Technical SEO ensures a website is optimized to meet all the basic technical requirements of a modern search engine to improve its rankings.
Technical SEO includes all the activities on your website to optimize it so that search engines like Google can crawl, index, and render it on search results. SEO involves many things, and technical SEO is just part of the big puzzle.
Most business owners and professional marketers walk the extra mile to better their websites and rank at the top on SERPs.
Why technical SEO is important
Hosting your website with a reputable server is not all you need to rank at the top and boost user experience; you should also focus more on the technical aspect of the website. Your website will not rank at the top if you only focus on quality content and not technical SEO.
Even when Google ranks your website, it doesn’t mean that you are now good to go. How do you know if your website is fully optimized for technical SEO?
Some aspects of a technically optimized website include fast loading, no duplicate content, mobile-friendly, secure, easy to navigate, and many other things. However, it does not mean you should make your website perfect to rank on search engines. You should try fixing all the loops on your website and make it easy for Google to understand and rank it.
Technical SEO best practices
As mentioned earlier, there are many things you can do under technical SEO to make your website easy to rank by Google. Here are some technical SEO best practices you should have in mind:
1 – Website speed
Being fast is a vital characteristic of any website that wants to rank on top of Google. When making your website “technically fit,” fast speed is better. Ideally, your website should take less than 5 seconds to load if you want to keep the most visitors on the page.
Fast websites are most likely to perform better than also websites. Visitors who find your website slow are most likely to bounce off. To improve your website speed, you can:
- Reduce images size
- Upgrade the server host to 64 bits
- Reduce plugins on your website backend
- Avoid heavy pre-made themes
- Avoid using too many scripts on the <head> of the site
2 – Mobile friendliness
Make your website mobile-friendly if you want it to compete for a position on SERPs. A mobile-friendly website is mandatory, given that most people use their mobile devices to surf.
Google introduced mobile-first indexing, meaning if your website is mobile-friendly, the search engine will make it appear on organic searches for most keywords.
Making your website mobile-friendly is a one-off thing. Once you make your website mobile-friendly, you don’t have to do it again. When making the site mobile-friendly, you want to ensure it has the same appearance on different screens. Also, when testing your website speed, you should ensure it can load in less than 6 seconds on a 3G network.
3 – Original content
Another way to rank your website is to ensure you don’t publish any duplicate content on the site. You can use a third-party tool to remove any duplicate content that you may have on the site.
Tools like Semrush can help you with site auditing to check the quality score of every part of your website with duplicate content.
When creating content published on your website, you should ensure it is unique and free of grammatical errors. This will make your website unique and rank at the top.
You should also remove all the dead links on your site. If there is a 404 error on your website, you should have it fixed to keep your visitors on the screen.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO is important to any business that wants to increase sales by driving traffic to their site. To optimize your website for technical SEO, you should focus more on the loading speed, crawling, mobile friendliness, and indexing by search engines.
Technical SEO may be a bit complex if you are doing it alone. That is why you should hire an expert in this field to help you with the most difficult task like setting up your website so it can function properly.