Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a vital strategy to ensure your website ranks well in the search results. One element of SEO that’s essential for achieving this is technical SEO. Let’s explore what technical SEO is and the essential technical SEO tactics to ensure your site is SEO-optimised.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on optimising a website’s technical aspects to improve crawlability, user experience, and online visibility. Technical SEO works alongside on-page and off-page SEO as part of an effective and well-rounded SEO strategy.
Successfully optimising and improving technical SEO is vital for your SEO performance. That’s because a simple error or fault can prevent your pages from being properly crawled and indexed.
No matter how valuable and well-written your content is, if you’re not ranking in the search results, it won’t make any difference. As such, you’ll experience a significant drop in traffic and a loss of business revenue.
Ensuring a website that loads fast, allows search engine bots to easily crawl pages, and is easy for users and search engines to understand is the main purpose of technical SEO. Yet compared to keyword research or link building, technical SEO sometimes gets forgotten.
That’s because some elements of technical SEO can get quite technical. In some cases, technical SEO optimisation may require working alongside a web developer to make necessary changes, such as improving page speeds.
How technical SEO fits into an SEO strategy
An effective and well-balanced SEO strategy will focus on 3 areas: on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. Let’s explore how these work in an SEO strategy:
On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimising content and elements on your site, such as written content and images. Keyword research will form a large part of on-page SEO, to allow you to create and optimise a page for a specific keyword you want to rank for. This process will include internal linking, and content and metadata optimisation.
Off-page SEO
Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO focuses on optimising elements away from your website. This typically involves third-party sites to help boost your authority and external signals. Off-page SEO will use link-building and digital PR to boost a business’s online reputation. Content promotion and gaining editorial coverage can also be carried out.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on improving and optimising a site’s technical aspects. Issues, such as metadata errors, link problems, or a site’s architecture, will be the main focus. As such, these methods will seek to improve a site’s crawlability and technical health.
Technical SEO elements are often the most widely covered in an SEO audit due to the importance they play overall. That’s because even a small issue can lead to the entire SEO strategy going to waste.
How crawling and indexing works
Before diving into the essential technical SEO tactics, it’s important to understand how search engines discover, crawl, and index your site. After all, this is the main purpose of technical SEO.
Search engine crawlers, known as bots or spiders, go far and wide across the billions of websites on the Internet using links from already discovered pages. This allows crawlers to discover new or updated pages that need crawling and indexing. That’s why an effective link-building strategy is important.
Crawlers can scan for a range of content, including written, images, documents, or videos. However, search engine crawlers cannot see visual content and so rely heavily on metadata and code to determine what the page or content is.
When a crawler discovers a page, it scans the code and content of each page to determine what that page is about. This is crucial for indexing and organising content. This indexing is vital to ensure your page can display in search results relevant to a query.
Then, depending on many different factors, pages relevant to a search query will be displayed in search results. As search engines seek to provide the best solution to their users, pages are ranked based on which they believe will best answer the user’s query.
This is why an effective and well-rounded SEO strategy is important. Not only to ensure your content is crawlable and indexable, but also to ensure your content appears high in the rankings. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on valuable traffic.
The essential tactics for technical SEO optimisation
Technical audit
The very first tactic for technical SEO optimisation is to conduct an audit of your site. This will involve using tools like Google Search Console and Lighthouse to determine the indexability and technical health of your site.
You can discover how many of your pages are indexed by visiting the ‘Pages’ section in Google Search Console. This provides a snapshot of all the pages on your site that are indexed or not. Scroll further down to discover the reasons why some pages aren’t indexed.
Clicking the reason will bring up a list of all the affected pages for that error. These issues will need to be addressed as quickly as possible as any non-indexed pages are illegible to display in search results.
You can also use Lighthouse, a feature in the DevTools of Google Chrome, to analyse the performance of your site. This will give you a score of how well your website performs, alongside tips for improving your page speed.
Site architecture
Another essential tactic for technical SEO optimisation is ensuring your website has a clear structure. Site architecture or structure refers to how the different pages on your site link with one another. The better the site architecture, the better for your technical SEO efforts.
That’s because a clear site structure organises your pages and content, making it easier for internal linking. Then, you make it easier for search engine crawlers to easily find similarly themed content quicker and easier.
The best way to do this is by using a hierarchy to ensure all pages are organised logically. For example, your home page will link to different service or category pages. These category pages will then link to other related subpages.
Ensuring a clear site structure by linking similarly themed pages together reduces the possibility of orphan pages. These are pages on your site that are not linked to by another page. As such, it makes it difficult for crawlers to discover and index such pages. It’s recommended to have no orphaned pages within your sitemap.
Sitemap
Speaking of sitemaps, that brings us to the next of our essential technical SEO tactics. Every website should create and submit a sitemap to Google. This is a list of all the pages within your site. You can check whether you have a site by visiting [yoursite]/sitemap.xml.
A sitemap is crucial for allowing search engine crawlers to discover and crawl all your pages. This is especially important if you don’t have an effective internal linking strategy. Fortunately, creating and updating your sitemap is straightforward.
If you use a content management system, such as WordPress, there are many handy plugins you can install to create a sitemap for you. For example, Yoast SEO will automatically create and update your sitemap when you make changes to your site.
It’s also important to make sure that you submit your sitemap to Google through Google Search Console. You can do this by going to ‘Indexing’ and then ‘Sitemaps’. If there is no sitemap displayed, enter the URL under ‘Add a new sitemap’ and click ‘Submit’.
Robot.txt
Alongside a sitemap, it’s also important that you properly set up a robots.txt file. This acts as instructions for how search engine crawlers should crawl your site. Sometimes called Robot Exclusion Protocol, you can find a robot.txt file at [yoursite]/robot.txt.
This protocol sets out instructions for the pages you allow and disallow search engine crawlers to crawl. An effective robot.txt will ensure your crawl budget isn’t overspent while blocking malicious, content-scrapping and spam bots.
Every website has a crawl budget, meaning search engines will only crawl so many of your pages each day. Therefore, certain pages on your site should be excluded from indexing. Pages such as form submission pages or login pages are ideal candidates to block from crawling.
It’s important to carefully set up a robot.txt file though. Improperly setting the instructions could lead to your entire site being blocked from crawling. If you feel confident enough, you can write your robot.txt file in a text editor. You then add this file named ‘robot.txt’ to the root of your domain.
Page canonicalisation
Duplicate content can be a big problem for search engine crawlers, making it difficult for them to know which content to rank. As such, your content may struggle to rank highly (if at all). To avoid this problem, you need to implement canonicalisation.
This means that if there are multiple versions of the same page, Google will only index the one you canonically set. When it comes to page canonicalisation, there are user-declared and Google-selected canonicalisation.
User-declared canonicalisation is where you set your own canonical tag to a page to indicate it’s the version of the page you want indexing. Google-selected canonicalisation refers to the canonical link Google has chosen.
To implement canonicalisation on your site, there are a few things you can do:
- Implement canonical tags
- Avoid duplicating pages
- Implement internal linking
- Make use of redirects where necessary
- Keep your sitemap up-to-date
Internal links
Internal links are an important part of allowing search engine crawlers to crawl and navigate your site. As such, implementing internal linking is another essential tactic for technical SEO optimisation that you should consider implementing.
If you use a clear site structure (as we outlined earlier), you are well on your way to implementing an effective internal linking strategy. Internal links refer to a link that directs to another page on your site.
Both users and crawlers use them to navigate your site and find content. Aside from the links you will implement in your navigation menu, blog feed, and homepage, you should also add contextual links. These are links that direct to related content.
Keeping on top of dead links on your site is also a must. Broken (or dead) links can significantly impact your user experience, increase crawling errors, and decrease your site quality. These should be removed or replaced as quickly as possible. There are many reasons why broken links occur:
- A page is moved or deleted
- The link is incorrectly formatted
- Change in web structure or URLs
- Broken images
- Malfunctioning plugins
Schema markup
Schema markup or structured data is another of our essential technical SEO tactics. Structured data is code added to a webpage that enables search engines to better understand its content. Implementing the right structured data also helps you gain rich snippets.
Rich snippets provide additional details in search results, such as star ratings, pricing, delivery options, and many more. This helps make your search listings more enticing and appealing for someone to click on it, helping boost your click-through rate.
There are many different types of structured data markups, so you must choose the right one based on your page’s content. Schema markup should be implemented within your page’s code. You can find out more about schema markup on the schema.org website.
If you don’t feel confident writing your own structured data, there are many free tools online to help you. The schema markup generator from Merkle is just one example. Once the schema is generated, you just copy the output JSON-LD markup into your HTML code.
HTTPS Secure
The last of our essential technical SEO tactics we’ll cover is ensuring your website is secure. You need to ensure your website is secure and uses HTTPS, not HTTP. Short for hypertext transfer protocol, HTTPS is crucial for your user’s safety.
That’s because it helps protect sensitive user information from being compromised. Google also placed greater significance on HTTPS sites over HTTP, making it a ranking factor in 2014. To do this, all you need to do is install an SSL/TLS certificate.
This certificate ensures a secure connection for users when accessing your site. This ensures data transferred between the user’s browser and website cannot be intercepted. If your website doesn’t display HTTPS at the start of its URL, you don’t have a valid SSL/TLS certificate installed.
There are many tactics that you must implement to ensure your site is technical SEO optimised. Ensuring your context can be indexed plays a significant role in ensuring your business can benefit from increased visibility, higher traffic, and improved results online.