Technical SEO is important in the process of SEO. If there are any problems associated with Technical SEO, you won’t be able to attain the desired results – no matter how much SEO effort you put in. Therefore, you must understand and know what Technical SEO is, as well as how to use it, to improve your website.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process to optimize a website for its indexing and crawling phase. Using technical SEO, one can enable search engines to crawl, access, index and interpret a website without any issues.
The main objective of technical SEO is to improve website infrastructure. It is known as “technical” because this SEO process is all about website infrastructure and has nothing to do with website content or its promotion. If you want to rank your website high in Google search engine then you should choose best SEO Company in Shimla which will help you in all your website’s seo need.
10 Technical Aspects of SEO that Everyone Should Know:
1. Identify Crawl Errors
The very first thing you need to do is to run a crawl report on a website or conduct a site audit. This will give you all the information about any crawl errors on your website. This will also help you check any missing H1/H2 tags, duplicate content and low page speed.
Using several tools, you can easily automate the site audits and work on errors shown on the crawl report. You must do this task every month to ensure your website is free from errors and is well-optimized.
2. Check HTTPS Status Codes
It is important to switch to HTTPS because search engines won’t be able to access your website if you only have HTTP URLs. According to a study by SEMrush, HTTPS URLs have a strong ranking factor and help rank your site higher.
3. Check XML Sitemap Status
The XML sitemap is a map for the Google search engine, as well as other search engine crawlers. It helps search engine crawlers to find different website pages while ranking them accordingly.
To ensure that your XML sitemap status is up-to-date, you need to meet certain guidelines, such as:
- Ensure it follows all the XML sitemap protocol
- Ensure the sitemap has been formatted in an XML document
- Update all website pages in the sitemap
After checking all these things, you also need to ensure that you submit the XML sitemap of your website pages to Google using the tool called Google Search Console Sitemaps. You may even insert the sitemap (i.e. http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml) within your robots.txt file.
4. Check the Loading Time
Website loading time is another important technical SEO aspect to consider. As per the technical SEO error report by SEMrush, more than 23% of website pages have a slow loading time.
The website loading time is all about user experience and hence, may affect certain metrics used by search engines for ranking like time on page and bounce rate.
For finding your website load time, you need to use the tool – Google’s Page Speed Insights. You have to enter your website URL into this tool and leave the rest on Google.
Ideally, the website page loading time must be less than three seconds. If it is more for desktop or mobile, you need to tweak certain elements of your website to reduce the loading time for better ranking.
5. Make Sure the Website is Mobile-Friendly
The website must be mobile-friendly for a better technical SEO metric and higher search engine rankings. It is easy to check using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. All you need to do is enter your website and get all the insights on its mobile status.
You may even submit the results on Google to let the search engine know how a website performs.
Some mobile-friendly solutions are:
- Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Embed YouTube videos
- Increase font size
- Compress images
6. Keyword Cannibalization Audit
Keyword cannibalization can lead to confusion in certain search engines. For instance, if two pages are in keyword competition, Google itself decides which the best page is. One of the common pitfalls of keyword cannibalization is to optimize the subpage and home page for the same keywords. This is common in local SEO.
So, you need to use the report for Google Search Console’s Performance to see pages that compete for the same keywords. You can use the filter for seeing which particular pages have similar keywords in the URL or simply search using keywords to see the number of pages ranking for the same keywords. To prevent keyword cannibalization, you can consolidate some of these pages.
7. See the Site’s robots.txt File
If all your website pages are not indexed, you need to look for the robots.txt file. Sometimes site owners may unknowingly block a few website pages from the search engine crawling. Therefore, robots/txt file auditing is crucial.
Whenever you check the robots.txt file, you need to look for “Disallow: /”
It will inform search engines to avoid crawling a page on a website. So, make sure no website page is accidentally disallowed within the robots.txt file.
8. Conduct Google Site Search
You have to search type “site: yourwebsite.com” on Google to check how the search engine is indexing your website. This will show you all the pages that are indexed by Google. If your website is not on the top of the ranking list, you may be Google penalized, or maybe your site is being blocked from getting indexed. So, you need to fix the issue ASAP.
9. Look for Duplicate Metadata
Even the technical faux pas is common in SEO, especially for e-commerce websites and sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. There are around 54% of websites with duplicate metadata (or Meta descriptions) and 63% with missing or no Meta descriptions.
The duplicate Meta descriptions are formed when the same products have copied content on the Meta descriptions. But with a detailed crawl report or SEO audit, you can know about such issues with Meta description.
10. Meta Description Length
When you check the Meta descriptions for the errors of duplicate content, you can even optimize them with the correct length. It is not an important ranking factor, but still a technical SEO aspect to improve your SERPs.
The Meta description length must be 160 characters to 320 characters. It also enables you to add a few keywords, location and other key elements in the Meta description.
Conclusion
With these technical SEO aspects, you can easily get to know about any errors on your website. This helps let you improve your website ranking and avoid any errors that may be stopping your site from getting a higher ranking on search engines. Contact us
