What is technical SEO and what is it for?

Technical SEO is a fundamental factor in any SEO strategy. If you have any problems with technical SEO, it is likely that all your SEO efforts will not generate the expected results. For this reason, it is essential to know what technical SEO is, what it is for and how to use it well.. The good news is that once you’ve tackled the technical side of SEO by solving the problems,
you won’t need to do it again
.

Technical SEO refers to all optimization operations that do not concern the content. It is a set of interventions and technical measures used to make the site work and stand out before Internet search engines. This way you will improve the user experience and improve your search engine ranking.

If you are wondering how to optimize your site with technical SEO and what precautions to take into account, you are in the right place. Rodanet will explain in detail what technical SEO is, what it drives for and much more.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to all the techniques that make it easier to index and crawl a website and improve its positioning. In most cases, these are techniques that are related to knowledge of code, servers and tag standards or markup for Google (canonicals, lang, schema, redirects, open graph, robots, sitemap, loading speed, DOMs, etc.).

When we talk about technical SEO, we refer to all search engine optimization activities that refer to interventions made on the website. For this reason, technical SEO is often considered a “subsection” of on-page SEO. However, it is more appropriately defined as another branch of SEO.

Technical SEO, in fact, as its name suggests, deals with optimizing the architecture of the website and not its contents. This branch of optimization works to improve the user experience by providing a coherent and navigable internal organization of the website. Therefore, it is a fundamental aspect within an SEO campaign, since it improves the performance of the website.

This improvement has a double value: it is obviously essential for users browsing the site itself. But, it is also crucial for
crawlers
that is to say, the bots that examine the contents of the web and that affect the positioning in the SERPs of the search engines.

This is why technical SEO is so important: a site that is well optimized on a technical level will be highly valued. And, for that reason, it will appear more easily (and higher) in search results.

What do I have to take into account when optimizing my website?

Search engine bots analyze several factors related to technical SEO to determine whether a site is “good” or not. Therefore, optimizing these factors means implementing an integrated SEO strategy.

Consequently, to optimize a site at the technical level, there are specific tasks to be performed. These are actions aimed at making the web not only easier for users to navigate, but also more crawlable by crawlers.
crawlers
.

We know that Google tends to favor content that can provide the best user experience. Many aspects of technical SEO have this value: for example, loading speed, but also usability for mobile devices. It will also favor a coherent and well-structured internal architecture over a poor and confusing one.

A website that is slow, difficult to navigate and full of technical errors, on the other hand, will not be perceived as worthy of visibility. Consequently, you will have very little chance of appearing in the top positions of the SERP.

14 Best practices for technical SEO

Now that you know what technical SEO is, let’s look at how to do it and what the best practices are.

#1 Choose your preferred domain

When creating a website, you must choose your preferred domain. This way, you can tell the search engines which variant of the domain you want to use. Let’s see why this step is necessary.

A website is accessible by default with and without www in front of a domain name. For example, if your domain is ejemplo.es, your site can be accessed from both http://www.ejemplo.es and http://ejemplo.es.

However, search engines consider these to be two different sites and therefore may encounter indexing problems or duplicate content. For this reason, it is essential that you set up your preferred domain by informing the search engines of your choice. And here a new problem arises, which one to choose? Actually, you can decide freely, because there are no advantages in one or the other. The important thing is to inform the search engine and be consistent with your choice.

#2 Optimize Robots.txt

Once you have finished setting up your domain, you should check and optimize your robots.txt files.

WHAT IS ROBOTS.TXT

When we create a new website we need Google to be able to access our site to crawl our information. In order to perform this task it is essential to create a text file (with extension .txt) in our domain to offer the search engine all the information we want it to know about our website or business. Another function of this .txt file is to prevent bots or robots.txt from adding data and information that we do not want the Moutain View company to access. According to Google, the definition of a .txt file is as follows:

“A robots.txt file is a file that sits at the root of a site and indicates which parts you don’t want search engine crawlers to access. The file uses the Robots Exclusion Standard, which is a protocol with a small set of commands that can be used to indicate website access by section and by specific types of web crawlers (such as mobile crawlers or computer crawlers).”

#3 Optimize the URL structure

SEO best practices dictate that URLs must follow these principles:

• Lowercase characters
• Use the hyphen (-) to separate words.
• They should be short and descriptive
• Avoid the use of unnecessary characters or words
• Use target keywords

In general, once the format of the permalink structure has been defined, the only thing to do is to optimize the URLs when publishing new content.

#4 Add a breadcrumb menu

No doubt you have seen the menu breadcrumb (a way of hierarchizing the information on the website to promote usability and navigation): a set of links at the top and bottom of the page that allows users to navigate to the previous page, for example, or to enter another website.

In addition to helping users navigate easily within your website, breadcrumbs provide another clue to search engines about the internal structure of your website.

#5Structured data markup and SEO

Structured data is gaining more and more importance because it is widely used by Google and search engines. Structured data is simply code that you can add to your web pages, which is visible to crawlers and helps them understand the context of your content. It is a way of describing your data to search engines in a language they can understand.

Although structured data has to do with the content of the website, it is related to technical SEO because we will have to add code to our website. As with breadcrumbs, once the correct structured data has been defined in your CMS, it will automatically be applied to the new content. The advantage of using structured data is that it helps to improve the performance of search results in Google SERPs through snippets.

#6 Check your canonical URLs

Each page of your website must have a canonical URL. This is defined by adding the tag <link rel = “canonical” href=”urldetupágina”>, in the <head> of your posts and pages.

WHAT IS A CANONICAL URL

It is a simple way to tell Google which version of a page to take into account when indexing your website. The concept is similar to that of the preferred domain, where a single page is accessible through several URLs. You can use it for pages with similar content to avoid duplicate content or pagination problems. Each page of your site must have a specific canonical URL. To know the URL, just right-click anywhere on the page and select: view page source code. However, there are plugins that add it automatically.

#7 Optimize the 404 page

This page is shown to users when the visited URL does not exist on your website. It happens more often than you think, maybe the page has been deleted, or the URL has changed. Most WordPress themes have optimized 404 pages by default, but you can make your 404 page friendlier and nicer by modifying your theme or using a plugin.

An optimized 404 page should:

• Inform visitors in a friendly way that the page they are looking for is no longer available.
• Provide them with alternatives and suggestions, for example, of related pages.
• Facilitate the return to the previous page, home page or other relevant pages.

You don’t need to spend too much time optimizing your 404 page, the important thing is that your text is personalized.

#8 Optimize the XML sitemap

Sitemap optimization is one of the most valuable tools of technical SEO. An XML sitemap is a file in XML format that includes all the pages and entries available on your website, including the date of publication and the last update.

Search engines use the XML sitemap as a guide when crawling a website. Optimizing the XML map is very simple, you only have to include the important pages of your website. Otherwise, you will have to make sure that your map is constantly and automatically updated when you add a new original page or an update.

#9 Implement SSL and convert your website to HTTPS

The latest trend on the Internet is security. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is used for secure communication over the Internet or a network. By installing SSL on your server, you can access your website using https and not http. This means that all the information that will be transferred between your website and the server (such as usernames, passwords, personal data) will be encrypted.

In the past, SSL encryption was only used for e-commerce, however, any website should have SSL installed. If you do not have SSL installed, the first thing you should do is contact your provider and ask them to enable SSL on your account and then you will have to perform a migration procedure to enable SSL on your website. Adding an SSL is similar to migrating to a new domain and is a procedure that must be performed with special care.

#10 Website speed: faster is better

Google takes the loading speed of a page very much into consideration for the ranking: faster websites perform better than slower ones. To make your site faster, you will need to take care of infrastructure changes and check the speed through Google’ s PageSpeed Insights tool on all devices(PageSpeed Insights). Thanks to this tool we will be able to know our real loading time on mobile and pc. In addition, it will be the same to tell us what improvements we should make.

Actions that improve speed are usually indicated in the tools themselves, but to do so effectively it may be necessary to consult an expert in the field.

You can still try to make improvements:

• Upgrade your server to use the 64-bit operating system.
• Install the latest version of PHP.
• Optimizes the size of the images.
• Minimizes the use of
  plugins
  .
• Always update WordPress and all plugins.
• Don’t use heavy themes, invest in customization.
• Minimize/merge CSS and JS.
• Avoid adding too many
  script
  in the head section of your website.

To learn in detail how to improve the loading speed of your WordPress or Plugins to improve the WPO of your website, do not miss our complete guides!

#11 Mobile friendly

Having a website optimized for mobile devices is not something optional, since it is likely that most users use their mobile device to navigate. With the introduction of the “
mobile first index
Google’s “mobile first index”, if you don’t have a mobile friendly site, your indexing will be affected.

Once you have a mobile-optimized theme, you no longer have to worry about it. Here’s what you need to know before proceeding with the mobile configuration.

Your mobile-friendly website should have the same content as your desktop website, including internal links or other elements. Your mobile website should load in less than 6 seconds. It is normal that the conversion rate is lower on mobile devices, but you should still try to optimize it as much as possible and avoid pop-ups. It should be noted that a site with AMP or
Accelerated Mobile Pages
must still be mobile optimized, as Google’s mobile first index does not consider AMP pages as a substitute for optimized pages.

#12 AMP pages

Accelerate Mobile Pages is a relatively new concept, introduced by Google in its attempt to make websites faster. Once AMP pages are created for your site, they are stored and delivered to users through a special Google cache that loads faster than pages optimized for mobile devices.

There is a long debate in the SEO community about the desirability of adopting AMP pages; there are both advantages and disadvantages to using this approach. Some believe that they are not easy to implement and that you can’t use AMP pages for email marketing purposes, but it can still make your pages faster for mobile devices.

# 13 Use pagination

Pagination is the process of dividing the list of your blog posts or other content into separate pages. To avoid duplicate content problems, rel = ‘next’ and rel = ‘prev’ links can be used to indicate to search engines that the pages are a continuation of the main page. When Google finds the code, itwill understand what the home page is and will use it for indexing purposes.

# 14 Multilingual Websites

Google, to a large extent, is able to understand in which language our website is written. Nevertheless, there are situations where you need a little help. For this reason, it was decided to use the tags
“hreflang” tags
tags, which should be placed in the header of the web site, inside the “head” tag , in this way:

• In the Spanish version:

link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”http://www.ejemplo.com/en/”

• In the English version:

link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”http://www.ejemplo.com/es/”

Make your business profitable with worldwide SEO thanks to an International SEO Agency!

What do I do if I have no technical SEO knowledge?

As we have seen, technical SEO consists of a series of controls and settings that you must optimize to help search engines crawl and index your website smoothly. In most cases, once the technical SEO is well structured, we will not have to take care of it anymore, just check it periodically. Remember that it is essential to do so because, otherwise, your website will not reach its full potential.

If you don’t think you have the necessary knowledge to do it yourself or simply want to make sure that the result looks professional, you only have one option: to turn to an SEO agency. Contact our Rodanet team, specialists in SEO and digital marketing, we will be happy to answer your questions and help you grow your business.

Tamara Rigotti

Copy & Content Strategist en Rodanet | tamara@rodanet.es | + posts

Tamara es redactora #seo y la boxeadora de la oficina. 🥊
Siempre escribe textos con gancho 😉

• Tamara Rigotti

  https://rodanet.com/en/author/tamara-rigotti/

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