A Beginner's Guide to Boost Your Website's Visibility and Rankings.
Technical SEO is about making sure your website works well behind the scenes so the search engines like google can crawl it and index it so that is visible is in search results. Technical SEO is one of the three main pillars of SEO alongside On-Page and Off-Page where one does not work without another.
You might have the most engaging and unique content on your website, but if you don't take care of the technical aspects of your website, search engines may struggle to find, understand, or index it. And without being indexed, your content won’t appear in search results—meaning users can’t find you online.
In this short guide, I'll walk you through the key aspects of Technical SEO. By the end of this guide, you should have a basic understanding of what it takes to optimise your website from a technical standpoint and the essential steps involved.
Crawlability refers to whether Google or any other search engine can access and navigate your website or specific pages. It can be controlled by the robots.txt file, which is placed in the root directory of your domain. This file provides instructions to search engine crawlers about which pages or sections of the website they can or cannot access. Indexability, on the other hand, is the process where a search engine adds your pages to its index, allowing them to appear in search results. To improve indexability, we use xml sitemaps (a file that lists all important pages on your website), making it easier for search engines to discover and index your content.
In the context of Technical SEO, website architecture means how your website's pages are organised and structured. It's about creating a logical hierarchy that helps users and search engines to understand importance of pages and eases navigation through them. A well-structured website makes it easier to discover and index important content, improves user experience, and influences link equity through distributed internal links.
Page speed is not only a ranking factor; it is also closely related to user experience (UX). Users become frustrated when they visit websites that take a long time to load, have moving elements or images, or features are unresponsive. Google has introduced Core Web Vitals (CWV), a set of three metrics that define how quickly and efficiently your website performs.
If you're interested in more detail how to identify, measure and optimised page speed metrics read Google documentation.
Over 50% of online traffic comes from mobile devices, according to Think With Google—making it incredibly important for your website to be mobile-friendly. This is essential not only from a Technical SEO perspective but also for delivering a seamless User Experience that meets user expectations throughout their journey.What Is a Mobile-Friendly Website?A mobile-friendly website is one that displays content correctly on different screen sizes. Features such as call-to-action (CTA) buttons, navigation menus, images, margins, paddings, fonts, and even layouts are designed to adjust dynamically to the viewport size, ensuring usability across all devices.
Canonical tag, also know as re="canonical" is an HTML code snippets placed in the <head> section of the document. It tells search engine which version of the page is "original" or "preferred" to be indexed. Canonical tags are especially useful when you have multiple pages with similar or identical content. For example, if you have a product page that can be accessed through different URLs (e.g., with or without tracking parameters), the canonical tag helps prevent confusion by pointing search engines to the main version of the page.If you don’t specify a canonical tag, search engines might treat these variations as duplicate content, which can harm your rankings and overall SEO performance.
Structured data is a standardised format that provides additional information about your website's content to search engines. It is typically written in specific code formats, such as JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata, and is incorporated into the HTML of your web pages. By implementing structured data, you can help search engines better understand the context of your content. This can involve identifying a page as a recipe, product, event, or article. Although structured data itself is not a direct ranking factor, it significantly enhances how your content appears in search results, making it more appealing and accessible to users. This improved visibility can indirectly boost your SEO by increasing user engagement and click-through rates. If you'd like to learn more about structured data, read Google documentation.
Modern search engines such as Google require websites that use HTTPS (Hyper Transfer Protocol Secure) and SSL certificates. These allow the data to be encrypted with an extra layer of security. It also send signal to search engines and users that the website is safe to visit.
As a user, you’ve probably encountered a 404 error while browsing online. It’s frustrating to expect a page and instead be greeted with a “Page Not Found” message. Addressing errors like 404s is an essential part of Technical SEO, alongside other key areas, because they can disrupt user experience and negatively impact your site's performance in search engines.
There is much more to explore in advanced areas of Technical SEO, like JavaScript, log files, rendering, and crawl budget. However, I hope this guide provides a fundamental understanding of the various elements involved in optimising your website from a technical perspective. It is essential to have a basic grasp of how websites are structured, how Google perceives and crawls them, and the strategies to implement for improving their search rankings.
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