A Comprehensive Guide of Technical SEO(2024)
A detailed guide to technical SEO, including definition, benefits, powerful strategies and tools for beginners. Together, dive into the world of SEO with us now.
Search engine optimization is not as simple a field as many people think. Actually, there is a lot more to securing a page's ranking than just sprinkling keywords on its content. An entirely different SEO layer is working secretly behind to ensure that Google values the page as much as possible.
While, apart from on-page SEO and off-page SEO, technical SEO ranks second place in this mysterious SEO layer, and that's what we're going to explore in this blog. Before we discuss the factors that influence technical SEO and how these factors can affect your website ranking, we'll first look at the basics of technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO means optimizing your website in the crawling and indexing stage to facilitate search engines to access, crawl and index. It's called "technical" because its main job is to improve the infrastructure of your website, and it's usually applied during the building phase.
Technical SEO contains multiple factors, including the rationality of website architecture, URL structure optimization, page speed improvement, mobile friendliness, code simplification and specification, security enhancement, and others.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO plays a vital role because it builds the bridge between the website and the search engine, ensuring that the website meets the technical standards of the search engine, so as to facilitate the search engine to smoothly crawl and index the content of the web. This process is like laying a solid foundation for a high-rise building, no matter how magnificent the superstructure is, if it lacks solid foundation support, it will eventually overturn its fate.
Search engines, such as Google, rely on sophisticated algorithms to assess the relevance and authority of websites. However, if the site at the technical level of SEO processing is not appropriate, it may hinder the search engine to effectively identify, include or reasonably rank your web page. The immediate consequence of this is a decline in search rankings, reduced traffic, and ultimately conversion rates, which can make your website less effective.
Top 10 Strategies to Improve Technical SEO
5 Crawling-Related Strategies
01.Creating an SEO-friendly site structure
Reasonable structure is very important for your website's technical SEO. It can facilitate users to find the content they want more conveniently on the website and also potentially make them stay longer to explore more content. The search engine will get some benefits from it as well. It can understand the website more easily and build a site index.
Below is a typical SEO-friendly website structure.
Our Suggestions
- Each major category should be unique, and subcategories should have a logical relationship to the category they belong to.
- The number of main categories should be guaranteed to be between 2-7. Unless your website is a big one like Amazon or eBay, it is not recommended to use too many main categories. It will be too difficult to display all main categories. Besides, users' attention is also likely to be distracted and they won't be able to quickly find the information they want.
02.XML sitemap
In a word, an XML sitemap is a list of all the pages in your website. It is the route that decides how search engines will continually explore your website. Once you establish one, then it will guarantee that the search engine will not miss any important content or pages of your site.
Normally, XML sitemaps can be divided into post, page, tag or other custom post types and include the number of images and last modified date for each page.
Our Suggestions
- The file size of a single sitemap should never exceed 50MB.
- A single sitemap must contain no more than 50,000 URLs.
- Remember to keep your sitemap up to date.
03.Improving site speed
These days, speed is Paramount, and users have limited patience and don't want to wait. According to 2016 data, more than half of mobile users abandon a web page after more than three seconds of loading. This trend continues today, with the 2022 study showing that each additional second of load time reduces e-commerce conversion rates by ~ 0.3%. If a website is slow to respond, users are likely to get frustrated and go elsewhere, resulting in lost traffic.
Google knows this, too, and tends to improve the user experience by speeding up the prioritization of pages in search results. Starting in 2021, page experience (specifically load speed) is directly related to Google ranking, making it more important than ever. Therefore, ensuring that web pages load quickly has become key to attracting and retaining visitors.
Our Suggestions
- Compress image size.
- Use CDN acceleration.
- Reduce HTTP requests.
- Adopt some speed checkers regularly to maintain your site's well performance.
04.Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which parts of your website you don't want them to crawl. Generally located at https://example.com/robots.txt, it is open to query. When you don't want to index certain pages or media, just annotate them.
As the picture shows, "Allow" represents pages that are allowed to be crawled. Generally, the whole website is set to allow all crawls. You can use "Disallow" to list the parts you don't want to grab if there are any.
Our Suggestions
- When writing Robots.txt, you don't need to add the main domain name, just fill in the content after https://example.com/.
- Disable indexes on your main admin page, private databases, etc.
05.Set an SEO-friendly URL structure
The setting of a site's URL structure is undoubtedly one of the most essential sections in technical SEO. An SEO-friendly URL structure can improve the user experience and help the search engine understand the page's content more clearly as well.
You can choose some easy-to-retrieve keywords to accurately describe the page, as follows:
https://wegic.ai/blog/wegic-price.html
Unfriendly URLs often contain a lot of numbers or are garbled, like this:
https://www.example.com/seo/X347384386/43843
Our Suggestions
- The website adopts a tree structure to expand two or three pages from the home page down.
- Prevent multiple pages from repeating URLs.
- Avoid special characters except English and hyphens in the URL.
- The URL requires all English words in lowercase.
- Limit URL slug to 3-6 words whenever possible.
- Replace Spaces with hyphens in URLs.
- Add keywords to the URL whenever possible.
5 Indexing-Related Strategies
01.Add internal links
The internal link is relative to the external link. The internal link refers to the link relationship between the pages inside the site. Between pages and pages through the href link, so as to turn the entire site into a network, convenient for crawlers to crawl quickly, the construction of the internal chain can accelerate the speed of the page.
Google recommends that sites do not set up island pages, and that all pages have an internal link entry.
For example, if you write a new blog post, and some content can get connected with other posts that you have already published, then you can wisely link the text to that related post. Therefore, the search engine can explore deeper in your website.
Our Suggestions
- Make sure that every internal link is meaningful, don't link those articles that have none business of your site.
- Don't link too many internals in one page, three to five is enough.
02.Use SSL & HTTPS
It's common to see websites that start with "http" and "https".The difference between the two is that the latter adds an SSL certificate, also known as a security certificate.
On the server, once you have an SSL certificate installed, you can use "https" for access. This certificate securely encrypts all information (name, account number, password, etc.) transmitted between servers to prevent information leakage. So Google also considers HTTPS as one of the important factors affecting the website ranking.
Our Suggestions
- Install an SSL certificate to encrypt data between the user’s browser and your server.
- Make sure that all URLs redirect to the HTTPS version of your site.
03.Mobile-friendliness Design
In 2019, Google updated its algorithm to adopt a mobile-first indexing policy for newly launched websites. Your website should be able to easily detect that a mobile screen is viewing it and have separate CSS rules to make the browsing experience easier.
Also, Google itself provides a free tool for website owners to check if their sites are mobile-friendly or not.
Our Suggestions
- Avoid pop-ups on your phone.
- Keep the mobile website loading time under 6 seconds.
- Measure your website's rank in mobile search results.
- Consider using AMP technology to speed up your website.
04.Add schema marked up
What is schema marked up? In a word, schema marked up is a piece of code that can be added to a website, visible to search engines, to help users better understand the context. In search engines, this usually takes the form of additional links.
Here's an example of structured data markup behind the scenes we see:
Currently, Google's schema marked up can contain articles, books, breadcrumbs, company contact information, reviews, courses, products, Q&A pages, recipes, and more.
Our Suggestions
- Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the appropriate code.
- Use Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure that your schema markup is correctly implemented.
05.Hreflang tag for the multilingual page
If there are multiple versions of a web page for different languages or regions, please inform Google of these variants. This allows Google Search to direct people who want to visit your page to the most appropriate version by language or region.
Notably, even if you don't take these steps, Google may still find other language versions of your pages, but it is generally recommended that you explicitly specify the pages you serve for a specific language or region.
The design of multi-language URLs is mainly divided into two types. The first is to only locate the language, that is, all the regions using the language are redirected to the page of the language, but no distinction is made between the specific regions below the language. The second is localization language + region, that is, the content /URL of the page rendered for different regions under the same language is also different. You can choose the right solution according to your needs.
Our Suggestions
- Indicates the relationship between languages on the same page, which is communicated to Google via the hreflang setting.
- Instead of using cookies or browser settings to adjust the language of content on a web page, we suggest you use a different URL for each language version of the web page.
Powerful Technical SEO Tools for Beginners
01.Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site's performance in Google search results and troubleshoot issues.
What this tool can do for your website:
- Make sure Google can find and crawl your website.
- Fix indexing issues and request new or updated content to be re-indexed.
- View Google search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google search, which search queries can display your site, how often searchers click to see search results corresponding to those queries, and so on.
- Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues related to your site.
- Shows which sites link to your site.
02.PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool designed to optimize web pages for faster page loading on all devices.
What this tool can do for your website:
- Generate actual performance reports of your web pages for both mobile and desktop devices
- Provide recommendations on how to improve the corresponding web pages.
03.Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test is designed to evaluate the ease of use of your web pages on Mobile devices, helping to ensure that visitors can easily and seamlessly view your content on small screens such as phones or tablets.
What this tool can do for your website:
- Identify and tackle a range of issues that affect the mobile experience, such as difficulty reading text in small font sizes, and reliance on incompatible plugins for page load.
- Give suggestions on how to adjust the direction of technical SEO to help you better build website SEO.
The Evolving Nature of Technical SEO
Indeed, technical SEO isn’t a one-time task. It’s an ongoing process. As search engines continuously update their algorithms, your site needs to stay compliant with the latest best practices. Regular SEO audits are crucial to ensure that your site remains optimized for both search engines and users. Keeping an eye on new developments, such as Core Web Vitals and mobile-first indexing, is essential to maintain and improve your search rankings.
Create Your Website First Before Implementing SEO
Before implementing SEO, you first need a stunning and functional website.
I believe that the website-building tool Wegic is your best choice. With Wegic, you can easily personalize your website by interacting with the system through natural language. Without any coding knowledge, you can quickly deploy your website and publish it with a custom domain name in just a few simple steps.
Wegic provides flexible design tools to ensure your website maintains an elegant look on any device, helping you focus on SEO web page design optimization and making your website stand out.
Click the image below and start your website design process first with Wegic now!
Written by
Kimmy
Published on
Oct 8, 2024
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