Technical SEO
That SEO is very important – let’s say indispensable – is no longer news these days. Many companies and entrepreneurs immediately think of keywords and content when it comes to SEO. While they’re certainly right about that, there’s another component that’s often overlooked: technical SEO.
The result is that your website, which is packed with highly relevant content and all the commonly used keywords, doesn’t appear on the first page of Google at all. And not on the 2nd, 3rd, and in extreme cases, remains completely unfindable. Technical mistakes can also sometimes cause a site that had already built up rankings to suddenly disappear from search results.
All the more reason to have the technical foundation of your website in good order.
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Here you can read about:
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is about everything you do to optimize the technology behind your website. This improves the user experience and ranking of your website to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. In other words: Through technical SEO, you ensure on one hand that your site is pleasant for users to use and on the other hand that Google (and other search engines) know what your site is about.
Technical SEO falls under the umbrella of SEO and is one of the three pillars of SEO. The other two components of SEO are content and authority.
Why is technical SEO important?
Imagine you’ve had an incredibly good article written in which you’ve brilliantly answered some of your customers’ search questions. You send the link to your followers on social media or announce it in your newsletter.
Your customers (loyal fans as they are) naturally click on it immediately.
Waiting.
……
Still nothing.
…
After 10 seconds the page finally loads.
Most readers won’t wait for that and click away.
And rightly so.
That’s why loading time is also one of Google’s most important direct ranking factors. Since Google’s Algorithm Speed Update in 2021, keywords are no longer the most important aspect if you want to score well in Google. The Speed update is intended to provide users with a better experience by prioritizing pages that offer a good user experience. There’s quite a bit to that, of course.
And this is just one example of technical SEO. Below we cover all aspects of technical SEO.
Curious how we can help you further?
What does technical SEO include?
We list all components of technical SEO for you.
Mobile optimization / Mobile Indexing
Because the majority of internet users nowadays primarily use mobile devices, Google has switched to Mobile Indexing or Mobile First indexing.
The biggest difference is that when crawling your website, the mobile site is now the starting point, instead of the desktop version that the search giant previously used. Google now first looks at the performance of the mobile version and lets that be leading in indexing and determining your final position in search results. If your mobile website doesn’t perform well enough in Google’s eyes, you can be ‘penalized’.
That’s why the first focus point of technical SEO is optimizing your mobile website:
- Ensure your content is complete
- Mobile and desktop versions have the same content
- Content must be displayed correctly
- Images (see below) and videos must be optimized
- The mobile website must load quickly (see loading time)
- Ensure you have a responsive website
- Use the same metadata
Loading time
In the intro example you could already read about loading time. This negatively affects user experience and is therefore an important ranking factor.
Loading time can also indirectly influence your SEO, as it has a negative effect on the bounce rate and dwell-time of your website, but these are not direct ranking factors. However, they are interesting things that you can use to see why some pages might not score as well.
Google thinks pages should load within about 2 seconds. Many websites don’t come close to achieving this and take more than 5 seconds. That’s way too long. When people are behind their desktops they sometimes have more patience, but when they’re on their phone they certainly don’t. Moreover, connections on mobile devices aren’t always stable.
Improving a website’s loading time is generally not something you can easily do yourself or leave to SEO consultants. Although the latter can tell you what needs to be adjusted, you generally need (front-end) developers for the adjustments themselves who can dive under the hood of your website and fine-tune everything precisely so that loading time improves.
You can improve a website’s loading time with technical SEO by:
- Optimizing format and layout of images.
- Optimization plugins and CMS.
- Not using inline JS and CSS.
- Deploying Content Delivery Networks.
- Optimizing caching.
- Not using render-blocking scripts that block page loading.
- Avoid redirects.
- Using G-Zip compression.
- Reducing the number of HTTP requests.
As you can see: really something for tech experts. The tech experts at ROXTAR live for technical SEO. Contact us to have your website technically reviewed.
Curious about how your website performs in terms of loading time? Check it with this Google tool.
Make sure all links work
Maybe you’ve heard of them: Dead links. These are links that no longer work. Because they refer to a 404 page, a non-existent website, or because someone made a typo when creating the link.
That this is inconvenient for internet users looking for something is logical. But Google’s bots also get confused by dead-end links. Too many dead links cause Google to classify your website as less relevant and therefore rank you lower.
Technical SEO is important, so fix those dead links.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is no longer as important for Google as it once was, but you’re still better off avoiding it. Duplicate content is, as you might guess, the same content that appears in different ways and places. You have two flavors of it. The content of your page is very similar to that of another website or other pages of your own website, or you can access the same content via different URLs. This can be due to the URLs or because the page has been published twice.
The latter is concerning. It can cause Google not to understand which version of the page is actually the correct one, which again causes lower relevance and ultimately a lower ranking. This happens because the page can be indexed in different ways through the different URLs. You don’t want this because it’s confusing, for your readers and for the Google bots.
Improvement points:
- Ensure URL variants are not possible
- Avoid copied, duplicate content
If the same content is still needed on two different pages, you can use a so-called canonical tag to make it clear to Google which page is the correct one. Even more components of technical SEO are:
404 pages and 301 redirects
A 404 page is a browser error message when a page cannot be found. Due to an error in the URL, because the page has been moved, or because one of your colleagues has been tidying up and has even completely deleted the page (can happen to the best of us). In those cases there are usually still internal and external links that refer to those pages so people and bots can end up there.
404 pages are not included in search results. So you have nothing to gain from them and you’re better off avoiding them as much as possible. You do this by correcting faulty links and using 301 redirects. With a 301 redirect you tell search engines that a certain page has gotten a new location so that visitors who click on your link in search results don’t see a 404 page.
It’s a kind of redirection that tells visitors and search engines where to find the new page.
Curious about how your website performs?
The experts at ROXTAR can tell you everything about technical SEO. Through a comprehensive audit of your website, they look at every component of technical SEO and how well your pages perform on it. This gives you a clear picture of how your website actually performs and which areas need attention to score better. Want to know more? Feel free to contact us and we’ll get to work for you!
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