A Guide to Technical SEO

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Author: | Digital Marketing Experts

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Your website has two audiences. The most obvious one is made up of any potential customers you're trying to connect with and promote your products and services. The other includes an invisible audience that your site must cater to if you want to be successful. These are the search engines themselves, which are always crawling around the Internet looking to connect people searching the web for the most relevant answers to their queries.

Much in the same way that choosing the right keywords and building strong content is vital for appealing to people, the way your site is constructed needs to be technically sound at the same time. This is why you cannot ignore the importance of technical SEO when building and optimizing your website. 

What is Technical SEO?

Contrary to what some may believe, Google and other search engines are not magic. They operate on strict rules about what they look for and how they compile search results. In many ways, they approach searches the same way people do — if they can't see something immediately, they will give up and move on to something that looks more promising. Any obstacles your site puts in their way means there's a lower chance of it being placed in a favorable position in terms of search engine ranking. This is independent of content SEO, meaning no matter how informative, authoritative or well-written your site may be, it won't mean as much if it has poor technical SEO. Simply put, the easier your site is to navigate and use, the more likely it is that search engines will find it. 

Key Components of Technical SEO

Technical SEO has a lot in common with user experience, meaning it consists of all the nuts-and-bolts elements of your website. Some of the most important of these include: 

  • Site architecture: For Google and other tools to find and recommend your site, it needs to be organized and structured in an intuitive manner. Without an orderly arrangement of pages, your site will be confusing for people as well as search engines.
  • URL Structure: Overly wordy or obtuse URLs are another clear warning sign for search engines to stay away from your site.
  • Page Speed: If your pages take too long to load due to poor site structure or other issues, they're likely to be bumped further down the search engine rankings.
  • Robots.txt: This file is critical because it gives search engines permission as to which areas of your site they can crawl and which ones they are not allowed to access.
  • Sitemap: A well-constructed XML sitemap gives Google a clearer idea of everything your website contains and where to find it.
  • Mobile Design: If your site is not optimized to function as well on mobile devices as it does as desktops, there's a stronger chance it will be ignored.
  • Canonical Tags: These help web crawlers choose the right page when presented with duplicated content across multiple pages.
  • Error Resolution: Broken links and other technical problems can cause a search engine to give up on your site, so you need a strong protocol for resolving these.
  • Structured Data: Adding HTML tags helps make the meaning of content on your pages clearer for web crawlers and enable better performance.

When all of these components are well-constructed and work together, it helps boost the visibility of your site and pushes it higher up on the page rankings. 

Technical SEO Tools 

If you want to know exactly how well your site is performing with regard to technical SEO, a site audit is essential. However, combing through all the various aspects of your website to find areas that need improvement can be a laborious and inefficient process when done manually. Fortunately, there are a number of technical SEO tools you can use to make the work much faster and easier. These review every technical aspect of your webpage and provide actionable insights you can use to ensure it is as appealing to search engine bots as it can be. 

Google Analytics is perhaps the most widely known and used of these tools, but there are many others including Google Search Console, Semrush, Screaming Frog and more. Any of these applications can scan through your website and identify any areas where its technical elements may be discouraging or frustrating search engines to a significant degree. 

A typical site audit begins by having the SEO tool of your choice crawl your site. From the application's dashboard, you should be able to find a complete listing of any issues discovered during the crawling process. These may include indexing errors, broken links or problems within your robots.txt file. Once those have been identified, the next step should be to review any on-page elements that may be contributing to problems, such as page titles, meta descriptions and canonical tags. Conducting a thorough site audit with the help of the proper tools is a critical component of technical SEO strategy. 

Implementing Technical SEO Best Practices  

The results of your audit should provide you with a roadmap of sorts for resolving any technical SEO issues that may have been uncovered. The next step is developing a good technical SEO strategy for fixing these and making sure they don't crop up the next time you crawl your site. Some of the most important technical SEO best practices for your site include: 

  • Make sure you have SSL: A Secure Sockets Layer is the difference between an “https://” domain and an “http://” domain, and it's a critical distinction for search engines. The added security is something that Google specifically looks for and impacts your search engine results. Without a secure domain, your site will be viewed as untrustworthy.
  • Pay attention to load speeds: Your page may seem fast enough to you, but even a few additional seconds of waiting can severely impact your rankings. This means you should do everything possible to speed up your site, including compressing files, limiting the number of plug-ins you use and cleaning up any superfluous code.
  • Clean up your site architecture: Hub pages and other important elements of your site should be positioned front-and-center in your architecture. You should cut down on any intermediary pages between them and your homepage so search engine bots can find them quickly and without any confusion.
  • Be aware of your robots.txt: One of the most important technical SEO basics is to make sure your site's robots.txt is comprehensive and as clean as possible. This means making sure your most important pages are open and accessible to search engine crawlers and removing any that don't contribute to your ranking. For example, a login page does little to help a bot know what your business does, and as such should be excluded to prevent unnecessary crawling.

Potential Issues and Common Technical Mishaps

A technical SEO audit can uncover a lot of problems with your site that you didn't know existed. Any of these could hurt your search engine visibility, so it's important to know what to look for when reviewing the results. Some of the most common obstacles to technical optimization of a website include: 

  • Broken Links: Internal and external linkage that goes to a 404 can be a huge red flag for search engine crawlers. These signal that your site is not well-maintained and may contain outdated or irrelevant information, so they should be cleaned up as soon as they are discovered.
  • No External Links: You might think to solution to the broken link problem is to simply not have any external linkage at all, but this presents its own problem. Without any links to outside sites, your webpage appears as a sort of cul-de-sac to Google's eyes, which hurts its search ranking.
  • Excessively Large Files: Although it makes sense to have high-quality images on your site for the user experience, it's important not to go overboard. Images that are too large will drag down your site speed, which means a search engine bot may get impatient and pass you by in favor of a quicker site.
  • Duplicate Content: If you have pages that share certain content elements, you need to provide canonical tags to let the search engine crawlers know which one is the preferred version for a particular search term. Without this, the bot may determine your pages are irrelevant and ignore them.
  • No Mobile Optimization: Most people today use handheld devices like smartphones to access the web, and search engines know this. If you don't have mobile-friendly architecture and design on your site, you can expect to languish near the bottom of the rankings.
  • Lack of Structured Data: Without a standardized way to let crawlers know what is on your page, it becomes much harder for a search engine to match your site to a user's query. Structured data provides a quick and easy summary for bots to understand your content.

Key Takeaways

There's more to search engine optimization than keywords. If you're only thinking of the human being behind the keyboard when optimizing your site, you're missing half of the full picture. Technical SEO is essential if you want to boost organic traffic to your website, and it takes specialized know-how to achieve the best results. All the behind-the-scenes aspects of your pages need to be configured in the most effective way to drive more eyes to your business. 

If you're unsure about where to start when it comes to optimizing your presence on the Internet, the best place to start is a complementary SEO audit from the experts at Straight North. We can take a close look at every element of your site and leverage our expertise to spot any areas that need improvement for users and search engines. If any problems appear that seem too big to fix on your own, rest assured that our professional SEO services can take the guesswork out of the process and leave you with a site that's built for both audiences. To learn more or to get started, reach out and talk to one of our SEO specialists. 

Digital Marketing Experts

This was written by one of Straight North’s digital marketing experts. Our team stays up to date on the latest digital marketing trends and best practices to inform our audience and create strategies that deliver results for our clients.

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