Search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on the technical aspects of your website and server can help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more efficiently, which can improve your site’s organic ranking. It’s undeniable that modern search engine algorithms are getting better at finding and understanding content, but they’re still not perfect. Given the vastness of the web, it can be challenging for search engines to properly crawl, index, and rank your website. The primary objective of technical SEO is to improve the website’s underlying technical architecture, such as by making it load faster, be more easily crawled, and be more easily indexed. To improve your site’s visibility in search engines and your visitors’ overall experience, technical SEO optimization is essential.

The primary goal of technical SEO is to facilitate crawling and indexing by search engines. The technical merits of a site include its accessibility, safety, structure, responsiveness, speed, and mobile friendliness. Search engines like Google and Bing will reward you with higher rankings, but the many factors that go into technical SEO also improve the user experience. Better engagement, more conversions, and a higher placement in search engine result pages (SERPs) are the result of the interplay between a solid technological foundation and an improved user experience.

A crawler, index, and sophisticated algorithms work together to power a search engine.

A crawler, bot, or spider constantly navigates the World Wide Web by following links. As soon as it arrives at a website, it will follow all of the links to every page it can access (yes, you can block the crawlers too) and will store the HTML versions of those pages in a massive database known as the index.

When a web crawler returns to your site and finds a newer version of a page, the index will automatically update to reflect the change.

That your web pages can be easily crawled and indexed is what we mean when we talk about crawlability.

Therefore, it is a necessary condition for the existence of your site in search engine results pages.

Using the robots.txt file and meta robots tags effectively can increase a site’s crawlability.

The robots.txt file instructs search engines on which pages to index and which to ignore. The robots.txt file for your site can be viewed at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Lacking a robots.txt file prevents search engines from determining your site’s usability. Although it may exist on your site, it is often handled incorrectly, preventing search engine robots from accessing vital pages. Therefore, if you don’t already have a robots.txt file on your site, you should add one and then double-check to make sure it’s functioning properly.

Meta tags for robots are small pieces of HTML code that tell crawlers how to crawl or index web pages.

While robots.txt tells bots whether or not to crawl a website’s pages, these meta tags provide more specific instructions on how to crawl and index a page’s content.

As a result, you can use robots meta tags to allow or deny crawlers from crawling or indexing any link on your page.

These days, it’s a must that websites load quickly. It’s quite frustrating when web pages take forever to load. In fact, more than 53 percent of visitors will click away from your site if it takes more than three seconds to load. This is why Google started using page speed as a ranking signal in 2010 for desktops and again in 2018 for mobile devices. There are numerous factors that can slow down a page.

Here are a few tips for making your website faster:

• DNS – Change your DNS (Domain Name System) provider to one that is faster.
• Minimize ‘HTTP’ requests – use scripts and plug-ins as little as possible.
• Use web caching – Cache files make it possible for your visitors’ browsers to store your site’s files, which makes your site load much faster.
• Compress your web pages – The total size of a page corresponds with load times more than any other variable.
• Compress your images but not till they get pixelated – Images are the most data-intensive components of a website. As a result, page loads will be quicker if the image sizes are reduced.
• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files – Minification eliminates extraneous whitespaces and comments from code, hence reducing file sizes and improving load times.
• Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network) – Content delivery networks disperse copies of your website among multiple servers. Website visitors will experience a quicker response time by automatically being routed to the server that is geographically closest to them. CDNs also shield sites from going down during peak traffic times.

When identical or similar content appears in many locations on a single or multiple websites, it is referred to as duplicate content.

As search engines place a larger emphasis on the quality of website material, they become increasingly adept at recognising duplicate content online.

Nevertheless, distinguishing original content from copied stuff remains difficult. Thus, search engines receive a negative signal from both of your websites. Even if you have duplicate material on your own website, it might have a negative impact on visitor engagement. Visitors would prefer not to waste time on many pages with identical content.

Due to negative signals sent to search engines and increased bounce rates, duplicate material might harm your rankings.

There are several approaches to dealing with duplicate content:

• Replacing duplicate content with original content
• Remove duplicate content (If the page has already been indexed, use permanent 301 redirects. Otherwise, if your page is linked from other pages on your website or via external backlinks, you will create numerous dead links in its place.)
• Making use of Canonical URLs (for example. Assume you have an e-commerce site with a product page for a shirt in five different colours, each of which has its own URL. As a result, you have duplicate content for all five URLs. In this case, you can use the canonical URL to inform the search engine that the URL for the black t-shirt is the “main” one, while the other four are variations.)

The worst thing that can happen to web browsers is to land on a dreadful “404 Not Found” page. It’s safe to say that a 404 page is terrible for user experience and will drive customers away. Both human visitors and the bots used by search engines despise 404 errors. Consequently, your website should not display any 404 errors.

This, however, is easier said than done. Every website undergoes constant modification; with time, pages are removed, URLs are reorganised, and even users make typos while putting in the address.

It is therefore preferable to enhance the 404 error pages. Make sure to include a statement explaining why the page they are trying to access is now unavailable, as well as links to commonly used pages like the homepage.

If the URLs are written correctly, they will give searchers a glimpse into the content of the linked page.

Site navigation is facilitated by using URLs that are consistent and logical in structure, for instance. You can see that Technical SEO is one of our offerings because this page’s URL is https://seoconsultant.agency/seo-services/technical-seo-services/. Also, Google will see that we include technical-seo under “SEO services.” Including relevant keywords in your URL structure is a good way to increase your page’s relevance, which can have a positive effect on your page’s ranking. Avoiding all capitalization, keeping URLs short and simple, and separating words with a hyphen (-) are also helpful.

Providing a secure environment for your site’s visitors is no longer just an SEO strategy, but rather a fundamental necessity.

Google has made site security a ranking criteria, so it should come as no surprise that the search engine prioritises safe websites over those without encryption. There are a variety of methods available to increase your site’s security, but switching to HTTPS should be your first priority. Information transmitted between a browser and a website is secure when HTTPS is used.

When a website uses HTTPS, the data sent back and forth between the user and the site is encrypted to protect sensitive information.

To use HTTPS on your website, you will need an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate.

When search engines have a sitemap to follow, they are better able to discover, crawl, and index all of your site’s information. In addition to the date a page was last updated, its importance, and the frequency of its updates, it also stores additional relevant information about each page on your website. If your website is new and doesn’t have many external links yet, a sitemap will be a tremendous assistance in getting it indexed by search engines. If your website has thousands of pages, search engines may have trouble discovering them all unless you’ve taken the time to carefully link to each page internally and provide a large number of external links. Sitemaps provide a painless answer to this type of issue. Thus, sitemaps are an indispensable tool for any website. Add sitemaps and submit them to Google and Bing using the respective search engine’s webmaster tools.

In the second quarter of 2020, 51.53 percent of all website traffic came from mobile devices.

As a result, catering to mobile users is essential.

The majority of your site’s traffic almost certainly originates from mobile devices. Therefore, it is crucial to have a mobile-friendly website that loads quickly. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are also increasingly utilised to reduce page load times for mobile devices. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are streamlined HTML versions of regular web pages that load much more quickly than their HTML5 counterparts. But turning on AMP alone won’t make your site automatically accessible on mobile devices. Your website’s mobile friendliness can also be increased by implementing things like a mobile-optimized UI/UX and not using pop-up adverts.

Structured data markup is the code with a fixed format (specified on schema.org) that is added to websites to aid search engines in comprehending their content.

This data results in improved indexing and more relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). Structured data can transmit to search bots various facts about a company, its products and services, price, etc. Structured data also qualifies your material for ‘rich snippets,’ which are highlighted search results that include star ratings, prices, and reviewer information.

Rich snippets are visually appealing and differentiate themselves from other search results. This is why they increase your click-through rate (CTR) and help increase website traffic.

John Mueller of Google once stated that the number of clicks from a site’s homepage to the destination page is given more weight than the number of slashes in the URL. Page depth is the number of clicks required to reach a destination page from the homepage of a website. Consequently, search engines are less likely to crawl pages with greater depth, especially on larger websites. Google prefers to favour indexing URLs with a shallower page depth due to the limited time available to crawl your site. Because of this, you should always organise your websites so that the most important pages are just a few clicks away from the homepage.

Breadcrumbs are a trail of website links that allow visitors to trace their current location and distance from the homepage. Typically, they are shown at the top or immediately beneath the navigation bar. Even Google uses breadcrumb navigation in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Breadcrumbs are highly SEO-friendly; they add internal links to your site, improve its architecture, and encourage visitors to view additional pages. Typically, web designers avoid adding breadcrumbs to a website because they believe they interrupt the page layout. However, strategically placed breadcrumbs are far more beneficial than harmful. Users should be able to see breadcrumbs on your website. Additionally, breadcrumbs should be responsive. If they are visible on mobile devices, ensure that they are sufficiently large or button-like to be clicked.

A 301 redirect indicates that the original page has been moved to a new location. Use them when a page has served its purpose, is no longer needed, or will be deleted permanently. They come in handy when remaking a website and cleaning up the URL structure in preparation for adding fresh, up-to-date material. Redirecting using a 301 status code rather than another type of redirect is recommended since it preserves nearly all of the link value of the original pages. Any time a search engine bot comes across a 301 redirect, it will replace the previous URL in its index with the new one. Meanwhile, all traffic is being diverted to the new address, which features enhanced infrastructure and content. When pages are deleted permanently, they should be redirected with a 301 redirect to prevent search engines and visitors from receiving 404 errors. However, it is not advised to use 301 redirects excessively unless absolutely necessary.

The hreflang element informs search engines of the language and nation of the target audience for a specific page. This property enables a search engine to serve pages to people searching in a certain language or country. If your site targets many countries or people who speak different languages, you should utilise the hreflang attribute to target the appropriate country and demography. In addition, hreflang reduces the likelihood of duplicate content.

You may track, analyse, and enhance your website’s performance on Google, Bing, and Yahoo with no cost at all using Google Search Console and Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools. Submitting your website’s XML sitemap to the console and webmaster tools before launch will help search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo in discovering your site and crawling and indexing it. As an added bonus, both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tool can alert you to any penalties affecting your site, display external backlinks, provide insight into the search terms people use to discover you, monitor technical faults that crawlers notice, etc. You can accomplish even more by linking Google Analytics and Search Console together, such as setting sales goals, tracking conversion, monitoring bounce rates, analysing visitor demographics (geographics, language, age, gender, device, etc.), identifying your most popular pages, determining average session durations, and more.