Surely by now, you’ve heard of SEO and likely know many of the SEO basics. Having the right relevant keywords to increase your ranking on search engines, linking strategies to build authority, and necessary meta tags. While these content/on-page SEO tactics are typically thought of when optimizing your website, there are technical aspects of SEO that can have a huge impact on the success of your website as well. In this article, we’re going to explore what technical SEO is, as well as strategies for search engine success.
What Exactly is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the indexing and optimization of your website for crawlers. Indexing and optimization is just a fancy phrase for making your website readable for crawlers and users alike to increase your searchability performance.
When a person conducts an internet search, crawlers (also known as spiders or internet bots) scan web pages to index them more effectively online. The internet has a whopping 1.86 billion websites currently and the crawlers scan these web pages in seconds to provide the most relevant, optimized website for the end user.
What Factors Can Have a Negative Impact on Your Technical SEO?
It can seem quite daunting and confusing at first but here is a simple truth: technical SEO will do more for your rankings than any blog post or landing page on your site. And it all begins with the setup of your website.
Core Web Vitals
Google’s 2021 algorithm updates will focus on page experience using core web vitals. Core web vitals ensure that they are providing users with the information they need while collecting data on user behavior as well. There are three main elements of core web vitals including First Input Delay (FID), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). FID measures user experience and their first interaction, LCP measures load performance and how long it takes the largest element to load, while CLS measures the visual stability of your website.
Website Errors
Look for broken links and error codes/pages on your website. There’s nothing worse than a user looking at your site and finding a blog filled with powerful studies to back up your words with and being unable to click on the URL or getting an error message. A big no-no for the user’s experience as well as internet crawlers. Don’t forget to do frequent SEO audits on your website to ensure minimal website errors.
Schema Markup
Schema is a piece of coding that you can implement into your website for improved technical SEO and searchability online. Essentially, it helps your website better communicate with crawlers on what your website data means. Then, it provides a better understanding of your website and its relevance as well as a better user experience. You can create schema markup codes for almost anything on your website to help improve the communication between your site and internet crawlers.
Security
The security of your website is now more important than ever, not only for the security of your website but to improve your technical SEO as well. With numerous spammers and cyber attacks, your website needs an updated and active SSL certificate. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, which is a security protocol that creates an encrypted link between a web server and your web browser. Typically, hosting platforms will include free SSL certificates with websites. If you’re an e-commerce website, it’s also a great idea to use a third-party payment gateway that’s well known (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), as they will have the most trusted security protocols in place for your website.
XML Sitemap
It’s essential to have an XML sitemap to communicate with search engines about your site structure and proper indexing. Your XML sitemap will list important web pages on your website to help crawlers understand which URLs are important during the scanning and discovery process. XML sitemaps are important for every website and should include main pages, blogs, and images.
Mobile Responsiveness
Responsiveness is when users have their internet browser window set to an odd size or using the full screen on larger monitors and part of your website breaks. Not breaks like a twig or a bone, but part of the code in your website does not scale properly for that size of the window. This can lead to parts of your site not displaying properly, or potentially at all. As of late 2020, there were roughly 4 billion users who primarily used their mobile devices for internet browsing. If your site does not scale, adjust, and function properly on mobile, crawlers will likely choose another mobile-friendly, superior technical site over yours.
Available Technical SEO Resources
At Symboliq, we have had a lot of experience with web development, websites, and SEO tactics that can improve visibility online. Here are some of our favorite resources for technical SEO:
- AIOSEO Blog is a WordPress plugin that helps optimize your blog pages for technical SEO.
- WordFence is a WordPress plugin that helps secure your website and block spammers, malicious IP addresses, and attacks.
- Google Structured Data Markup Helper can help you produce schema markup coding for your website.
- Symboliq’s Core Web Vitals eBook can help you better understand how to improve your technical SEO with core web vitals.
- SEOptimizer is available as a quick SEO audit and reporting resource to help find any website errors.
More About Symboliq Media
At Symboliq, we want to redefine what a marketing agency is. Utilizing the latest technology and trends, combined with years of industry-leading experience, we bring the positive results our clients demand. We pride ourselves on great work ethic, integrity, and end results. Throughout the years, we have been able to team up with amazing clients to create websites that contain award-winning designs combined with SEO tactics to get them found online across multiple mediums. If you’re needing help with technical SEO tactics, contact us today!
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