Search engine optimization is one of today’s most prominent tools for a website’s online success. It ensures that your website can reach the topmost ranks on search engine results pages by optimizing content and technical aspects like loading speed, backlinks, etc. Among the three segments of SEO, which include on-page, off-page, and technical optimizations, the latter is of great importance to every website. Technical SEO deals with improving your website in terms of user experience. It looks after website speed, security, mobile-friendliness, and the overall browsing experience. These both enhance user experience and allow search engine bots to assess the level of accessibility and navigability of your website. All of these ultimately contribute a lot towards the ranking of your website on the results pages.
Let us now find out the importance of technical SEO for your website in more detail.
A short introduction to Technical SEO
As already specified, technical SEO contributes to raising your website’s search engine rankings by looking after aspects that may hinder a good user experience. It helps to improve the visibility of your website by modifying some technical aspects of your website. These include sitemaps, website architecture, and site speed. It forms the core of a website’s crawlability, performance, and indexation on search engines.
Technical SEO increases the possibility of ranking higher among the search engine results for your website. This is because of two reasons –
- First, technical SEO makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index your web pages by revising sitemaps and site architecture.
- Secondly, it contributes towards making your website more mobile-friendly and increases loading speed. These attributes signal to Google that your content can address search intent and is easily accessible to online audiences.
This means that your on-page SEO efforts need to be complemented with technical SEO in order to make the best of online visibility. No matter how valuable and informative your content is, your web pages may remain hidden from your target audience unless your backend processes are optimized fully. Without SEO, there will be no healthy generation of organic traffic for your website. This will not give you enough conversions and potential revenue to the extent you expect from your website.
How technical SEO revamps your website’s performance
Now that we know all about what technical SEO is and what contributions it has to make towards improving your website. Now let us see in detail how technical SEO optimizes your website’s performance, increases crawlability, and helps in better indexation.
1. Optimizing website performance
Technical SEO begins with the optimization of your website’s performance. Let us look at the few key activities that go into this process –
- Page speed: This entails understanding how much time it takes for particular webpages to load and then using JavaScript and CSS to ensure that they load faster. This helps to reduce bounce rate, which can significantly impact website ranking.
- Responsive design: This ensures that the design and layout of your website are functioning equally smoothly on all kinds of devices and browsers. This helps to enhance user experience, thus elevating rankings on results pages.
- HTTPS certificate: This ensures that your website is using the encrypted version of HTTP. Thus, it will be safer from hacking and cyberattacks. As new search engines and browsers prefer websites with HTTPS, it provides more integrity and authentication to your website.
- Mobile-friendliness: This includes optimizing your website for mobile devices using Google Search Console.
2. Optimizing Crawlability
Crawlers are basically search engine algorithms that work on understanding the content from all your webpages to help identify links on these pages, used to find other pages and understand the overall navigational structure of your website. The more organized and interlinked your webpages are, the greater will be the crawlability of your website on search engines. Let us see which components of technical SEO help to optimize the crawlability of a website –
- txt: This file provides a note to search engines on what they can and cannot do to your website.
- Access restrictions: This helps to restrict access to a page by using login systems, HTTPS authentication, or IP whitelisting to prevent search engines from finding a page.
- XML Sitemap: This provides a clear structure for your website that the search engine can use to navigate your site and understand its layout. A sitemap is also ideal for on-page optimization. It also helps marketers to define the usability and navigation for visitors coming to browse through your website. This helps them to find information that is relevant to them without getting lost in the maze of webpages.
3. Optimizing indexation
Indexing is the ideal next step for your website after getting a good crawlability. Once Googlebot has crawled your website, it will start storing content and information according to specific indexes. These will help the search engine to fetch out the relevant results when a particular user is searching for similar terms. To ensure that your website indexing is optimum, technical SEO can take the following measures –
- Ensuring that there are no dead links or non-existing pages on your website;
- Ensuring that there are no issues relating to duplicate content on your website. Sometimes marketers can create landing pages for specific campaigns, but forget about removing them after the campaign is no longer operative. This can lead to duplicate content, which may confuse search engines.
- Technical SEO also ensures that your website’s URLs are optimized to be able to feature the primary keyword or title of each webpage.
- Technical SEO also ensures that your website is redirecting to current pages.
- Using hreflang tags helps your search engine define the webpage for the country and language. This is important primarily if your website is catering to multiple countries and languages.
Technical SEO is very important for your website to achieve a better user experience, get identified better by search engines, and increase visibility by reducing bounce rate. These are some of the key aspects of technical SEO that can revamp the online performance of your website.