What is Technical SEO And How Can You Improve It?
What is Technical SEO And How Can You Improve It?
Google uses over 200 factors to judge and rank web pages according to SEO research, and around 20% of these factors are based on your website’s technical health. So working on improving your technical SEO is important. But what does that mean these days? And what are the most important tech SEO factors?
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a type of search engine optimization that is all about improving the infrastructure of your website. As the name suggests, it involves optimising the aspects of your website that affect its technical health, from page speed to URL structure.
The aim of these optimizations is to help search engines to crawl, index, and ultimately rank your content while also providing a better user experience to searchers. So, to really understand how to work on your technical SEO, you need to understand how search engines work.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines, like Google, need to discover all of the pages on the internet, understand the content on them, and decide which ones best match each search query made by its users. For context, there are 5.6 billion searches made every day, so Google needs to be efficient, accurate, and fast.
To do this, search engines work in three steps:
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Crawling
Google sends robots, called Googlebots, to discover all the pages on a website. Googlebot does this by starting from the homepage and following all of the links until it runs out of time.
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Indexing
Once Googlebot has collected all the web pages that it can find, it takes a snapshot of them and returns to Google, where the content is processed, understood, and stored in an index next to other related pages.
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Ranking
When someone makes a search, Google will look through its index to find the most relevant pages. It will then rank these results by relevance using complex algorithms.
Technical SEO is about making this 3-step process as efficient and slick as possible to give your content the best opportunity to rank.
How To Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO
When it comes to working on your site’s technical SEO, you need to consider how you can make it easy for Googlebot to access your site, find all the content, understand all of the content, and know when to rank it. This involves optimising several aspects of your website, including:
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- Robots.txt
- XML sitemaps
- Structured data
- 301/302 redirects
- Canonical tags
- Hreflangs
- Noindex / Nofollow
- Structured Data
- PageSpeed optimization
Site Architecture
Tip: Use a Flat, Organised Site Structure
Site architecture is how your web pages are structured and linked in relation to one another. This can include internal links, category structure, menu navigation, and more.
Generally, there are two main types of site structure, only one of which is more effective for SEO and users.
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