Optimizing a website for the search engine allows you to rank better but your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy should include both on-page SEO as well as technical SEO audit. Giving preference to any single SEO technique can harm your website ranking, traffic, conversion, and many more. 

Getting an in-depth technical SEO audit offers insight into the technical issues on web pages and helps you to optimize them for search engine crawlers.

Remember the web pages you are creating should be structured for both user and search engines. Technical SEO can contribute to make your website accessible and understandable to the user as well as a search engine bot.

Creating attractive and educating content helps the website to engage users. But if the search engine crawler fails to understand its purpose then all your hard work can go in vain. That’s why Traffic and conversion-centric content always complement their pages with robust technical SEO strategies.  

In this article, we will help you to demystify what is technical SEO, Why your website needs it and different SEO techniques that can help you to improve your website technically for search engines. 

Check our blog on 10 Effective Off-Page SEO Techniques In 2020 To Boost Your Website Ranking to discover the latest Off-page activities Every site owners and SEO Professionals should know in 2020

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of website and server technical issues to help search engine crawlers to crawl and index web pages more smartly and effectively. Optimizing web pages for technical SEO allows you to improve your website ranking in search engines. 

Why is Technical SEO important for a website?

Optimizing your website for technical SEO allows search engines to determine your website purposes and help them to discover your web page friendliness. There is no doubt that search engine crawlers are becoming smarter at crawling, indexing, and understanding your website information.

But they are not perfect at understanding each and every aspect of your webpages. That’s where technical SEO comes in. It allows you to optimize your website so that search engine crawlers can easily crawl and understand your website. 

Today Google is focused on offering the best solution to its users. To achieve that google considers various factors to evaluate a web page. Some factors help google to measure your website speed. Whereas other factors help them to get an insight into your website and web pages. 

Remember Google considers every web page as a single website. Whether it’s your product page or your blog page, you need to ensure that your pages are easily crawlable. Improving your pages for technical SEO helps you to achieve that. 

If your website is easily crawlable and understandable then your pages may rank on the top in SERP. But if your website contains too many technical errors then it will cost you in different ways like a rank downfall, traffic loss, no development in page rank, and more. 

Below we have listed some important technical SEO activities that you should consider while optimizing your website for search engines.

Technical SEO Checklist (2020) 

1. HTTPs Secured (SSL certificate)

We would like to start with one of the most important but underrated technical SEO activities. With the increase in the website hacks and vulnerabilities, it has become essential for every website to integrate the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate so that it creates an encrypted link between the browser and the webserver.  

You might have come across a website having a lock symbol in the URL section of the browser, those symbols indicate that the website is secured. Search engines give preference to websites that is HTTPs secured. 

Integrating SSL certificates ensures that no one intercepts the data exchanged between the browser and web pages. Not only that but savvy users know that a secure website keeps their data secure. So before making any purchase or creating an account on your website they check whether the website is HTTPs secured or not. 

If you are a beginner then don’t worry there are so many tutorials available that can help you to upload data SSL certificates into your web hosting. 

2. Reduce Website Load time (PageSpeed)

Website speed is one of the important aspects of technical SEO. No matter how effective and helpful your website product is for the user, if your website is failing to load faster then the search engine will never recommend your website to the user. 

Today users are impatient if your website takes a long time to display its element then 70% of the user may abandon your website and never return back. So while optimizing the website for technical SEO make sure you consider page speed. There are tools like Gtmetrix, PageSpeed Tool, and more that can give you insight about your website load time.

You can use the below tips to optimize your website speed: 

  • Select the right hosting for your website 
  • Make use of Fast DNS 
  • Use minimum script and plugins to reduce HTTps request 
  • Instead of using multiple CSS stylesheets prefer to use one one CSS style sheet 
  • Upload compressed images 
  • Minify your HTML, CSS and javascript code 

3. Create XML Sitemap 

When someone offers a roadmap it becomes easy for you to discover the route. Same goes with the XML sitemap, creating XML sitemap files allows the search engine to understand your website. The XML sitemaps are the files of your web pages that are created to help search engine crawlers to smartly crawl your website. 

By creating an XML sitemap you ensure that search engine crawlers don’t miss out on any important product page or blog page of your website. Your XML sitemap contains all the important information like the last modification time, update frequency, and web page priority. 

Your web page interlinking helps search engine crawlers to crawl your website wisely but creating XML sitemaps makes this process more effective and efficient. It is not mandatory to add XML sitemap on your website but our SEO experts always recommend creating and adding XML sitemap as it will not do any harm to your website.

4. Include Structured Data Markup 

Earlier we have mentioned that your content should be accessible and understandable by both user and search engine crawler. Adding structured data markup code on your website helps search engines to understand and index your website and content. 

Using Structured Data Markup you can tell the search engine about your website niche like what you sell and different services offered by your website. Using structured data markup you can add rich snippets to make your search results more attractive. Adding review and start rating attracts user attention and persuades them to click on your website.   

Google daily crawls thousands of websites on your niche so how can search engines identify small details about your product, features, and author. Schema makeup helps search engines to identify every small detail related to your website and information on your web page. 

Using Schema markup you label all the content to make it visible to search engine crawlers. Once google crawler clearly understands what your content is about then it increases the chances of getting ranked on top in SERP.

5. Remove Duplicate Content 

The duplicate content issue is another optimization tip that you should consider while optimizing your website for technical SEO. Having the same content on multiple pages confuses the search engine. If your web pages are displaying the same content then the search engine may fail to determine which web page to rank highest on for a particular keyword. 

These types of activities can make Google rank your web pages for the same keyword but at a lower position. Duplicate Content may not affect user experience because users don’t check each and every content. But when it comes to a search engine they crawl each and every aspect of a web page to ensure that it is displayed under the right keyword. 

How can you avoid duplicate content issues? Make sure that you CMS is not publishing multiple pages from the same content. Use the canonical link element to indicate the main and original page that you want to rank. 

Today ever site owners know that they shouldn’t copy content from other websites but creating duplicate content within a website can also land you in trouble. While optimizing your website for technical SEO, check and modify duplicate content issues.

6. Mobile-Friendliness (AMP)

Today most of the desktop users are shifting to mobile devices. Because of that search engines are giving preference to websites that are optimized for both desktops as well as mobile devices. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices then you are losing lots of organic traffic and customers-which you don’t want to lose at any cost. 

Using google mobile-friendly tools you can analyze whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. If there are issues with web page loading speed or visibility then get it resolved ASAP. Because every minute you might be losing quality traffic from mobile devices. 

Make use of AMP(accelerated mobile page) as it helps you to optimize your web pages content delivered on a mobile device by using a special code called AMP HTML.  It allows your web page to load faster on a mobile device with proper structure (without any content shift). 

Don’t worry AMP will not harm your media elements like video and images. It just strips content and code and disables extra script, forms, and comments making your web page more effective and efficient on mobile devices.

AMP optimized web pages are easily accessible by the user which encourages them to share your web page with their friends and family. That means using AMP for your mobile and web pages will offer you a lot more benefits.

7. Remove Dead Links 

To attract more visitors to your website you need to offer a satisfying user experience. Most of the time a slow loading website frustrates users which is very common but one thing that drives away users from your website is a dead link. Having a dead link on your website annoys users and they abandon a web page after discovering these types of broken links. 

There are times when visitors don’t prefer to click links on a web page. But when a search engine crawls a web page they go through each and every link present on your web page including hidden links. If your website is filled with broken links then there are chances that search engines may not recommend your website for related keywords. 

There are tools like broken links checker, Ashrefs, and more that can give a clear idea about the total number of broken links present on your web page. Whenever you delete or more any URL make sure that you redirect it to a page that replaces the old dead link.

Conclusion 

If you are facing difficulty in driving organic traffic and conversion on your web pages then this Technical SEO Guide will surely help you to resolve issues. Getting insight into your website technical issues and improving those issues makes it easy for the user as well as a search engine to understand your website. 

To identify your technical SEO issues you can always reach out to an effective SEO agency that gives you an SEO audit of your website. If you face difficulties in resolving your technical issue then you can hire a result-driven SEO Agency to resolve those issues. 

Paying attention to on-page and off-page and technical SEO of a website can offer you various advantages like a rank improvement, an increase in organic traffic, sales, and more. Using the aforementioned tips you can identify and rectify your website technical SEO mistakes. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

1. What is a Technical SEO audit? 

Technical SEO helps site owners to optimize their website for search engines so that it can easily identify its purpose and goal. Optimizing your website for technical SEO allows search engines to determine your website purposes and help them to discover your web page friendliness. 

2. How do you do a technical SEO audit? 

Getting an in-depth technical SEO audit of your website helps you to identify the technical issues on your website. Using the below process you can 

  • Firstly we recommend you crawl your website using various tools like Spyfu, SEMrush, and more. 
  • Next, you can check and review your website site map 
  • Check Interlinks in your website 
  • Test your website speed on mobile as well as desktop devices 
  • Check website security (HTTPS, SSL)
  • Backlink audit
  • Remove duplicate content 
  • Fix redirects (broken link)