Technical SEO is a critical component in the overall SEO process. If your technical SEO is flawed, it is most likely that the SEO you’re doing will not get the desired results.
As a result, it is essential that you grasp what technical SEO is and how to do it correctly.
The good news is that you won’t have to deal with them again once you’ve conducted a technical SEO audit of the site and fixed any potential concerns.
This post will teach you what technical SEO is, what best practices to implement, and the best way to do a technical audit of the website with our technical SEO checklist.
What is Technical SEO?
The process of optimizing your website for crawling and indexing is referred to as technical SEO. Technical SEO allows search engines to easily access, crawl, interpret, and index your website.
It’s labelled “technical” because it has nothing dealing with the website’s real content or promotion. The fundamental goal of technical SEO is to boost the infrastructure of a website.
What Is the Importance of Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is vital since it can influence search engines to favour your website. Technical SEO allows search engines to easily crawl and index your information. It is critical that your site is thoroughly optimized for technical SEO so that it appears higher in organic search results.
This form of SEO is essential to understanding how search engine optimization works.
How Crawling Works
Crawling is the process by which search engines collect content from pages and utilize the links on those pages to find even more pages. You have some control over what is crawled on your web page. Here are a few possibilities.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file informs search engines which pages may and may not go on your site.
Crawl speed
Many crawlers accept the crawl-delay command, which you can include in robots.txt. It allows you to specify how frequently they can crawl pages. Unfortunately, Google does not take this into account.[1] You’ll need to alter the crawl rate in Google Search Console for Google.
Restriction of access
If you want the page to be available to some viewers but not search engines, you should generally choose one of the following three options:
- Some form of login system
- HTTP authentication (password protected)
- IP whitelisting (allowing only particular IP addresses to access the pages)
How to Perform Technical SEO
This is a fundamental method for performing technical SEO on a website:
- Crawl your website with a technical SEO tool such as Screaming Frog or Deep Crawl.
- Use the “site:” operator followed by your domain to execute a site search in Google to ensure that all of your pages are indexed.
- Make sure that just one version of your site (http or https) is accessible.
- Perform on-page SEO audits:
– The meta title is no more than 60 characters long and has no gaps.
– Meta description is fewer than 160 characters long and includes keywords.
– The H1 tag is fewer than 70 characters long. - Analyze the site’s architecture and click depth. Restructure the site so that no page is more than three clicks deep.
- Find broken internal and external links using a technological SEO optimization tool.
- Analyze each web page to see if it requires structured data.
- Check the speed of your website.
- Check the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console for any crawl issues.
- Review Google Analytics for any traffic problems.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A sort of SEO audit is a technical SEO audit, often known as a technical site audit. Technical SEO audits examine and evaluate your website’s backend features, including page speed, index status, crawl ability, and more, to identify and resolve issues affecting your SEO.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Follow these steps to do your first technical site audit:
- Choose Your SEO Tools
- Crawl your website, examine your crawl report, and look into your Google Search Console reports.
- Examine Your Google Analytics Configuration
- Organize Your Technical SEO Fixes List
- Plan Your Next Technical Site Audit
How to improve Technical SEO
Now that we know what technical SEO is, let’s look at the recommended practices to follow. You can conduct your own technical SEO audit using the list below.
- Choose a Preferred Domain and Optimise Your Robots.txt
- Improve Your URL Structure
- Website Navigation and Structure
- Breadcrumb Menus, Structured Data Markup, and SEO are all optional.
- Examine Your Canonical URLs
- Optimize Your 404 Page with XML Sitemaps
- SSL and HTTPS Website Performance
- Pagination for mobile devices and multilingual websites
- Create a Webmaster Tools account for your website.
Important takeaways
- Your content will not be found in search engines if it is not indexed.
- When something breaks that affect search traffic, it may be a top priority to fix it.
- However, for most sites, you’re definitely better off focusing on content and links.
- Many of the most significant technical efforts revolve around indexing or linking.