Technical SEO is about improving a website’s technical aspects to increase its pages’ ranking in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other channels.
Why should you optimize your site technically?
Google and other search engines want to present their users with the best possible results for their queries. Therefore, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on many factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, among others, structured data does. So, by improving technical aspects, you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If you do this well, you might be rewarded with higher rankings. Or even earn yourself some rich results!
It also works the other way around: if you make severe technical mistakes on your site, they can cost you. You wouldn’t be the first to block search engines entirely from crawling your site by accidentally adding a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file.
But you should not focus on the technical details of a website to please search engines. A website should work well – be fast, straightforward, and easy to use – for your users in the first place. Fortunately, a solid technical foundation often coincides with a better user and search engine experience.
What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?
A technically sound website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about. It also prevents confusion caused by, for instance, duplicate content. Moreover, it doesn’t send visitors, nor search engines, to dead-ends caused by non-working links. Here, we’ll shortly go into some critical characteristics of a technically optimized website.
It’s fast
Nowadays, web pages need to load fast. People are impatient and don’t want to wait for a courier to open. In 2016, research showed that 53% of mobile website visitors will only leave if a webpage opens within three seconds. And the trend hasn’t gone away – a study from 2022 suggests e-commerce conversion rates drop by roughly 0.3% for every extra second it takes for a page to load. So, if your website is slow, people get frustrated and move on to another website, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.
Google knows slow web pages offer a less-than-optimal experience. Therefore, they prefer web pages that load faster. So, a slow web page also ends up further down the search results than its faster equivalent, resulting in even less traffic. Since 2021, Page experience (how fast people experience a web page to be) has officially become a Google ranking factor. So, having pages that load quickly enough is more important now than ever.
It’s crawlable for search engines.
Search engines use robots to crawl or spider your website. The robots follow links to discover content on your site. An excellent internal linking structure will ensure they understand the most essential content on your site.
But there are more ways to guide robots. You can, for instance, block them from crawling certain content if you don’t want them to go there. You can also let them crawl a page but tell them not to show this page in the search results or not to follow the links on that page.
You can give robots directions on your site by using the robots.txt file. It’s a powerful tool that should be handled carefully. As we mentioned initially, a small mistake might prevent robots from crawling (essential parts of) your site. Sometimes, people unintentionally block their site’s CSS and JS files in the robots.txt file. These files contain code that tells browsers what your site should look like and how it works. Search engines can’t determine if your site works appropriately if those files are blocked.
All in all, we recommend diving into robots.txt if you want to learn how it works. Or let a developer handle it for you!
The robot’s meta tag is a piece of code you won’t see on the page as a visitor. It’s in the source code in the so-called head section of a page. Robots read this section when finding a carrier. In it, they’ll discover what they’ll find on the page or what they need to do with it.
If you want search engine robots to crawl a page but keep it out of the search results, you can tell them with the robot’s meta tag. With the robot’s meta tag, you can instruct it to crawl a page but not follow the links on the page. Yoast SEO makes it easy to noindex or nofollow a post or page. Learn for which pages you’d want to do that.
It needs to have (many) dead links.
We’ve discussed that slow websites are frustrating. What might be even more annoying for visitors than a slow page is landing on a page that doesn’t exist. If a link leads to a non-existing page on your site, people will encounter a 404 error page. There goes your carefully crafted user experience!
Moreover, search engines prefer to avoid finding these error pages too. And they tend to find even more dead links than visitors encounter because they follow every link they bump into, even if it’s hidden.
Unfortunately, most sites have (at least some) dead links because a website is a continuous work in progress: people make things and break things. Fortunately, some tools can help you retrieve dead links on your site. Read about those tools and how to solve 404 errors.
It would help if you always redirected a page’s URL when you delete or move it to prevent unnecessary dead links. Ideally, you’d redirect it to a page that replaces the old page. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can easily make redirects yourself. No need for a developer!
It doesn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content.
Search engines might need clarification if you have the same content on multiple site pages or other sites. Because if these pages show the same content, which one should they rank highest? As a result, they might give all pages with the same content a lower ranking.
Unfortunately, you might have duplicate content issues without even knowing it. Because of technical reasons, different URLs can show the same content. This doesn’t make any difference for a visitor, but a search engine will see the same content on a different URL.
Luckily, there’s a technical solution to this issue. With the so-called canonical link element, you can indicate what the original page – or the page you’d like to rank in the search engines – is. In Yoast SEO, you can easily set a canonical URL for a page. And, to make it easy for you, Yoast SEO adds self-referencing canonical links to all your pages. This will help prevent duplicate content issues you might not even know about.
It’s secure
A technically optimized website is a secure website. Making your website safe for users to guarantee privacy is essential nowadays. You can do many things to make your (WordPress) website fast, and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.
HTTPS ensures that nobody can intercept the data between the browser and the site. So, for instance, if people log in to your site, their credentials are safe. You’ll need an SSL certificate to implement HTTPS on your site. Google acknowledges the importance of security, making HTTPS a ranking signal: secure websites rank higher than unsafe equivalents.
You can quickly check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers. On the left-hand side of the search bar of your browser, you’ll see a lock if it’s safe. If you see the words “not secure,” you (or your developer) have some work to do!
Plus, it has structured data.
Structured data helps search engines better understand your website, content, or business. With structured data, you can tell search engines what kind of product you sell or which recipes you have on your site. Plus, it will allow you to provide details about those products or recipes.
There’s a fixed format (described on Schema.org) where you should provide this information so search engines can easily find and understand it. It helps them to place your content in a bigger picture. Here, you can read a story about how it works and how Yoast SEO helps you with that. For instance, Yoast SEO creates a Schema graph for your site and has structured data content blocks for your How-to and FAQ content.
Implementing structured data can give you more than a better understanding of search engines. It also makes your content eligible for rich results, those shiny results with stars or details that stand out in the search results.
Plus, It has an XML sitemap.
Simply put, an XML sitemap is a list of all pages of your site. It serves as a roadmap for search engines on your site. With it, you’ll ensure search engines get all vital content on your site. The XML sitemap is often categorized into posts, pages, tags, or other custom post types and includes the number of images and the last modified date for every page.
Ideally, a website doesn’t need an XML sitemap. If it has an internal linking structure that connects all content nicely, robots won’t need it. However, not all sites have a great design, and having an XML sitemap won’t do any harm. So, we’d always advise having an XML site map on your site.
Plus, International websites use Hreflang.
If your site targets more than one country or multiple countries where the same language is spoken, search engines need a little help understanding which countries or languages you’re trying to reach. If you help them, they can show people the right website for their area in the search results.
Hreflang tags help you do just that. You can use them to define which country and language each page is intended to serve. This also solves a possible duplicate content problem: even if your US and UK sites show the same content, Google will know they’re written for different regions.
Optimizing international websites is quite a specialism. If you’d like to learn how to make your international sites rank, look at our Multilingual SEO training.
