What is ‘Technical SEO’?

Technical SEO, as part of On-Page SEO strategy, focuses on optimizing elements on the website to increase its ranking on search engines such Google, Bing, etc. 

Why Optimize The Website? 

Google and other search engines aim to give their users the best possible result for every query. In order to do so, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate certain elements on the web pages. Some elements are based on the user experience such as site speed. 

By improving technical aspects, you help search engines crawl and understand your site easily. If done accurately, your page has a higher chance of appearing on the first page result. 

What Are The Factors That Make a Good Technical SEO?

1. Fast Site Speed

According to a study by Hobo, a 2-second delay in load time results in abandonment rates of up to 87%. Google knows slow web pages offer a less than optimal experience, as a result, it will not show the website on the first pages of the result and could miss out on all the potential customers and traffic.

Test your website speed here.

2. Crawlability

Google uses robots to crawl and understand websites and a great internal linking structure will serve as a guide for those to discover the important contents inside.

You can give robots directions on your site by using the robots.txt file – a powerful tool, which should be handled carefully. 

3. No Dead Links

What’s more annoying than a slow web page? A page that doesn’t exist, right? Search engines don’t like to find these error pages either. They tend to find even more dead links than visitors do encounter because they follow every link they bump into, even if it’s hidden.

To prevent unnecessary dead links, always redirect the URL of a page when you delete it or move it.

4. No Duplicate Content

Search engines will be confused if you have the same content on multiple pages. If these pages show the same content, which one should they rank highest? As a result, they might rank all pages with the same content lower.

5. Secured

There are many things you can do to make your (WordPress) website secure, and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.

To check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers, go to the left-hand side of the search bar of your browser, you’ll see a lock if it’s safe. If you see the words “not secure” you (or your developer) have some work to do!

Secure Sockets Layer – SSL – is a security technology which creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can spot a site using SSL fairly easily: the website URL starts with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’

6. Implements Structured Data

Implementing structured data helps search engines understand your website, content or even your business better. It also makes your content eligible for ‘star ratings’ to make it look more eligible and visually appealing. This awarded feature can attract more click-through rate (CTR), and generate additional traffic to your site. 

7. Good XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a file that helps search engines understand your website whilst crawling it – you can think of it as being like a ‘search roadmap’ of sorts, telling search engines exactly where each page is.

It also contains useful information about each page on your site, including:

• when a page was last modified;
• what priority it has on your site;
• how frequently it is updated.

8. Hreflang

If your site targets more than one country where the same language is spoken, search engines need a little help to understand which countries or language you’re trying to reach. 

Hreflang Tags help you do just that. You can define for a page which country and language it is meant for. This also solves a possible duplicate content problem: even if your US and UK site show the same content, Google will know it’s written for a different region.