Hello guys, I’m Akash. And welcome back to CybercityHelp once again. So in this today’s article, we are going to discuss about our fourth module of SEO that is known as Technical SEO. However, this article is going to be the most important module among all other modules, so please read carefully till the end.
In this fourth module, we are going to cover every Technical aspect of SEO such as, what is technical SEO, what’s the need of technical SEO, how to work on technical SEO, how technical SEO ranks any website, how to apply technical SEO and many more interrelated concepts. So let’s get started.
What is Technical SEO?
So according to the definition, technical SEO is the process of ensuring the website meets its all technical requirements to get proper and healthy organic traffic from the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. This is known as technical SEO.
In other words, it basically means to optimize your website in such a way so that it starts ranking on search engines like google. For example, let’s say if there is any server error in your website or if you have any crawling error or any indexing error, then with the help of technical SEO, you can fix or improve that error. Not only fixing, but you can also help the search engine crawlers to index your website more effectively to help improve your organic traffic as well.
What is the Need of Technical SEO?
Now you might have thought, what is the need of doing technical SEO? What if you skip technical SEO, so what will happen?
If you skip technical SEO, it will be the biggest mistake you will ever commit in this field, because technical SEO is one of the main foundations of ranking. It deals with the web crawler and makes your website convenient to judge the content of your website for Google search engine rankings. So if you skip this, you most probably going to lose all your ranking, traffic, visitors etc.
How to Work on Technical SEO?
In case of technical SEO, we work on some tools like Google Search Console or Google Webmaster. Google Search Console (GSC) is a tool here, and with the help of this tool, you can check your website pages whether they are crawling or not, they are indexing or not, and if they are not indexed, so you can also index those pages. If there is any error, you can resolve that error, and that’s why it is more convenient for them to judge your content with the help of this particular tool.
How Technical SEO ranks any Website?
Search engines generally rank any website based upon several factors. For example, user experience, page speed, crawling, indexing etc. Let’s understand each of them one by one:
The first one and the most crucial one is your user experience, and for user experience, page loading time matters a lot. If your page loading time is not good, it is more likely that, new users will leave your website because of delay, and search engines never prioritize those websites which have long loading page issues.
However, you can also improve the loading time with the help of technical SEO. Your website pages are supposed to load super fast and not bother any visitors with unnecessary long loading time. Website loading speed is the most important ranking factor which generally google prioritize first before ranking.
Now next one is technical SEO monitoring and audit. This SEO monitoring and audit simply aims to upgrade certain elements of the web pages and making them more accessible. For example, these elements are crawling, analyzing, optimizing, and monitoring. Let’s understand these elements in little detail for better clarity.
What are these Crawling, Analyzing, Optimizing and Monitoring Elements?
These elements may sound little unimportant but it’s not exactly what it sounds, infect, it is very important concepts to understand, so let’s discuss about them below one by one:
The first one is Crawling. Crawling is just a virtual robot of search engine which access your website and extract all the useful data and information from your website and sends it to Google search engine database for indexing and ranking purpose, but only if it meets it’s requirements, and we have already discussed it’s requirements in the previous article, so you can visit that by navigating our SEO category from the header section.
Now after crawling step, we have analyzing step, so analyzing is just a activity or an action where you figure out the insights about your website like how the website is performing, whether it is getting rank or not, how many visitors the website is getting, which pages are getting popularity, and how people are getting the website. So these all kind of observations you can do using analyzing step.
Next we have optimizing, so optimizing basically means to an action or activity where you make some changes for your website. These changes can be errors fixing, performance, page speed, crawling, indexing all kind of steps, if error comes, so you have to resolve them, this resolving action is known as optimizing the website.
Finally, we have monitoring which means you monitor your website performances such as indexing, and organic traffic etc. We will learn more about this in the upcoming part of article. So these are the things which are mostly done by using technical SEO, and that’s why we can say technical SEO helps in monitoring and auditing our website.
What are the benefits of Technical SEO?
Now let’s discuss about it’s benefits as well. So there are many benefits we get upon applying technical SEO, such as website optimization, having a mobile friendly interface so that users can access from any device they want, and ensuring the website loads quickly, and improving overall website speed so that users don’t leave the website. Well, you won’t see benefits in the short-term but rather on long-term. Any aspect of SEO takes time. For example, which kind of long-term changes you can observe after applying technical SEO, such as:
It makes your website easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank. It also helps in removing pop-ups and other intrusive ads or elements from the website which may give bad user experience, and lastly it makes your website easy for users to navigate and find the information they need. But these changes can’t be observed or seen quickly, it takes months and years to reflect.
Now what other changes you can observe? So it keeps the website safe and secure. With the help of technical SEO, you can also detect if there is any threat in your website or not. If there is any manual threat action happening, so you can also track them. So these are some important benefits of technical SEO you can observe over time on long-term basis.
How to apply Technical SEO?
Now let’s talk about it’s practical application part, like how exactly you can apply technical SEO to your website? So for this, we have a checklist, where we have mentioned all the activities you need to perform in order to apply technical SEO to your website. So we have divided these activities into four main parts:
1. Website Speed and Optimization
With the help of technical SEO, we work on website loading speed and optimization. In case of website loading speed, we work on improving the website’s server response time, means the time it takes to open any link or page in the website. Then we work on reducing image size without affecting quality of the image by using some compression techniques to decrease the size, so that, it doesn’t increase the load of the server or response time.
Then we work on minimizing JavaScript and CSS functions which takes time to load and generally decreases the page loading speed, so what we can do to fix this, we generally limiting the number of resources and HTTP requests, and then setting up browser cache policy, and then by reducing redirections, and by eliminating redirect loops. I know, this part may feel hard, because all terms are purely technical and it requires knowledge to understand each of them. However, we will learn more about these terms in our future articles, so don’t worry.
2. Website Functionality and Usability
Now the second part is website functionality and usability, so here we purely work technically to improve our website’s functionality and usability. Functionality and Usability means, all those functions or usable options of the website basically the theme/template part of the website’s function which generally work as your search bar, menu bar, header bar, link list, category etc. So we must make sure that our website is mobile friendly, build search engine friendly URLs, and use secure protocol (HTTPS) connection through SSL certification. If you don’t the meaning of SSL certification, you may comment your doubt, we will answer you.
We also make sure to setup 301 redirects after the site migration, we make sure our website’s resources like article, pages, images, videos etc are crawlable, means not blocked for our search engine crawler robot. To avoid this, we may perform multiple strategies here like running the robots.txt file from GSC to show google the right content or to verify indexed content of the website. We also review sitemaps, website hosting resources, optimize crawl budget, and avoid meta refresh along with redirection part. In redirection part, we use permanent or temporary redirects to fix “404 Not Found” pages. We also use href lang for language auto translation, and also we ensure that tracking is working properly.
3. Content Optimization
Now the third main part is Content Optimization. So with the help of technical SEO, we can also work on content optimization. In the case of content optimization, we work on multiple areas such as redirecting or replacing broken links, removing bad pages, auditing internal links, getting rid of duplicate content, using structured data, keeping a reasonable number of links, and avoiding canonicalization issues. Here the most important part is canonicalization, so let’s understand this, what exactly it is.
What is Canonicalization?
So canonicalization means, let’s say, in your website, you have written an article but you are claiming that same article with two different links, like this article is belonging to this link or that link. But according to the concept of canonicalization, any webpage or any part of website must have only one link pointed to them. So here we declare canonical URLs to claim or tell google that, this article is belonging to us or to this specific portion of the website.
But in content optimization, not only canonicalization comes. There are more factors which plays a major role, for example Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), so technical SEO also helps in making user-friendly websites by setting up AMP, now lastly, some more factors are there like adding breadcrumbs navigation, and testing across multiple platforms and devices. If you are unsure about these terms, you can comment below, based on the request, we will bring one more article to explain all of them.
4. User-Friendly Website
Now the last part is user friendly website. So with the help of technical SEO, we can make our website more user-friendly. And it will create a positive impact among the users. For example, breadcrumbs navigation you might have seen on Amazon or Flipkart websites, they are starting from their home page, then their category page, then product page etc. This improves navigation for visitors and overall user experience.
So finally, we have completed our fourth module of SEO. We understand that, this module may feel harder than other modules, because in this module, we have covered most of the technical aspects of SEO. However, we have explained the topic in light language, so you won’t feel any pressure while understanding them.
We hope that, you will be able to learn every technical aspect of SEO, and this part is crucial as well, so don’t think to skip this part if you seriously want ranking for your website. In case if you have few doubts, you can ask them in the comment section, we will answer those doubts. But if you have multiple doubts, then you may request us to bring one dedicated article to explain all those terms where you have difficulty to understand them. So thank you so much for reading this article till the end.
“So keep learning, keep growing!”
