What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of improving organic rankings by making sure that a website meets all the technical requirements of search engines. The main important elements of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website structure.

Crawling: Through the use of bots, search engines can read a webpage by recognizing what is on the page.
Indexing: Indexing is where the content found after crawling is stored and organized in search engines. Once a page is indexed, it can be displayed as a result for search queries.
Rendering: This is the process where search engine bots use to turn a website code into interactive pages that users can see when they visit a website.
Website architecture: This is the planning and designing of the technical, functional, and visual elements of a website so that it can be displayed for users without any problems.

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is an important factor that will easily help your website rank high and appear in search engines results.

It does so through:

Helps search engines crawl your website and rank in search results through the code that is used and the structure of the website
Helps with speeding up your website
Can be used to make a mobile-friendly version of your website
Provides easy navigation
Offers functionality without glitches

Elements of technical SEO

The main objective of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website in a way that search engines can crawl, index, and render the website for users.

The main elements of technical SEO that will help optimize your website are:

1- Site architecture

This refers to how information is structured and organized in a website. Search engines read site structure by crawling a website through its URLs, sitemaps, and breadcrumbs so pages can be indexed. Here’s a more in-depth explanation of the elements of a site architecture:

2- Sitemap

This is a blueprint that contains all information about pages and files that helps search engines crawl your website easily

3-txt

This is a text file with instructions for search engine crawlers that define which areas are website crawlers allowed to search.

4- Breadcrumbs

This is a navigation tool that shows the user’s location on a website. It consists of showing the page hierarchy. For example, Home > Resources > SEO Guide.

5- Website speed

Website speed is how fast the loading speed of a website is. The faster the website speed, the faster that you will rank in search engine results.

6-Mobile-friendliness

When websites are mobile-friendly, they will look great and be effective in showing your website on mobiles.

10 common SEO technical issues

1- Duplicate content

Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one website address, URL. So, if content appears in more than one website address, you get duplicate content. Duplicate content makes it hard to rank in Google easily because search engines don’t know which version is the most relevant to the user’s search query.

Duplicate content causes the following problems for search engines:

They don’t know which versions to include or exclude from search engine indexes
It becomes hard to direct the link metrics such as authority, trust, link equity to one page or to multiple pages
Search engines find it challenging to find the most relevant version to rank on search results

2- Poor mobile experience

The mobile experience is defined as the process of ensuring that people who access your website from mobiles have a positive optimized experience on their mobile devices.

Some of the factors that affect mobile experience are:

Site design: This is defined as the appearance of a website based on the user experience aspect where it displays what the user sees.

Site structure: This is how the content is organized on your website and divided into posts, pages, linked to one another, and the way that it is presented to the user.
Page speed: Due to connectivity issues, page speed on mobile devices can actually cause users to bounce from your website. So, it’s important to solve problems related to page speed such as minifying code.

3-Shady link building

Shady link building is a technique that uses black hat SEO techniques that can make your website rank higher through organic search but in an unethical way. Shady link-building techniques can get your website penalized easily by Google.

Some of the strategies used in shady link building are:

Unnatural and spam-like backlinks: This is where someone posts backlinks to their website in blog comments with the purpose of ranking in Google. Users can spam a variety of blogs through using automated software that will build lots of backlinks in many different blogs in the comments section.

Link farms: Link farms are one of the black hat techniques the person uses mutual backlinking with another website to get their website to rank higher. Another technique is to pay a provider to provide backlinks to your website. Ultimately, link farms main goal is to increase your website ranking but it is highly penalized by Google and is considered a spam

4- Poor navigation

Navigation is all about the structure of your website and is part of the website’s design. Also, navigation consists of links that leads users to different parts of your website. However , it isn’t only limited to the structure of a website but also includes how a user navigates throughout a website.

The more the website structure is, the more that navigation by the user becomes easier. Therefore, when navigation isn’t set up properly, users won’t engage with your website at all leading to high bounce rates, so it won’t rank on search engines.

5- Images that are not optimized

Images can appear beautiful; however, they can affect SEO if they aren’t optimized using SEO. When images are SEO optimized, they can speed up page loading speed, increase user engagement, and search engine ranking.

Those without SEO optimization can have images that don’t get read by search engines.

6- Improper redirects

A redirect is a way to send users and search engines to a different URL from the one that was originally requested. Redirects are used especially when moving content to a new URL.

Improper redirects will actually cause your users to not find website content that they are searching for and instead will show errors such as 404 “not found errors”, where it means that the pages that you wanted to access on the website aren’t found on the server.

7- Messy URLs

These are URLs that are hard for search engines to read and use for indexing purposes. Having these messy URLs can actually stop your website from the ranking because they contain elements that aren’t suitable when search engines crawl and index your website.

8- Slow page loads

Page speed is another factor that helps with achieving good search rankings. The slower the website, the more that it will affect your position in search results.

A slow page speed will affect bots by making them crawl fewer pages which will affect your website being indexed in Google.

9- Local search

Websites that use local search marketing which is a form of search engine optimization are more likely to show in search results relevant to local searches. So, when businesses don’t take advantage of local search, they miss many opportunities to rank.

10-Too much flash

Flash is a technology that is used to show animation on a webpage. However, websites with lots of flash can actually hinder search engine robots from crawling and indexing your webpages which will affect ranking.

How to fix the 10 common SEO technical issues

1-Solving duplicate content

The most common solution that will help solve duplicate content is to use 301 redirects from the duplicate content URL to the original content page’s URL . This 301 redirect will pass all the ranking power from the old URL to the new canonical URL.

The canonical URL helps in pointing out which page is the original version.

2-Solving poor mobile experience

If you want to solve a poor mobile experience, you have to optimize your mobile experience using the best practices for best user experience.

Creating a positive mobile experience happens through improving the site’s speed. There is a tool called Google PageSpeed insights that will tell you about your website’s speed and give you recommendations about areas of improvement.

Using designs that are responsive to the user’s navigation will definitely help in solving the poor mobile experiences for users.

3- Don’t participate in shady link building

The only way to solve shady link building is through not participating in building links using blackhat SEO techniques. By only following white hat SEO techniques that are ethical and follow Google guidelines, you won’t be penalized by Google and you will still rank organically.

4- Solving poor navigation

Solving navigation requires that you improve site navigation. This is done by following these steps:

Divide categories easily: All categories must be clear and visually defined so you can easily click on the category links.
Make navigation elements contain clickable links: All categories, whether they are the main category or subcategory, should have links on all of them.
Have very accurate navigation titles: This is through having accurate titles in the categories that give an idea to visitors what the pages are going to be about.

5-Solving images that aren’t optimized

To effectively solve images that aren’t optimized, you have to start by reducing the file size by compressing it until the file is smaller in size. By reducing the size of the file, you ensure that the speed of your website is faster than before

Another way to optimize for SEO is through putting alt tags. Alt tags provide descriptions about the image and will help search engines read the image. Thus, it helps with ranking.

6-Solving improper redirects

To solve improper redirects, you can use redirects that ensure that the user and search engines are directed to the correct page.

There are many redirects that you can use such as the 301 redirect which is a permanent redirect that passes link equity to the redirected page.

7-Solving messy URLs

Messy URLs can be solved by creating URLs that contain SEO keywords and are easy to read for search engines and users. This is a really important step since it will help your website to become indexed and rank.

8-Solving slow page loads

Factors that affect page speed are elements such as images and videos that take up so much space, so you need to optimize your website so that it can have a faster speed.

You can use a page speed test such as GTmetrix to test your site speed and implement new areas of improvement regarding site speed.

9- Enhancing local search

For businesses that want to enhance their local search, they can do so through the use of local SEO. Local SEO deals with optimizing a business, product, or service for a search query that is based on location.

10- Minimizing flash

Websites that use a lot of flashes can actually affect the site’s speed. For this very reason, it is best to minimize the use of flash and instead use other technologies such as HTML 5, CSS 3, and JavaScript used for animation.

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