In order for your website to rank high in search engines, you need to focus on SEO efforts. In order for a search engine to crawl and index your website and rank it, there must not be certain technical errors. For this reason, you need to fulfill technical SEO work on your website.
Technical SEO combines many strategies that are necessary for your website to run smoothly. For this, you should examine your website with the eyes of an expert and identify errors with technical review with various tools. You should then take action to solve the necessary errors.
If there are no technical errors on your website, your website can be ranked smoothly and rank high in search engines. In this section, we have created a technical SEO guide.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website in accordance with the Google algorithm and eliminating the technical errors necessary for it to be indexed. It is to develop special strategies so that your website can be discovered, indexed and ranked high by Google bots.
The main purpose of technical SEO work is to ensure that your website can be found, crawled and indexed quickly. Technical processes focus on website design, website structure and content structuring.
If you do not structure a content correctly, if you do not optimize visual and other elements on your website, if you do not make the code structure smoothly, you will have technical problems.
In our content, we looked at the question of what is Technical SEO. Now let’s take a look at how technical SEO should be structured.
Why Technical SEO is Important?
Technical SEO is very important if you want to drive traffic to your website and perform well in search engines. Learning technical SEO is a necessary process for your website to be discovered in search engines.
By implementing technical SEO strategies on your website, you can have a better quality website for both search engines and users.
If you optimize your website for mobile users and increase site speed, users will have a better experience and your website’s SERP performance will increase. Whether you have a small website or manage a very large e-commerce site, you should have a technical optimization strategy.
Technically flawless websites are easier for search engine bots to find, understand, index and list in SERPs. The title, description and content of your web page can be relevant and engaging. In this way, you can attract more organic traffic in SERPs.
If you do your technical SEO well, your website will run smoothly on different screen types. The experience is also good, especially for mobile users. Thanks to the HTTPS protocol, you can make your website a safe place to visit for users and search engines. While strengthening the technical features of your website, you work for both search engines and your visitors.
Fundamentals and Importance of Technical SEO
Technical SEO work is not just about your website’s crawling and indexing problems. Your work in this direction aims to provide a better experience for users. It also ensures that search engine bots can find your website.
If we make a list about technical SEO basics, we can count crawling and indexing, page loading speed, content quality, image optimization and sitemap. We can also add hosting performance, security issues, structured data, mobile experience and desktop experience, meta tags, navigation experience and hierarchy.
Now we will move on to the question of what Technical SEO does and examine all the basic topics.
Effects of Technical SEO on Website Performance
Learning technical SEO ensures that your website ranks high in search engines. If a website is smooth in terms of speed, site structure, security, different device experiences, search engines can easily find your website.
Websites without technical errors can be easily indexed. At the same time, users have a smooth experience no matter which device they enter from. Websites with strong technical SEO are secure, open fast, work smoothly on every device and rank high in search engines.
Site Architecture and URL Structure Optimization
One of the most important technical SEO mistakes is not optimizing the site architecture and URL structure. If your website’s architecture is bad, crawling and indexing problems can occur.
Google bots find correctly structured sites more easily and discover web pages more easily. In this way, your web pages get indexed more easily.
Your site structure affects all other technical issues in the SEO guide. A strong architecture and a URL structure suitable for SEO will make your optimization efforts more successful and smooth. At the same time, your URL structure should be consistent and correctly categorized.
Crawlability and Indexability: Site through the Eyes of Search Engines
Having your website crawlable and indexable is important for reaching users. Google has a very simple system for crawling and indexing a website. However, this process can become a bit complicated.
Google bots start crawling the internet and navigate between websites to discover new web pages. They crawl pages on websites while collecting URLs. The text, image and video content found on a crawled page is analyzed by Google.
Google categorizes this content by search term and search intent. The web pages crawled and analyzed by the bots are indexed and then displayed on the pages. Google carries out this process as automation. You need to fix all technical errors so that your website can be crawled and indexed.
Speed Optimization: Improving Load Times
When we ask what technical SEO is, site speed and page speed are the most important titles. While page speed refers to the loading time of a web page, site speed is the average opening speed of all your web pages.
Fast loading sites rank high in Google SERPs. Users always want the web pages they browse to open fast. For better SERP performance and user experience, you should always make sure that your web pages load in less than 3 seconds.
You can take the following steps to improve load times;
You can minimize the code structure by cleaning unnecessary code.
You can use cache plugins on your website.
You can do Google Pagespeed test and apply the suggestions it offers you.
Minimize the images on your website and add description text.
Use a content delivery network to reduce your page load time.
Minimize redirects on your website.
Don’t forget to use browser caching.
Develop strategies to improve server response time.
The Importance of Mobile Compatibility and Responsive Design
After the “Mobile-First Indexing” update, Google only adds the mobile version of a page to the index. For this reason, you must have a mobile-friendly website to be included in the SERPs.
A significant portion of internet users spend time on mobile devices. For this reason, a quality website must be mobile compatible. Your website should also have a responsive design.
Responsive design is the smooth operation and display of your website on all devices with different screen types and sizes within mobile and desktop devices. If you do not have a mobile version, you may have indexing problems, and if you do not have a responsive design, you may not get full marks from the user experience.
The Role of SSL Certificates and Security Settings
SSL certificate is a security certificate that encrypts the information of users who log in to your website and allows the recipient to receive this information encrypted. With this certificate, users’ personal information is protected and users are safe on your website.
You can also get SSL certificate service from the server you receive hosting service. Google prioritizes secure websites. For this reason, sites with SSL certificates in SERPs rank in the front rows. At the same time, users also attach importance to having this certificate on the site.
If you do not have an SSL certificate, your website will be displayed in browsers with the warning “This website is not secure”. In this case, many users will leave your website. Therefore, make sure you have an SSL certificate.
Tools for Technical SEO
At the end of our technical SEO article, which is a beginner’s guide to SEO, we will explain the tools you can use. With technical SEO tools, you can perform a technical SEO audit of your website, find existing errors and incorrect practices, and find suggestions for correcting technical errors. Some of these tools are paid and some are free.
The most popular technical SEO tools are as follows;
Google Search Console
Dopinger SEO analysis tool
GTmetrix
Screaming Frog
Page Modified
SEOmator
SEMrush Site Audit
Google PageSpeed Insights
Ahrefs Site Audit Tool
DeepCrawl
OnCrawl
The post What is Technical SEO? 8 Steps to Implementation (2024) appeared first on NSF News and Magazine.