What is Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a process for optimizing a website, so search engine spiders (crawlers) can index everything on the site efficiently. It is essential for crawlers to gain access to your website’s content because if they can’t, you miss opportunities to rank those pages.

When you think of search engine optimization, you think about what the users see, and that’s a huge part of SEO. Technical SEO is what helps you hit those goals. You have to combine traditional SEO and technical SEO with other strategies, including on- and off-page optimizations. In fact, all of them together are what make the three pillars for SEO.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

In a sense, technical SEO is essential because it could boost or hurt your organic performance and rankings. You could have the best content ever imagined. Ultimately, you may have backlinks from authoritative sites that are strategically placed. All of that is good, but if the search engine can’t crawl and index your website, you may not see any rankings at all. If nothing else, you might be on the fifth or sixth page. We all know that if you’re not on that first (and maybe second) page, no one is visiting your site. There are exceptions to that, but that’s pretty much what it boils down to.

The Technical SEO Checklist – Suitable for Beginners

Below, we have come up with a technical SEO checklist to cover most of the critical elements relating to technical SEO. That way, you have a website that’s technically sound and ready for action. However, this isn’t a full or comprehensive list of all technical recommendations out there. It’s up to you to make sure that you’re doing what you can to keep your website on the up and up.

In most cases, people don’t know where to begin with SEO in any form. That’s okay! You can always work with a professional SEO agency to get the help you need. Yoshiro Digital offers assistance with technical SEO, so you’re good to go.

If you want to get started on your own, we don’t blame you and commend you for such a task. By following the checklist below, you can make sure that your website has a strong technical foundation. Many of the roadblocks that prevent search engines from indexing, crawling, and ranking your site are covered here.

1. Ensure that Google Can Index and Craw Your Site.

Crawling is the process where Googlebot discovers updated and new pages that should be added to the Google Index. When Googlebot can’t crawl those pages, it can’t rank the content or index it.

Webmasters must make sure that Googlebot can index and crawl a page, and the best way to go about it is to use a special URL tool called “Inspect a Live URL.” This can be found in Google Search Console, and it allows people to test live URLs to see if Google can index them or not. If Google can’t index that URL, the test shows an error. That way, you know you have to fix the problem to ensure that it’s indexed and crawled correctly.

Here are common ways to make sure that your website can be indexed and crawled:

• Make sure you’re not blocking the search engine from crawling the page in the robots.txt file.
• Check for any orphaned pages. That means there are no internal links, so it’s harder for crawlers or users to find that page.
• Ensure that the page is in the sitemap.xml file. That way, search engines can find it efficiently.
• If you want a page to be indexed, make sure it doesn’t feature a “no-index” tag on it.

You can also use a mobile-friendly testing tool to check the HTML code of a landing page to make sure Googlebot can see the content. This is quite useful when you’re testing JavaScript for a site that is built using the JS framework. These tools can give you a snapshot of how the page is designed and offer errors that could impact crawlability.

2. Don’t Have Duplicate Content on Your Website.

Duplicate content means that you’ve got many pages with similar or exactly the same information on the site. If search engines see duplicate content, it confuses them, and they aren’t sure which version should be ranked and indexed. Typically, the search engine picks the one it thinks is best and then filters out the rest. This also holds true if you’ve got two similar pages that compete for the same keyword terms.

There are many ways to prevent duplicate content and solve this issue. The most common include:

• Use canonical tags to tell Google which page version you want it to use.
• Make sure that you’re using either a non-www or www version, but do not use both. When you do, that creates a duplicate of your entire website.
• Use various 301 redirects to get similar content pages to the right one.
• Ensure that you’re enforcing the lower-case URLs because mix-case URLs are usually considered to be duplicate content.

You can find many online tools to help you find duplicate content on your website. However, it’s often easier to work with a professional.

3. Make Sure the Website Loads Fast.

Ever since 2010, site speed is a ranking factor. Ultimately, a slower site ranks worse than one that works quickly.

You can find different tools to determine your website’s speed. With PageSpeed Insights, you can plug in the URL and get a report about the page’s performance. It also comes with a list of ways to improve speed.

Google also has a tool called Think. This lets you compare mobile page speeds with the competition to see how you rank. With that, you can also evaluate how much better you’re going to rank if your site is faster. That way, you can effectively see how much money you could make if the website speed was boosted by a specific amount.

Core Web Vitals is set to become a ranking factor for Google in mid-2021. You can keep an eye on your CWV metrics with various tools, such as GTMetrix and LightHouse. Alternatively, it might be easier to work with a technical SEO agency.

4. Focus on Website Security.

Google is now trying to create secure web experiences for its users, so it recommends that all websites use the HTTPS encryption. It has offered incentives for that by providing ranking boosts if the sites use HTTPS. On top of that, Google is marking regular HTTP sites as “not secure” as a way to protect and warn people.

It’s easy to ensure that your site is secure with a valid SSL certificate. However, we understand that some people don’t know how to go about it, and we can help.

5. Mobile-friendly Sites Are Important.

In March of 2018, Google started mobile-first indexing. Now, it’s the default. With that, if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you’re not ranking well.

Conclusion

Most people (unless they’re webmasters) aren’t sure how to implement technical SEO practices. Instead of muddling through it and hoping for the best, work with a professional. That way, you know things are done correctly, and it’s not going to hurt your ranking. In fact, it could help you rank better!