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When optimizing a website, keyword targeting and link building are often considered the first step. In doing so, a vital area gets often overlooked. That area is ‘the technical SEO.’ There are times when you must focus on technical SEO before attempting to obtain links. Your website will not perform well if it lacks technical SEO areas.
What is technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures that a website complies with current search engine technical criteria to boost organic rankings. Following are the four main components of technical SEO:
Crawling -> indexing ->rendering -> website design
With technical SEO, you need to be sure about the following five technicalities:
- Search engines can crawl easily through your site
- Your site has a least possible load time
- Efficient implementations of plugins are there on your site
- Your website is adaptive and responsive for both mobile and desktop
- There are no problems with the Google Analytics code that got misconfigured.
Google and other search engines must locate, navigate, and index the site’s pages. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Your website must be safe, duplicate-content-free, mobile-friendly, fast-loading, and a thousand other factors that contribute to optimization. Before you begin a link-building campaign, you should understand why and how to handle technical SEO.
1. Well-organized website structure
The layout of your website determines how all of the pages get arranged. Google and other search engines can quickly crawl all of your site’s pages with a flat layout. “Orphan pages” are often the product of a disorganized system. It also makes it challenging to identify and correct indexing problems.
When developing your site, maintain a total of two to seven major categories. Each of the major categories should be separate and distinct from the others. Every subcategory should have some connection to the primary category. Keep things as even as possible. Your site’s structure will become unbalanced if one essential type has fourteen subcategories and another only has three.
2. Smart URL structure
The next move is to evaluate your website’s URL structure. The format of your URLs is known as URL structure. When finalizing the URL’s structure, make sure to use lowercase letters and keep it short and concise. If you use WordPress as your CMS, you’ll find that WordPress uses the post’s title to generate the URL when you create a new post.
For example; if your post is about “7 Tips on how to tackle SEO”, WordPress will generate the following URL for your post:
http://www.abc.com/7-tips-on-how-to-tackle-seo
You can further make it concise, targeted, and readable:
3. Impeccable web code
The user experience and interaction can get harmed by a poorly coded web design. Design flaws can occur on several platforms. For example, forms won’t work where they were supposed to, or the tracking code isn’t getting monitored appropriately, leading to poor choices.
Before going on to link building, you should consider these concerns. If you don’t, you may end up with vulnerabilities that are much more difficult to pinpoint, or worse; you may never notice them.
4. Use the breadcrumbs menu
During the crawling-indexing processes, breadcrumbs support search engine bots. Crawlers may recognize breadcrumbs and use the structure to learn more about a web page. They inspire visitors to explore more pages of a website before leaving, lowering the bounce rate. They’re helpful in terms of search engine optimization. Instead of displaying the permalink, Google shows breadcrumbs in the SERPS.
It is a group of links found at either the top or at the bottom of a webpage. It enables users to return to a previous page or return to a website’s home page. Google suggests using breadcrumbs.
Make sure breadcrumbs are enabled and accessible to users and that the font size is large enough for the links to get easily clicked. To give search engines more information about your website and content, include Breadcrumb Schema markup in your HTML. It will boost the odds of receiving rich snippets and well-formatted breadcrumbs in search results.
5. Optimize 404 page
When a user visits a URL that does not exist on your website, they get directed to a 404 page. Using a plugin or modifying your theme templates will make your 404 pages more SEO-friendly. Inform visitors that the page they are searching for is no longer available in a welcoming manner.
To test your 404 pages, open a new browser window and type a URL. Your custom 404 pages will appear in the browser window.
6. Use HTTPS to enhance security
HTTPS:// is a well-known ranking signal that helps you create trust with your users. When you install an SSL on your computer, you can access your website using HTTPS rather than HTTP. It ensures that all data shared between your website and server is encrypted.
An initial surface-level audit will assist you in identifying any significant issues. When buying your credential, be sure to double-check that it protects all of the subdomains. You won’t redirect URL parameters on a subdomain that your certification doesn’t defend if you don’t get a complete wildcard certificate. It’s essential to pay attention to the choices you choose when buying an SSL certificate.
7. Use AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages is a modern idea for making the mobile site load quicker. According to Google, there is no SEO advantage to using AMP other than speed. But there are some primary advantages of AMP, such as boosting your mobile sites’ speed. Deploying AMP may also enhance your click-through rate.
8. State a preferred domain
It would help if you defined your preferred domain when creating a website or blog. You’re telling search engines which variant of the domain you’d like to use by doing so. A website can be accessed with or without the www in front of the domain name by default.
There is no SEO benefit to preferring one format over the other; it is purely a matter of choice. It’s vital to remind search engines of your decision and to preserve continuity.
Verdict
Technical SEO is a crucial part of the overall SEO process. Make sure you know what it is and how to do it correctly. You can use technical SEO to make it easier for search engines to access, crawl, and index your web. Technical SEO is primarily concerned with improving a website’s infrastructure. Once you’ve completed a technical SEO audit, make sure to correct any possible issues so you don’t have to deal with them again.
