Technical SEO Basics To Get Started

Start learning about technical SEO with the basics.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO includes all the backstage activities necessary to enhance the overall user experience on a website. It is a crucial part of an SEO strategy that helps search engines like Google crawl, render, and index a website. 

On-page and off-page search engine optimisations also go hand-in-hand with technical SEO, and together they help a website rank higher. 

In general, a website meets the fundamental technical SEO requirements when it 

• Is secure
• Loads fast
• Has no duplicate or thin content
• Is easy to navigate and has good site architecture
• Has an updated XML sitemap
• Has few or no 404 links

Today, the blog will cover more about technical SEO with important elements, common issues, and conducting a basic audit. 

Main Elements of Technical SEO

Website Speed 

Website speed directly affects user experience. A Portent study mentions a 0-4 second load time is best for conversion rate. Even when a webpage with longer load time has great content, users will leave. 

Improving page loading speed is one of the many ways to reduce bounce rate. Also, Google uses page loading speed as a ranking factor. A longer loading time will affect ranking as well.

Site Architecture

It refers to the ideal hierarchy of pages on a website. This helps crawlers crawl the website faster. It also helps the user navigate the pages of a website easily. 

Keeping the site structure flat, ensuring the URLs look consistent, etc. are some ways of maintaining a good site architecture. 

Crawling, Rendering, and Indexing

Search engines engage in crawling by following links on web pages they are already aware of to discover new pages that they have not previously encountered.

After crawling a webpage, the search engine proceeds to “render” the page. It uses all the information based on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS so that it can display how the page will look to desktop or mobile users.

After a page has been crawled and rendered, the search engine will analyse it to decide whether to include it in the index or not. It also tries to understand the content of the page to determine its relevance to search queries.

Structured Data Markup

Structured data provides additional information about the content on a website. It can include related details. 

It helps search engines to better comprehend the content on their website. This increases the chances of their content being highlighted in rich snippets or other enhanced search features.

Robots TXT and Sitemap XML

A robots.txt file instructs bots of the search engine to crawl. It can also tell bots which pages should not be crawled. While the XML sitemap can keep a record of every page on a website. Both of them are important for search ranking. 

Common Technical SEO Issues

Duplicate Content and Canonicalisation

Search engines may have difficulty determining which version to show in search results when they find multiple versions of the same content. Penalisation of the website can also happen, which may affect the page’s ranking.  

Canonicalisation is a technique of telling search engines which version of a page is the preferred or canonical version. 

Without canonicalisation, search engines may see multiple versions of the same content and may not know which one to prioritise in search results. By specifying a canonical URL for a page, website owners can indicate to search engines which version of the content should be indexed and shown in search results.

Broken Links

When search engines encounter broken links, they may have difficulty crawling and indexing the affected pages, which can negatively impact the website’s ranking in search results. 

Thin Content 

Thin content refers to pages on a website that have little content. Such pages typically contain only a few sentences or paragraphs of text, and may be created to generate traffic or promote affiliate links. 

Conducting a Technical SEO Audit for Your Website

Get Your Website to be Crawled

Use tools like Google Search Console to identify the technical errors on your website. Some of them can be broken links.  

Test Website Speed

Free tools like PageSpeed Insights from Google instantly inform you on the website performance by giving you all the diagnostics. 

The above screenshot shows the domain of Google.com on PageSeed Insights. It shows the performance of 67, whether it performs well and how well the domain is optimised. 

GTMetrix and Pingdom are some other alternatives to PageSpeed Insights. 

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Again, you can go ahead using Google’s helpful Mobile-Friendly Test tool. 

You can paste your website’s URL on the tool and find out whether your page is responsive on mobile. 

Update XML Sitemap

It is important to keep the sitemap updated so that it contains only the relevant pages. 

Remove Duplicate Content

Tools such as Copyscape are great for finding duplicate content on your website. Then you can do a 301 redirect for a bunch of pages with the same or similar content with the same keyword. 

Conclusion

These are the basics of technical SEO. There is, of course, a lot to uncover. But keeping the above-mentioned in mind will give you a better head start when you are beginning to learn about SEO.

You can find a long list of SEO courses to begin with as well.