Technical SEO is an important yet often overlooked aspect of SEO. You may have heard the term thrown around, but what exactly does it entail, and why should you care about optimizing your site for technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the non-visible aspects of your website that search engines are able to observe behind the scenes. Things like your website speed, mobile friendliness, internal linking structure, metadata, redirects and more all fall under the technical SEO umbrella. While users only see the visible parts of your site, search engines are analyzing everything happening both on the front and back end to better understand your website and determine if it should rank well for relevant queries.
Stick with me for the next few paragraphs, and by the end, you'll have a comprehensive understanding of this vital ranking factor.
Website Speed
One of the most impactful technical SEO factors is your site speed. Speed is an important ranking signal that Google has highlighted time and time again in their search quality evaluations. PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that allows you to enter your URL and get an analysis of how quickly (or slowly) your site loads. Focus on improving the page speed score by optimizing images, avoiding redirects, minimizing CSS and JavaScript files, enabling SEO services in the USA, and more. Users are simply less likely to wait around for slow pages, so Google wants to show users the fastest-loading relevant results first.
Mobile-Friendliness
Another major technical ranking factor is how well optimized your site is for mobile devices. As more searches happen on phones versus desktops, Google considers mobile usability as an important ranking signal. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool to enter any URL to get an instant report on whether that page is optimized for mobile or not. Things like viewport settings, tap targets being large enough, and responsive images are all important to have. Google may penalize sites that are slow or hard to use on phones.
HTTPS Implementation
Having your website served over HTTPS versus regular HTTP is another technical SEO services USA best practice. Google has been gradually rolling out HTTPS as a ranking factor, so make sure your whole site is properly migrated over to HTTPS to avoid any potential ranking issues. Tools like SSL Labs can analyze your HTTPS implementation and provide recommendations on improving security.
Page Speed Optimization
As mentioned earlier, page speed is vitally important for both the user experience and search engine optimization. Here are some specific technical optimizations you can make to speed up your pages:
- Minify and compress CSS and JavaScript files.
- Defer off-page JS and CSS where possible.
- Optimize images: compress and resize photos.
- Enable browser caching for static assets.
- Minimize redirects.
- Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- Optimize hosting and server response times.
- Add expiration headers for cache control.
- Compress and minimize HTML.
Following these page speed best practices can noticeably boost your user experience scores while keeping Google happy.
Content Formatting and Structure
The way your content is structured and marked up with things like headings, lists, paragraphs, etc. also matters from an SEO perspective. Some key optimizations include:
- Using unique and relevant <h1> tags for main headings.
- Properly formatting different sizes of subheadings (<h2>, <h3>, etc.)
- Embedding rich snippets like recipes and reviews.
- Adding alt text descriptions to images.
- Structuring content with lists, where applicable.
- Use bold and italics sparingly and appropriately.
Semantic and accessible markup helps search engines understand your content better while enhancing usability.
Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are a technical element that allow search engines to easily discover all the pages on your website, especially the deeper archived content. Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to help bots comprehensively crawl your site. Sitemaps are also important from an internal linking structure perspective, as covered in the next section.
Internal Linking Structure
How your pages on a site are linked to each other is an important technical on-page signal that Google analyzes. Some best practices include:
- Having a reasonable number of internal links to deeper pages.
- Changing the anchor text used for links naturally.
- Avoid over-optimized anchor text that looks unnatural.
- Ensure all important internal pages are reachable.
- Linking out to authoritative external domains, where relevant.
A balanced and natural internal linking structure allows Google to better understand what your site is about through how pages relate to each other.
Redirects Management
Redirects handle changes to your URLs, like page renames, removals or platform migrations. From an SEO perspective, make sure to:
- Use 301 permanent redirects for renames or content moves.
- Apply 302 temporary redirects judiciously for temporary changes.
- Consolidate multiple redirects where possible.
- Prevent soft 404 errors on pages removed without redirects.
Proper redirects preserve your SEO rankings and pass along link equity whenever URLs change.
Meta Descriptions
Although meta descriptions don't directly impact rankings, they are important for technical and on-page SEO. Google may leverage meta descriptions as snippets in the SERPs, so optimize them to be compelling, unique and entice clicks. Aim for roughly 155 characters, including spaces.
Additional Technical Factors
Some other technical elements that influence E-commerce SEO audit include:
- Site architecture and information architecture.
- Server response codes and page errors.
- Ensuring all tags and schemas are valid.
- Eliminating JavaScript errors and blocking resources.
- Setting up analytics and search console properly.
- Creating an XML sitemap index for large sitemaps.
As you can see, technical SEO encompasses many non-visible factors that search engines consider very important. By addressing the key areas discussed here, you can dramatically improve both your site speed and search visibility.
Final Words
Technical SEO may seem complex but focuses on fundamentals. Website speed is one of the most impactful technical factors that Google analyzes. By optimizing page load times through techniques like image compression and JavaScript bundling, you can create a better user experience while satisfying Google's speed guidelines. With diligent optimization and monitoring, you can overcome any technical issues holding your site back from ranking to its full potential.
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