Technical search engine optimization or technical SEO is a term that refers to optimizing the technical aspects of making a website rank higher on search engines. This includes making the website faster and better looking while being easy to be crawled by search engines.
Like quality content, technical aspects of SEO can never be neglected, as Google gives these aspects very high importance within ranking signals. So let’s dive more into what these aspects are and why they matter.
Why technical SEO matters to businesses?
Google, as the biggest search engine in the world with over 90% of market share, wants to show the best possible results on top of search results. The best results don’t just depend on content and keywords, but they also depend on the whole experience when using the website.
So the search engine doesn’t want a slow loading website to show on top of search results, or a website that has problems showing up.
Google takes many signs to do this, including signs that start with crawling the website and how it is optimized for the process. Crawling is the process when a search engine robot visits a website to analyze it and add to its big index to show up in results.
And since faster websites that have no issues in crawling are rewarded, technical SEO became a very known term in both website development and digital marketing worlds.
Technical SEO aspects to look for:
There are a number of aspects that make a website technically SEO optimized, and each of them should be a major concern for your business if you care about having a powerful digital presence or want to rank high in search engines. Here are the biggest aspects to watch for.
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Website speed
You may already know that the internet world is fast, everything needs to be easily accessible and the least time should be wasted. In this digital world, there is no place for a slowly loading website.
More than half of the visitors will probably leave a website if it loads slowly, even without viewing its content, according to a number of statistics. So if you don’t want to make people frustrated, improve your website loading to become as fast as possible.
This doesn’t just impress people, but it is an important signal for Google that this website can go up in search results. The major search engine now measures more analytics about website loading than ever, through its new Web Vitals algorithm, so it may be the time slow websites are never forgivable.
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Website security
Website security is an essential aspect of a technically optimized website. A safe website has a number of crucial things to implement nowadays, including the HTTPS protocol, which is essential.
The HTTPs protocol can be purchased through an SSL certificate that you get from your website hosting provider, and it adds layers of protections that make website visitors safe as no one can intercept the data sent between the browser and the site.
Also, you need to apply high standards of security to your website to avoid spam comments and visits, DDoS attacks, and hacking that may lead to the hacker ransoming data or just destroying it.
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Search engine crawl ability
Search engines use bots known as robots or spiders that discover websites on the web and follow links to add them to their index with their information. When these bits reach a website they try to quickly understand its internal structure, and the website should be optimized for this.
The robots.txt file can help you do this as it contains the primary information for robots on what to do when they visit the website. This also means you can tell search engines not to follow specific links if some webpages don’t need to show up on search engines.
Tools like Yoast SEO help WordPress website users do this easily, through a visual interface where you choose the settings and actions to be done by robots for different pages through the website structure.
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Dead links
Slowly loading pages are frustrating, but pages that don’t exist at all are much worse. The error 404 that shows when a page is not available should never happen at many of your website pages if you plan to rank high in search engines.
Search engines know that people don’t like it when they find error pages, and they act based on this. That’s why technical search engine optimization of websites should include fixing dead links.
Bottom line
Technical SEO is not a matter to ignore when optimizing websites for search engines, especially now as user experiences matter more than ever and the competition has become broader and tougher.
The aspects discussed in this blog are a great start for every business will do technical SEO with organized priorities.
