What is Technical SEO?

SEO is a collective of many different techniques and tools used to optimise your site for search engines. One aspect of SEO is technical SEO, but what is technical SEO? In essence, technical SEO refers to optimising your website for search engines to allow them to easily crawl and index the site. While the majority of SEO is focused on improving the user experience for site visitors, technical SEO is primarily devoted to robots over humans. It’s an essential part of SEO that cannot be overlooked. Below, I am going to run through the component parts of technical SEO that your site should focus on.

Technical SEO: Understanding website components

Technical SEO can be broken into four parts; site architecture, content, speed and mobile-friendliness. Every component has been specifically identified by Google as something it uses to rank websites. Therefore, these actions should be completed to give you a good starting point for your ongoing SEO strategy.

Site architecture

Site architecture refers to the organisational structure of a site and how it delivers the content of your website to users. These points below are the most important structural elements that you should address on your site first.

SSL Certification 

An SSL is a way to secure the information that is passed through devices using your website. If your website has an SSL it will usually have a little padlock in the URL bar next to the website name and you will be able to access the website via HTTPS. Once you have an SSL in place, you should ensure any unsecured traffic from HTTP redirects to HTTPS. 

Site Map

A site map is a technical map of the site and includes all URLs for the site. The site map is used by a search engine to discover all the different URLs in a site and can therefore crawl them. A site map usually takes the form of an XML file and can be automatically generated by your website framework but you can also manually create them with a site map generator. Although search engines can find these maps, it’s best to submit them straight to the search engine such as Google in your search console. 

URL structure

The way a URL is presented to a user is important to Google because good URL structures improve engagement. A good website structure would include the domain, followed by a folder and then the page, e.g. domain-example.co.uk/blog/blog-article-example. This kind of URL is easy to read for humans as well as Google. It is showing a hierarchy of the site as well as using actual words. A poor URL structure would include letters and numbers that are randomised and do not relate to the actual content. E.g. an IMDB URL which is known for confusing URLs, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112760/?ref_=nm_knf_i1 

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are internal navigation on a page that displays to users whereabouts in the site hierarchy they are currently. They can be designed in many ways but they usually signify how deep into a site you are and should be usable as a way to navigate through the site (e.g Home > Services > SEO Services). Not only is this good for technical SEO it’s also great for user experience.

Internal linking

An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. By including a link to my contact page here, I am internally linking. Linking helps users and search engines navigate through information on a site when linking to appropriate pages. Writing a longer blog article, like this one, is a good opportunity to share links to other supplementary blog articles and relevant service pages. They help users learn more and improve the page from Google’s perspective. 

Robots

The robots.txt file is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl and which ones not to crawl. First and foremost, including a robots.txt that allows the majority of your site to be crawled will encourage search engines to crawl it. You can also stop certain pages being crawled if they don’t add any value to your SEO strategy.

404

Any 404 error pages should be fixed on your site immediately. They can often happen when a web page no longer exists and you’ve either not de-indexed it or redirect it to somewhere more appropriate. You should never delete a page without a plan to avoid a 404 because Google hates them and so do your customers. 

Technical SEO Content Improvements

Content marketing is an essential part of SEO, but when we discuss content in terms of technical SEO, it’s more associated with good housekeeping of your site. 

Duplicate content

Duplicate content on your own site can include any text that is literally duplicated or when a technical error causes search engines to read the exact same page twice. Examples of this include: 

• when your web pages are displayed with and without a file extension (example.co.uk/shop & example.co.uk/shop.html)
• or when your category and tag pages are paginated this causes duplicate content.

This can cause your web pages and website to be marked as including Thin Content. 

Structured Data Markup

Google uses structured information to understand the content on a web page. If you provide this information on your page then you can make it easier for Google to understand what kind of web page is featured. It can also decide whether they would like to include it in some of the richer features of the search engine. Structured data markup involves tagging a web page and it’s contents, stating what it is, such as an article, a how-to, an event or even a logo of your company. 

Broken links

As with 404s, broken links are incredibly annoying. Broken links usually lead to a 404 so it’s essential you review your website frequently and remove broken links. This links can be both internal and external links. If it’s a broken external link, then like the 404 it’s showing poor housekeeping. As for external links, you want to ensure that any links to outside your site remain relevant to the content you linked from and that they themselves don’t lead to a 404. 

Site Speed & Technical SEO

For over a decade, Google has used site and page speed as factors in ranking. They have continued to tweak their algorithm to improve this measurement and it looks like there will be further speed based updates in 2021. A great tool to utilise is Google’s own PageSpeed Insights that you can use to analyse your website.

Optimise Visuals

One of the biggest culprits of slow load time is poorly optimised images and using the wrong kind of image. Here are a few tips:

• For anyone wanting to instantly improve page load, reducing the image size to the lowest pixels possible without compromising quality is essential. 
• Don’t just think of width and height though, ensure the file size is not more than 1MB, though the lower the better too.
• Use a resolution of no more than 72 dpi.
• Utilising the correct file formats can also help. As a general rule use JPGs for photography and PNG for graphics.

Minimal components & JS (JavaScript)

The more you have on the page to load, the more time it will take. Reduce the number of components on each page and only use the essential. Not only will your load time improve, but users will also be more focused on one or two things you have to say rather than getting distracted. Using too much JS will also cause slower loads. Use it sparingly and your customers will thank you for it.

Reduce plugins/extensions

As with components and JS, having too many plugins and extensions on your site will make the whole site slow not just the plugin elements. If you are experiencing slow load times, it may be time to consider a website audit and clear up any unused or redundant extensions.

Redirects

Redirects of a URL can be an essential way to manage older or missing content but used too excessively they can cause slow load times. Here are a few things to consider:

• If a page links to a URL that is going to redirect, you are better off changing the link to the final page instead to avoid the extra step.
• Any resources that end up redirecting (such as CSS) should also be modified to go to the final stage and miss out the redirect.
• When a redirect must be used, make sure only one redirect is used and not a chain of several.

Modifying and tidying up redirects is a good yearly practice to adhere to. 

Cache

A website cache is a way to temporarily store a website’s pages. This allows the user to see the website’s contents quicker. If a website constantly has to ask the web hosting server to render the items, it takes more time than if that user already has the majority of it stored in a cache. Caches can be an internal website cache, frequently controlled by a plugin or more advanced CDNs for websites that have a lot of traffic and a lot of content.  

Mobile-friendly Design

In 2015, Google rolled out its mobile-friendly updated algorithm, known more commonly as mobilegeddon. With mobile usage at the highest rate it has ever been, mobile-friendly websites and SEO geared towards mobile experience continue to dominate technical SEO improvements. These aspects combine user experience and speed improvements to tell Google whether your site is worth ranking.

Responsive

One of the easiest ways to ensure that your site performs well on mobile is to make it responsive. If the site does not scale to a smaller screen, then a customer will soon leave. Having to zoom in to read content and to navigate around the site is a big no-no and will result in a very high bounce rate. 

Mobile-friendly User Experience

Mobile design should be very different from desktop website design because: 

• The screen is physically smaller
• Users will use their fingers primarily to move around a website
• Actions can be different on a mobile 

With this in mind, try to ensure;

• The site has a ‘thumb’ friendly design 
• The call to actions are easy to see and easy to use
• Fonts are legible on a smaller screen
• Pop-ups are not more intrusive than they have to be. They can easily be closed and do no cover important information. 
• If you are interested in using popular external apps, ensure your site is optimised for it. E.g. Pinterest App displays your website within the app.

Mobile-First Design

If you are looking at designing or a redesign of your website, you may consider mobile first design. This is a design idea that aims to create better experiences for users by starting the design process from the smallest of screens, the smartphone. With more users utilising mobile than ever before, it makes sense for many industries to opt for this approach. However, it is not essential and can actually be damaging if you neglect other device sizes, so ensure you discuss these with your UX designer. 

AMP Pages

The same can be said about using AMP pages. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It was a project developed by Google and Twitter to deliver mobile pages incredibly fast to mobile devices. Its a lightweight HTML framework that will improve load speed of a site when used on mobile. Although great for speed, it does have significant design limitations. Stripped back CSS is used and JS is not used at all. Discuss your options with your web designer and/or developer. 

Technical SEO Admin

Technical SEO is also about the administrative side. Ensuring your site is hooked up to the right places and is being monitored correctly is vital. Not only will Google appreciate you using their tools, but Google will also monitor your site directly. Below are some of the administrative aspects of technical SEO. 

Google analytics

If you don’t utilise Google analytics for your website, you will not be able to show your site has improved. Engagement, load times and bounce rate are just some important performance metrics. Understanding these will help your technical SEO strategy and improve your site.

Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Signing up to services like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools will allow you to monitor your efforts. You’ll see crawl errors, submit site maps, request de-indexing. Plus many more technical SEO tasks to improve your standing with search engines.

SEO software setup

To measure your technical SEO improvements you will need some sort of SEO software to monitor crawls and rankings. I have genuinely met SEOs who just Google keywords to see where a site is ranking. Not only is that highly inaccurate, but it’s also a mind-numbing waste of time. A good SEO freelancer or team will utilise the correct tools to improve your site. 

Start Your Technical SEO Strategy

I hope you’ve enjoyed this comprehensive guide on the different elements of technical SEO. There are many tips and tricks that can aid these areas. These key points are the things to look out for. Read through the additional resources listed in each section for more detailed information. If you would like any help with improving the technical SEO aspects of your site, please get in touch. Let’s see how we can grow your business together.