What Is Technical SEO?

Date First Published: 30th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what technical SEO is in this article.

Technical SEO is the process of optimising a website for search engines to find, crawl, render, and index it more effectively. Website owners can write high-quality content and make it work well for users, but if a website is not optimised for web crawlers, it is not going to come up in the SERP. This is because Google and other search engine bots need to be able to access the content in order for it to show up in the search engines. Technical SEO is a type of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements inside a website that the owner of the website has control over to rank higher in the search results. Technical SEO is important because it helps build a website that search engines can easily understand and have no issues crawling and indexing.

Examples Of Technical SEO

Examples of technical SEO are:

• Ensuring that a website is crawlable for search engines - Web crawlers rely on links to other pages to find, crawl, render, and index pages. These links could be external links from another website or internal links inside the website. A good internal linking structure without any orphan pages will ensure that they can find all of the important pages.
• Ensuring that a website does not have any broken links - Broken links are links that point to non-existent pages or pages that generate other errors. If search engines follow links to pages that do not exist, they will encounter an error page, often a 404 error page. Search engines do not like to find these error pages. In order to avoid broken links, always ensure that all links are spelt correctly and if a page is renamed, redirect the old name to the new name. If it is deleted, remove the link as it is clear that the page is no longer necessary for the website.
• Ensuring that a website does not have duplicate content that will confuse search engines - Having content that is very similar to or identical to content that already exists on the same website or different websites might confuse search engines. Sometimes, the same content is accessible from more than one URL, such as the homepage being accessible from both 'example.com/index.html' and 'example.com'. In order to avoid duplicate content issues, use the canonical link element to indicate the page you would like to rank in the search engines, redirect traffic from one page to another, or mark the duplicate pages with the noindex tag.
• Having an XML sitemap that contains a list of links to important pages, images, and videos of a website so that search engines can find and crawl pages. Note that it is not absolutely necessary to have an XML sitemap, but it is beneficial to have a sitemap for large websites with thousands of pages as search engines might miss crawling them, a website that has a large number of media files, such as videos and images that need to be crawled by search engines, a new website with no backlinks to it, and a website with isolated pages that are not internally linked and can only be reached by manually typing the URL.
• Ensuring that the pages are fast enough - Webpages need to load fast enough as a slow page may cause users to get fed up with waiting and leave the website. Google prefers webpages that load faster and knows that slow webpages offer a poor user experience, so page speed is a Google ranking factor. For example, if Google indexed two pages from different websites with similar content, the faster of the two would rank higher.
• Ensuring that the pages are mobile-friendly. Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor as the usage of mobile devices to browse the World Wide Web is becoming more common and Google will consider a page that malfunctions on mobile devices to deliver a poor user experience. In order to avoid issues with mobile-friendliness, always ensure that the pages use a responsive design.
• Ensuring that pages that are not supposed to show up in the search engines, such as error pages and product checkout pages are blocked from being indexed using the noindex tag.
• Ensuring that important pages of the website, such as the homepage can be crawled and indexed by search engines and are not blocked by the noindex tag or the robots.txt file.
• Ensuring that the page does not rely too much on JavaScript to load the main page content. Search engine bots cannot mimic the behaviour of human users, so types of content that rely on JavaScript to load content, such as infinite scrolling cannot be reached by bots, leading to anything outside of this range not being crawled and indexed.
• Adding Hreflang tags to define the country and language a page is designed to serve if a website targets more than one country or multiple countries that the same language is spoken in. Search engines need help understanding which language a page is trying to serve. Adding the Hreflang tag allows search engines to show people the right website for their country in the search results. It also solves duplicate content issues as even if the French version and the UK version of a website show the same content, Google will know that they are written for different countries.