Beginners Guide to Technical SEO - An Integral Part of On-page Optimization.
Most people see search engine optimization, or SEO, as having two parts: on-site optimization and off-site optimization. Both of these having to do with content, keywords, and links, but a lot of the time technical SEO gets overlooked.
Many people are either not educated enough about the subject, or get nervous when they hear the word technical.
What is Technical SEO??
Technical seo refers to the process of optimizing a website for crawling and indexing . It can be further defined as optimizing a website such that search engines can crawl, interpret and index effectively.
In other terms “Technical SEO” makes a website crawler friendly.
Search engines have their own way of interpreting a website and considers a lot of on-page and off-page activities of the particular site and crawls through it to determine its position on SERPs . All the digital marketing companies strive hard to get to the #1 Position in serps and take a lot of measures to get there. Let us take a brief note on SEO.
On-Page Optimizations: It refers to the process of optimizing a website without any flaws in design, content, images and the over-all structure. On-page optimization include: Keyword Research, Optimizing Title, Meta tags, image optimizations, generating sitemap, setting up robot, txt file etc.., In short on-page refers to the over-all actions done on the website so as to make it user and search engine friendly. All these optimizations are done on-site and are called on-page optimizations.
Off-Page Optimizations: It refers to all the necessary steps taken to create awareness about the existence of one’s website. In this process brand recognization, backlinks generation, trust building takes place. All these optimizations are done outside the website and hence called off-page optimizations.
From the above explanation we can conclude that Technical seo is an integral part of on-page optimizations as they are meant to be done on-site.
Lets dig deeper into Technical SEO:
All the technical issues/factors that a website needs starting from website building to ranking in SERPs comes under technical SEO.
Firstly, Identify the site issues where your site is lagging behind. To do so audit your site to get some knowledge on the site and seo issues. We have a numerous site auditing tools available for free such Seoptimer , Raven tools and can try with them.
Step 1: Select a site auditing tool.
Step2: Paste your url in the search bar of that tool and start auditing.
Step 3: Get the full site audit report within few seconds.
Step 4: Download and identify the areas that needs attention.
Step 5: Rectify the errors.
Here are some of the factors that comes under Technical SEO:
- Site Load Time: It is an important technical seo metric to check. It is one of the google ranking factor and also effects other metrics such as: bounce rate and time spent on the page.
- Sitemap.xml : It is an url inclusion protocol that explains search engines about all the urls available for crawling in a website and the last updated stats. A XML Sitemap is a XML file that lists all pages/posts available on your website. Besides their title it also includes the published date and last updated date.
Search engines can use the XML sitemap as a guide them when crawling a website. How to optimize your XML Sitemap?
XML sitemap optimization is simple, only include in your sitemap the pages that are important for your website. In the majority of cases, these are your pages, posts and categories.Don’t include in your sitemap tag pages, author pages or other pages that have no original content on their own.Make sure that your sitemap is automatically updated when a new page is published or when a page is updated.
Use the Google search console and Bing Webmaster tools, to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing and check the status.
- Robot.txt : Having Robot exclusion protocol also called a robot.txt file in a website helps crawlers to identify pages that need not to be crawled or scanned. robot.txt file is a way of communication of a website to the crawlers about what to not consider for crawling. Robots.txt is a text file residing in the root directory of your website that gives instructions to search engines as to which pages of your website they can crawl and add to their index. What is important though is to check and ensure that there are no false blockings that will discourage search engines crawlers from indexing your website.
- Broken links : Broken links are not just bad for SEO but also bad for user experience and can ultimately lead to lower ranking.
- HTTPS : “S” in “HTTPS” stands for “Secured” which implies that it is a secured version of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTPS is equipped with Secure Socket Layer Protocol that transfers data securely. So search engines prefer HTTPS over HTTP.