, technical SEO is really about making sure your site is safe and functional for your users.
Why Is It Important To Optimize Your Website Technically?
Google really cares about organic search results. They want to provide their visitors with the best possible experience. They have one of the best businesses in the world, and their success depends on the quality of their search engine.
The best results for a keyword are the most relevant and informative pages on the internet on this topic. However, they will not be able to find your website without crawling it first. If you do not allow them to crawl your site easily, your rankings will suffer.
The good news is that when you improve the technical parts of a site, you improve the overall performance and the user experience. We build websites for people who visit them and not for search engines. So, most of the rankings factors of Google and other search engine are relevant to the quality of a website.
When you have a technically optimized website, Google will figure out in two ways. First, it will be easy for them to index any new pages or find the changes in existing ones. Second, many of their ranking factors are relevant to user experience. For example, when your site has a fast loading time, Google will figure it out because more people remain to your pages once they find you through the organic results.
Also Read: Website Design and SEO: Why Your SEO Plan Needs to Come First
Characteristics Of A Technically Optimized Site
1. Site Speed
There are too many websites on the internet these days, so people are not willing to wait a long time for some information. If they visit a page from any channel, and it does not load in a few seconds, they will click the back button and move to the next one.
A technically optimized site always loads in a time that is good enough for the users. It’s common sense that a slow website does not offer a good user experience. Google prefers fast websites and improves their rankings.
The easiest way to evaluate the performance of your website is to run a test on PageSpeed Insights. It’s a tool by Google that scans your site and finds issues that slow down your loading time.
2. Good Website Navigation
The structure of the site should be helpful for the users. If they don’t know where they are on your site, what are the important pages, and how to find what they are looking for, it will be confusing for them.
You can improve the navigation with categories and subcategories of their posts, menus with a few important pages, and internal links to other relevant pages. A good site structure helps both search engines and users. Search engines can crawl the website easier, and the users can browse your posts and pages.
On the other hand, bad website navigation means broken links, no categories and subcategories, and menus that do not make sense.
3. No Duplicated Content
Google wants unique content these days. Most website owners already know that and create new content regularly. A visitor cannot recognize the difference between unique and duplicated content unless they have read the original article before.
However, Google will rank the first piece of content that they have indexed. So, if there are many pages with the same content on your website, they may get confused and decrease your rankings. This problem can happen when more than one URLs on one website include the same content. There is an easy fix for this problem. It is called the canonical link element that indicates the page that you want to get ranked.
4. It Is Secure
Security is an important ranking factor for Google. If your site does not have an HTTPS before the domain name, it cannot guarantee the privacy of the users. When users visit a non-safe site, they get a warning from Google and your rankings decrease at the same time. Making your website safe is even more important when you ask contact details from the users or have to use login details.
Conclusion
Many website owners are focused only on content creation and promotion. They tend to overlook simple parts of their sites that can make a big difference in the long-term. When most people think about SEO they are thinking about on-page and off-page SEO which is a perpetual process of content creation and work. It’s a process that you need to do over and over. Off-page SEO is the exact opposite part of on-site SEO as it is about getting links, mentions, and visibility from other channels on the internet that point to your website and improve your ranking and authority in the eyes of a search engine.
Google has hundreds or thousands of ranking factors, and not all of them are equally important. However, the parts that improve user experience are should not be taken lightly. Your results on search engines and conversions will increase when the visitors have a great experience.