Why Technical SEO is Essential for Your Online Business to Succeed
While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is widely understood as actions driving search-engine traffic to websites by, for instance, using the right keywords, there is another aspect to this strategy. It is called technical SEO and is defined as using hidden components such as website architecture, mobile optimization, and page speed to enhance a website’s overall organic growth. Any issues with the technical aspects of SEO will likely mean that the attempts to improve SEO efforts will not produce the results that digital marketers anticipate. As a result, it is important, from a digital marketing perspective, to understand what is technical SEO, why it is important, and how to implement it correctly.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to a process that involves assessing and enhancing a website’s technical components to increase its chances of ranking higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The three primary components of a strong technical SEO strategy are:
- Â Improving page load times
- Making websites easier for search engines to crawl
- Giving search engine algorithms enough data about the website to index it
As a result, the primary emphasis is on boosting these aspects of the website that, collectively, have the potential to present a more favorable impression to search engines.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Search engines, like Google, want to help users with the best possible results when they search for any query. That is the function of Google’s robot crawler, which analyzes each web page of a website based on factors such as how fast it loads and what the content is.
This also explains the importance of technical SEO because it optimizes websites by:
- Ensuring the easy and smooth navigation of a website
- Making the website free from technical glitches that restrict its ranking in search engines
- Allowing search engines to recognize the high quality of the information on the website
In short, technical SEO is important because it makes websites search-engine friendly, which means easy to index, crawl, and rank.
Aspects of Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that the website meets all the technical requirements of search engines while improving the organic ranking. It has various technical aspects, which include:Â
1. Site Security
Site security is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO. The secure version of a website can be identified if the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), available on the top left of the address bar, is written as HTTPS. The icon next to it should look like a lock.Â
Site security helps users prevent sensitive user information, such as passwords and credit card numbers, from being stolen or compromised.Â
2. Site Speed
Page load speed is a ranking factor for mobile devices, laptops, and desktops. Hence, ensuring that the website loads as quickly as possible is imperative. PageSpeed Insights, a service provided by Google, is useful in determining the current speed of the website. It shows a score between 0 and 100 based on how well the website performs.
3. Mobile-Friendliness
Statista claims that mobile devices are responsible for nearly half of the web traffic to a website across the globe. Google understands this. Using its mobile-first indexing service, Google evaluates the mobile version of web pages to index and rank the website. Hence, ensuring the website is mobile-friendly is crucial for an online business.
ALSO READ: How to Become an SEO Expert: A Comprehensive Guide
Benefits of Technical SEO
The benefits of technical SEO include:
- Making websites mobile-friendly to allow users to access them from any device
- Boosting the website speed
- Eliminating pop-ups and other intruding elements to enhance user experience
- Getting rid of ‘404 page’ errors and other broken links from the website
- Enhancing the website indexing by setting up the sitemap
- Directing the search engine about what to crawl and what not to crawl by adding a robots.txt file
- A streamlined process for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your website
- Facilitating user information discovery on your website
- Maintaining the safety and privacy of your website
Technical SEO vs On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages so that they rank higher in search results. Here, the material that is considered includes image alt text, the utilization of keywords, meta descriptions, H1 tags, the naming of URLs, and internal linking.
Technical SEO is a subset of on-page SEO. As discussed above, optimizing the technical aspects of your website is the focus of technical SEO. These technological aspects include things like website speed, mobile-friendliness, and website structure.
Technical SEO Checklist
With the understanding of what is technical SEO and why it is important for a website, let’s go through a technical SEO checklist that should help you in this process. This includes:
- Specify a preferred domain
- Check and optimize robots.txt
- Check and optimize URL Structure
- Revise navigation and website structure
- Include breadcrumb menus on web pages and posts
- Add schema markup for breadcrumbs
- Add structured data to the homepage
- Include structured data in web posts
- Add structured data to all other pages
- Check canonical URLs
- Optimize 404 Page
- Optimize and submit the XML sitemap to Bing and Google
- Enable HTTPS
- Check the website’s loading speedÂ
- Check the mobile-friendliness of the website
- Register the website with Google Search Console
- Register the website with Bing Webmaster tools
What are the Important Components of Technical SEO?
Technical SEO comprises the following components: crawling, rendering, and indexing. Let’s understand each component individually to learn what is technical SEO in detail.
Crawling
Technical SEO enables easier crawling of web pages by search engine web crawlers such as bots. This is done by creating XML sitemaps and optimizing the site structure.Â
Rendering
Googlebot obtains the web pages of a website, checks the website code, and evaluates the content to comprehend the layout or structure of the website. This process is called rendering. Technical SEO helps render the website by managing the web page size and increasing the web page loading speed.
Indexing
When search bots examine a website, they immediately begin indexing pages according to the subject matter of those pages and how relevant those are to the subject matter. Technical SEO plays a crucial role in indexing web pages by unblocking search bots from accessing the pages, removing duplicate content, and making the pages mobile-friendly.
Why Should You Learn SEO?
In a digital era, businesses rely on websites for sales, marketing, and customers. SEO plays a pivotal role in enhancing the visibility of the website in the search engine result pages. Learning SEO is highly important because it helps you:
- Increase the traffic of a website
- Create better user experiences by providing easy and smooth navigation
- Build trust and authority of a website by delivering quality and informative content to users
So if you are interested in making a career in digital marketing, this is an integral part of the job and will help you fulfill hirer requirements.
Learn and Grow with Emeritus
Technical SEO is one of the aspects of SEO that helps search engines recognize the website as highly credible. Explore more about SEO, SEM, SMM, and other digital marketing strategies by enrolling in Emeritus’ digital marketing courses. The programs will help you upskill and ensure you are future-ready.
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