Understanding Technical SEO - Important Tips From Semalt



Now more than ever, you need to learn the top technical SEO tactics as it will help you rise to the top of SERP. As you begin to learn more about SEO, there comes the point where you figure out that technical SEO is the foundation upon which you can build a successful SEO strategy.  

Technical SEO has become so important because, in the last decade alone, SEO has changed more than any other marketing channel. Through several evolutions and developments of algorithms, SEO has remained the foundation of a successful digital presence. After all, about 51% of online traffic is a result of organic searches.

In a nutshell, SEO has gone mainstream, and we must take into account that to stay ahead of the competition, you need new SEO skills and approaches. Today, there are over 5,000 devices integrated with Google's assistant. With voice search use on the rise, also, the focal point of SEO has become decentralized.

The SERP you once knew is fading away, and search is becoming more dynamic and universal. These have had a significant impact on SEO as it requires several parts to work in synergy to achieve the best results. At the heart of the change or improvement in current-day SEO lies technical SEO. 

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but it also involves making your website more visible. On its own, technical SEO is a very broad and interesting topic. It covers everything from Sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and much more.  

After crafting valuable content for your website, you must optimize it not just for your human audience but also for the search engine bots responsible for indexing. To understand technical SEO, you don't need a deep technical understanding of its concepts; however, you must understand just how important these assets are to help your developer design a more impactful strategy. It is important for you and your website developer can understand the same language in the sense that you know what you want, and you can communicate those ideas to your developer.  

Why focus on technical SEO?

You can look at technical SEO, like accounting. There are simple parts, but there are also complex and tricky parts. To not ruin your website, you should let the professionals handle the complicated stuff. Search engines strive to improve their efficiency in crawling websites, but they aren't quite there yet. For several reasons, they may find it difficult to figure out what your website is about and if it has the information a user wants. When they fail to get this information, they move to the next website, which is a problem for you.  

At this point, having the best content wouldn't matter because no one will be able to see it. For your amazing content to yield its results, you need a good technical SEO foundation. Getting your SEO wrong can spell doom for your business, so you need to ensure your technical SEO is spot on.

What should a good technical SEO look like?

Technical SEOs usually have three primary elements that must be taken into consideration. They are:
  1. Performance 
  2. Crawlability 
  3. Indexation

Performance

This involves the overall performance of a website. Under this, you have the:

Site speed

This refers to how fast your web pages load. There is no top speed on how your website should load. To be the best, you simply need your website to load as fast as it possibly can. Ideally, you should aim for less than 2 seconds, any longer and your users begin to consider leaving. 

On top of this, you should also check your website's waterfall. You can do this using webpagetest.org or GTmetrix. You can use these tools to see how your webpages come together as it loads. You should also look out for other page speed metrics such as:

Code bloat

After running the analysis on several web pages, we have discovered that many web pages have unnecessary long-forgotten codes that developers have forgotten to remove. These lines of codes can become an inconvenience which will need to be removed as they affect the overall performance of the site.

Consider implementing AMP

Consider implementing AMP and adding a responsive design to your website. AMO project exists because Google couldn't wait for websites to get its affairs in order. Whether or not webpages are ready, users need webpages to load faster. However, you shouldn't go to bet after implementing it because no one knows how long AMP would benefit your website.

Implement a responsive design 

Responsive design helps make user experience (UX) better on all devices, so implementing it on your website serves to benefit you significantly. Considering that there is a rising rate of mobile users on your website, having an excellent user experience can go a long way. After implementing, ensure you test your website on several mobile devices to ensure that it works properly, and you can spot and fix any issue that surfaces during these tests. 

Crawlability and indexation

Your crawl budget is the amount of time, money, and resources that Google is willing to spend on your site. Gary Illyes, in Google's webmaster central blog post, informs us that several factors can negatively affect the crawl budget. However, one of the most obvious and dangerous factors is having many low-value add URLs. Some examples of these includes:
To easily spot and resolve indexing and crawling issues, you should regularly monitor the index coverage report and crawl stats in Google's search console. Your developers should provide you with several log files to analyze what Google's bot is doing on your site and how to improve your page's performance. To know what the bots see as they crawl your site, you can try headless browsing. 

The future of technical SEO 

With Google rolling out the mobile-first index and the fact that search has so much evolved that keyboards are no longer a necessity or a URL or even the internet, what we should be focusing on is device-agnostic information. The fact remains that there is a vast opportunity beyond the traditional concept of web search. To be the best, we must ask ourselves, "how easy is it for he contents on my website to be extracted by search engines and displayed across devices?". 

Ranking for featured snippets is one way to determine if your content passes the mark, which indicates that Google can successfully extract data from your site. Using semantic markup also makes it easier for Google to interpret the content on your web pages and figure out what to do with it. 

Making technical SEO work 

Technical SEO can only be as successful as a team effort. To get it up and to run, SEO professionals, web developers, and designers must work together.
The main purpose of technical SEO is to bring money to the owners while improving the experiences of users on the site. 

Technical SEO is not the only important part of SEO. You'll need a combination of several other SEO efforts to have a well-rounded and optimized site. Nevertheless, having on-point technical SEO makes everything easier. 

Performing an in-depth technical SEO audit

This comes as the last part of this article for well-deserved reasons. The truth is conducting an in-depth SEO audit is a major deal. Because of how vast and important it is, chances are we will have a dedicated article that explains it in detail.  

As SEO consultants, we would love nothing more than to hear our clients say our technical SEO audit looks great. It is a rare privilege for us to organize our process and help our clients get rid of their old website flaws. 

Since we wouldn't be going into the details just yet, here are some tools for performing a technical SEO audit:
Performing a technical SEO audit is very important because you can fish out and get rid of little or, in some cases, significant flaws that limit your website from performing as good as it should. After the audit, you become aware of the several problems on your website, and you can do well to fix them.  

In reality, this sounds far more complicated than this, and we wouldn't advise you do this on your own. Technical SEO audits are very technical, and you should leave it to professionals. 

Conclusion

Thanks to technical SEO, websites can do better and appear better to both search engines and their users. At Semalt, we take great delight in getting your technical SEO efforts up to date and making sure your website is the best version it can be.

Get in touch with us, and let's make your website great.


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