What is Technical SEO, How To Improve 7 Part of Technical SEO
Technical SEO describes technical changes to your website so that it improves page ranking in SERP to get more traffic.
Technical SEO aims to present your website content to search engines and index it properly.
Technical SEO also improves user experience.
Search engines, specifically Google, give a lot of importance to the user experience.
Why is Technical SEO Important
Our primary objective is to attract traffic to our website, which could be a blog, an e-commerce site, or a company.
If we have good content, but it’s not indexed by the search engines, nobody will find it, and everything will go to waste. Because search engines are the major source of traffic.
Technical SEO is very important to add some attributes to our website which help to list our website content on search engines.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit involves reviewing various technical elements of a website to ensure they follow search optimization best practices. This refers to technical aspects of your blog or website that affect the ranking factors of search engines such as Google or Bing.
Use of HTTPS for technical SEO
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is a protocol used to exchange data between clients (web browsers) and servers. HTTP is not secure; anyone can intercept data. To solve this problem, an encrypted version of HTTP called HTTPS( Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is used. HTTPS uses SSL for data encryption.
Benefits of HTTPS
Protecting sensitive information such as login information and credit card details is mandatory.
To protect your data, Google prefers websites with SSL and use HTTPS to transfer data. The majority of international users are aware of the significance of HTTPS for security. Most browsers alert you if a website doesn’t use HTTPS. Thus, users avoid opening websites that do not use SSL.
HTTPS is seen as a positive user experience.
HTTPS is very important for SEO.
If a website uses SSL, the browser displays a lock sign.
Ensure the Page’s Accessibility Through a Single URL to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues.
Ensure that only one copy of website pages is accessible, otherwise, your website will be considered to have duplicate content.
Google dislikes duplicate content on a blog or website. The user experience is negatively impacted by it.
If you do not publish duplicate content on your website, you should also take care of some technical points to prevent it from looking like duplicate content.
Google treats the following links as separate and will index both pages as different content. Both URLs have the same content now.
“https://yourwebsite.com”
“https://www.yourwebsite.com”
If your website is accessible through both URLs, Google will treat it as duplicate content. According to Google, it does not penalize websites with such duplicate content, but it certainly lowers the site’s rank in the SERP.
Moreover, it will be harder to evaluate the performance of your website or blog in the Google search console.
Here we need to use technical SEO techniques to prevent this situation.
Adjust your hosting to use only one version (with or without www) for your website. Make sure the other version is redirected to your main website.
If you have SSL, make sure that the server uses HTTPS only and not HTTP.
Improve website loading speed
The website loading speed is a very important point in technical referencing. If a website takes longer than 2.5 seconds to load, visitors will leave the website.
To improve website speed and SEO, take the following steps.
Optimize images. Images are an important part of a web page. It is also a part of a web page that has the maximum size. As a result, the speed of the website is reduced. So it is important to reduce image size.
Online services are available to reduce image sizes. We can also convert our images to WEBP format, which is very useful for reducing the image size.
Use Lazy Load for Images. Lazy load is a technique in which only required images are loaded, which are needed to show on a mobile or desktop screen. Other images that are out of the viewport(screen) are loaded as we scroll to change the viewport.
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A CDN is used to save images and other files of your website on different servers at different locations. Your website will serve files from the nearest server when someone opens it.
As a result, it helps to increase website loading speeds.
Compress or minify CSS and JavsScript files: By minifying files, we can reduce the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. We can use some software to minimize files by removing unnecessary lines, characters, and whitespace.
The Importance of Website Loading Speed for SEO.
Develop a responsive mobile-friendly website
After detaching the target device, a responsive website loads code to render pages according to the device. A website that is mobile-friendly efficiently generates UI and view for mobile devices. It enhances the user experience on a mobile device. And it’s good for SEO. According to Google, it will give priority to websites in SERPs that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
Google Search Console has a tool to check for mobile-friendliness.
How to create mobile friendly website, best Techniques.
Use of Structured data on pages
Structured data facilitates Google Search Engines to understand the content of a page in a better way. It helps Google figure out the content of your page. If Google understands our content, it will display our content on the search result page in a better way.
structured data also high lite content efficiently on the SERP. Rich snippets are a part of structuring data. Rich snippets are more appealing in search results, with additional information appearing under the title and description.
Structured data is very important for SEO enhancement. It helps to improve CTR (click-through rate).
Rich snippets can be generated using structured data markup code. Structured data markup code is used to display rich snippets.
Remove duplicate content
If you have multiple copies of the same or almost similar content on your website. It is considered duplication. There are other forms of duplicate content as well.
Linking to the same page in different categories is an instance of duplicate content.
“https://example.com/seo/wordpress-seo”
“https://example.com/wordpress-mantenace/wordpress-seo”
Even though there is no penalty from Google, it is still harmful to your website’s SEO. There are also some unintentional causes of duplicate pages on our website, for example.
Printable versions of pages are indexed.
The website is accessible with the wrong URL because of the wrong domain setting.
Pages are saved in two categories.
Other issues with duplicate content
It increases the unnecessary load of crawling on the website. Sometimes these pages also come up in search results, but they are not required.
Importance of Core Web Vitals
Page loading speed is also described in terms of LCP.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It should take less than 2.5 seconds, which means the largest content on the page must be painted in less than 2.5 seconds.
Interactivity: It states that the page should be responsive to user actions, videos, and so on.
Also, there should be a low FID (first input delay), which is the time taken to react to user interaction by a webpage.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a measurement of the shifts in various elements’ layouts of a webpage.
HTTPS: We already discussed that it is mandatory to transfer sensitive data online between the client (browser) and server.