What does the term ‘technical SEO’ refer to? Earlier, SEO experts used the term to refer to the optimization of a website for crawling and indexing. These days, the perception of technical SEO has changed. Now any technical process can be considered as technical SEO if the process plays any role in improving the search visibility. This is a broad field that includes sitemaps, Meta tags, JavaScript indexing, keyword research, backlinking, and more.
Promoting your business on online platforms is a great idea. It is obvious that you are eager to post informative and appealing content on different online channels for backlinking. Many entrepreneurs live in a utopia. They only focus on off-page optimization. However, for building links, you will need an efficient website. Off-site optimization without a proper website is like body without a soul. Therefore, before starting off-site optimization, it is important to consider the technical SEO working behind a website. These days, any reputed SEO services company in Australia will fist audit the technical SEO of an online business before mapping out a plan for on and off-page optimization.
If you want the best results to happen, you should consider all the factors which are associated with a website’s SEO. These factors include:
- Technical SEO
- Content
- Links
Therefore, before you come up with a backlink building strategy, it is important to audit your technical SEO.
Three Key Elements of Technical SEO
Site Content
You should ensure that your site content can be easily crawled and indexed by all popular search engines. These engines should be able to make use of log file analysis to understand their access pattern and structured data. Such understanding will provide the search engines with access to content elements.
Structure
Your website developers should create a site hierarchy and URL structure that enable the search engines and users to navigate to the most relevant content. Your website structure should expedite the flow of internal link equity throughout the site.
Conversion
Sometimes blockages in the site structure make the navigation difficult to the users. It has an adverse impact on the conversion rate.
6 Vital Aspects of Technical SEO
It is difficult to cover all the technical aspects of your website because the number of issues to be fixed can be thousands. However, there are a couple of areas which are extremely important for better online visibility. Let’s focus on these vital areas:
- Indexing and Crawlability
First, you should ensure whether the search engines are able to index and crawl your website or not. You can check the number of your web pages which the search engines have indexed in Google Search Console. If you want to avoid any issues in indexing and Crawlability, you should consider the following facts:
- Resources which cannot be indexed
Google is now able to render all kinds of resources including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If some of these resources are blocked from indexing, Google will not be able to view the pages the way it should view. Therefore, Google will not be able to render those restricted resources properly.
Orphan pages exist on your site but they are not linked to any other page. It implies that orphan pages are not visible to the search engines. You should always make sure that your vital pages haven’t become orphan.
Recently Google has revealed that “rel=next and rel=prev are no longer supported for the past year”. Further, this first-rate search engine has recommended the market experts to consider a single page content. It is not necessary that you will have to change anything in any case you already have paginated content. In fact, it makes sense in some cases. Still, it is recommended that you should ensure that the paginated pages are able to stand on their own.
Tips:
- Check whether your robots.txt file is blocking important pages on your website or not
- Find out an effective tool that is able to crawl and render all the resources and double-check your website with this tool
- Crawl Budget
Garry Illyes has defined the crawl budget in his blog post named “what crawl Budget Means for Googlebot’. Crawl budget is the number of visits coming from a search engine bot (such as Googlebot) in a particular timeframe. For instance, if Googlebot visits your sites for 3k times every month, then 3 k is your crawl budget for Google per month.
Here pops up a question- how do search engines use crawl budget. It is not possible to identify which particular theory is working behind that; still, marketers attaché great importance to the following theories:
- Number of internal links to a page
- Number of backlinks
For amplifying your crawl budget, you should apply good SEO techniques that will compel the search engine spiders to crawl most pages of your website.
Tips:
Ensure all the important pages are crawlable and the robots.txt file is not blocking any useful resources:
- Don’t use long direct chains
- If you have broken pages, fix them immediately
- Your sitemap should always be clean.
- Disallow pages which don’t have any SEO value
- You should always maintain internal linking efficiency
- Make sure you are catering to your URL parameters
- Site Structure
A well-thought site structure will make your navigation simple and easy to use. Listed below are some major elements of site structure:
- Sitemap
You should review the sitemap to determine whether it is looking perfect or not. If you don’t have a sitemap, you should immediately create a sitemap and upload it to Google Search Console. You should always keep your sitemap updated, concise, and clean.
- Internal Linking Structure
We all know about the benefits of external links while we do not pay attention to internal links. However, a leading SEO services company in Australia will always take internal link building into consideration. It helps you distribute the link juice among all of your pages. It boosts the traffic of the pages which have less authority.
Tips
- Create, monitor, and update the sitemap
- Use contextual links wisely and add relevant keywords to the4 anchor texts of internal links
- Page Speed
Page speed is immensely important for online visibility and ranking of a website. If your web page takes more than expected time to be loaded, your users will get irritated. They will abandon your site and move to your competitors’ website. While developing the website, ask your developers to make the site speed fast. Even when you will hire an SEO service company, they will check your page loading speed.
Tips
- Develop a responsive site and pick a redirect type
- Remove unwanted resources
- Detect which elements making the speed slow
- Introduce a caching policy
- Use minification with compression
- Avoid using heavy images
- Mobile-Responsiveness
You might be aware of the fact that Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2018. It implies that Google now does not entertain the websites which are not mobile-responsive. As an outcome, these websites are not indexed and ranked by Google. Therefore, now every site must be mobile-responsive.
Tips:
From the beginning of your web development, make it clear to your developers that the website must be mobile-friendly.
- Structured Data
We all know that Google’s SERPs have been enhanced visually; therefore, the users are no more prone to clicking. They want to get all the data they are looking for from the search results to be visible even without clicking on any page. If they are able to click, they wish to reach a result that caught their attention first. To provide users with such experience, the data must be well structured.
Tips
- You can assign schemas to your URLs, which are suitable for the text of your website.
- Make structured data markup
Bottom Line
Technical SEO is something without which your SEO campaigns cannot perform well. If you pay attention to the issues discussed here, your website ranking can be benefitted. Therefore, before your SEO services company in Australia makes a plan for backlinking, make sure they have prepared an effective plan for technical SEO.