Many people get squeamish when the word ‘technical’ is used. But when it comes to optimising your website, technical SEO merely refers to any SEO work that is done on your site.
At its core, technical SEO is about laying a strong foundation to provide your content with the best opportunity to rank for relevant keywords and phrases.
You can look at technical SEO as the part of search engine optimisation that focuses on how well the search engine bots can crawl your site and index your content. Once you’ve created valuable content based on solid keyword research, you need to make sure your content is readable by people and the search engines.
The technical structure of your website can have a big impact on how your site performs. The search engines prefer websites that display certain technical characteristics like a fast loading time, a responsive design, and a secure connection. Below are a few things you can do to ensure your technical SEO is sound.
SSL stands for secure sockets layer. It’s a security technology that establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. The link ensures that all the data passed between the two is secure.
A website URL starting with ‘https//’ is using SSL instead of ‘http//’. Google favours SSL sites when determining where sites will rank in the SERPs. The good news is that most popular website builders now include SSL by default.
Google tells us that having a responsive website is crucial to earning a good ranking. Since the search giant is now taking a “mobile first” approach to indexing content, it’s more important than ever to have a responsive website. Be sure that your site is fully responsive and displays correctly whether someone is viewing it on a tablet, mobile phone, or desktop PC.
Search engines and users prefer websites that load quickly. Page speed is a key ranking factor which means you have to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.
You can speed your site up several ways including:
Google uses an XML site map to understand your website when crawling it. The site map tells the search engine what each page is about. It also tells Google when a page was last modified, how important the page is to your website, and how often the page is updated. If you don’t have an XML site map on your website, you can easily add one by using a site map generator tool.
Other technical tweaks you can do to your site include registering your site with Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools. Another good action to take is to add structured data markup to your site to help the search engines better understand the content on it.