With millions of web pages on the Internet, it can be challenging for a business’s website to stand out. However, technical SEO can help brands boost their website’s visibility online and gain more traffic. Technical SEO tactics help a website rank higher on the search engine result pages, or SERPs, so more potential customers can find it.
If a website has the best content, but it doesn’t employ a technical SEO strategy, it would be difficult for it to rank high on SERPs. This leads to a business losing out on potential clients and revenue, which will harm it in the long run.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO covers all activities in a website’s SEO strategy, except for link-building and content optimization. It ensures that a brand’s website fits the technical criteria set by major search engines. The end goal is to boost the website’s organic ranking, which would then attract more online traffic. Since search engines are constantly evolving, websites must also constantly fine-tune their technical SEO to keep up with what search engines are looking for.
There are four key processes in technical SEO: website architecture, rendering, crawling, and indexing.
Website Architecture
This element refers to how a website is structured and how it showcases the brand’s content across the site. When a user visits a website, the first thing they see is how it’s designed. A well-designed and intuitive website is crucial to the user’s experience. Website architecture also includes the technical aspects of a site that allow search engines to explore and analyze it more easily.
Rendering
A website’s content must have the ability to be rendered, so search engines can crawl them. When determining a website’s ranking, bots analyze a site by taking its pages, running its code, and going through its content. This process is called rendering, and it’s crucial to bots because it’s what they use to figure out how a website is structured.
Crawling
This is the process that search engines undergo when they deploy bots, also known as spiders or crawlers, to search the web for fresh content. The content that can be found in websites can come in different forms, such as articles, images, videos, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, and more.
The crawlers gather web pages and use the links on those pages to discover new links. Through this method of going from one URL to another, the crawlers are introduced to fresh content, which they add to a database of links. This database is what the search engine brings up when a user browses the Internet and enters a certain search query.
Indexing
Search engines conduct indexing to organize all of the data that they were able to collect. As mentioned above, crawlers compile information in a database, which search engines then show users when they type a specific search query. This database is developed through indexing. The process of indexing is what enables search engines to quickly respond to search queries.
The Importance of Technical SEO
SEO is a crucial tool for improving a website’s visibility, and all businesses need a solid SEO strategy to succeed. More visitors to a site translate to more potential customers, which leads to added revenue. Technical SEO is a major part of having an effective SEO strategy. Here are some of the reasons why:
- It aids search engines in accessing, analyzing, and compiling data from websites
- It optimizes websites and servers to provide visitors with the best user experience
- It addresses technical issues that can negatively impact the way a website performs
Technical SEO requires constant monitoring and maintenance. Website owners need to spot potential issues, develop fixes, and consistently optimize website performance according to search engines’ standards to rank higher on SERPs.
How to Enhance Technical SEO
The first step to improving a website’s technical SEO is to do an SEO audit. A technical SEO audit should include checking on the following elements:
- Website structure
- Website loading speed
- Quality of website content
- Crawling and indexing issues
- Internal and external links
- Mobile performance
- HTML tags
Once a technical SEO audit has been accomplished, businesses can then proceed to work on the site elements that can be further optimized.
