What Is Technical SEO? Basics and Best Practices

Technical optimization is key for improving a website's ranking across search engines. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website's technical aspects. Site map, page speed, schema markup, link building, structured data, and other technical aspects are included in the technical SEO process.

Put simply, it's fine-tuning your website to make it search engine-friendly and more accessible for search engines to find, understand, store and rank your web content.

Although understanding technical SEO can be daunting for many, we've created this guide to help you clearly comprehend why it's crucial, the best practices for its execution, and whom to choose for excellent technical SEO services. This should give you the confidence and security you need to navigate the world of technical SEO ever so easily.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves practices and processes that include optimizing websites' technical areas. It consists of a range of optimization tasks, from robots.txt to web structure and from page speed to URL structuring.

Furthermore, technical SEO is not just a series of practices; it's a gateway to unlocking your website's potential. By improving search engine crawlability, achieving higher SERP rankings, and enhancing website performance, technical SEO can significantly elevate your website’s visibility and ranking.

Technical SEO improves your site's user experience. For instance, if the page loads fast and the user attains the information without any hiccups, the user experience is improved, increasing the chances of revisits.

What are Technical SEO Best Practices?

Now that we know how essential technical SEO is for a website’s online visibility, improving SERP rankings, and enhancing search engine crawlability, let’s look at its best practices. These are as follows:

1.    Improving the Page Speed

Initially, you should strategize to increase your website's speed. As mentioned earlier, a website with a fast load time is appreciated by both web surfers and search engines. A faster website means quicker content, image loading, and less wait time for surfers. The following are the ways you can increase your page speed.

●     Optimizing Images: Compress images to reduce the file size. Besides faster image lading, it also helps maintain the quality and ensure that graphics are not compromised.

●     Minifying CSS and JavaScript: Remove unnecessary codes to make your website-built code easy to understand and read for the search engines.  

●     Minimizing HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of web page components. This decreases HTTP requests and enhances web page performance.

2.    Submission of Sitemaps

Sitemaps encompass all the URLs of the websites and additional information on the URLs. A sitemap enables search engines to understand your website and its content seamlessly, making it easy to index all the URLs. A well-indexed website can help you get good SERP rankings.

Mainly, there are two types of sitemaps, which include HTML and XML. You must submit XML sitemaps on Google Search Console for search engines like Google. XML sitemaps can provide valuable metadata about URLs and information such as the date of the last update and the page's priority relative to other pages on the site.

3.    Site Structuring

Site structuring refers to the ways web pages are linked together. When performing technical SEO on your website, it is essential to consider that your web structure is SEO-friendly. An SEO-friendly web structure enhances your website's search engine crawlability.

Besides improving search engine crawlability, SEO-friendly content structuring of your website ensures that all the pages are navigable.

4.    Removal of Content Duplications 

Content duplication refers to homogeneity among URLs or your website's content. Although it doesn't adversely affect search engine elements like SERP and web crawling, it does cause wasted crawling budgets, undesirable URLs, and backline dilution.

For this reason, you should remove the content duplication. There are various ways to minimize and manage content duplication. These include parameter handling, 301 redirects, and canonical tags.

5.    Optimizing Robots.txt File

The Robots.txt file is allocated in a website's root directory. It instructs the bots, which are crawlers, about inaccessible pages and files. Optimizing the Robots.txt file enables you to manage how search engines access and index your website. 

Moreover, it also helps crawl and index crucial pages and limits access to constituents and web pages with sensitive content. Also, optimizing the robots.txt file can contribute to better crawl budget allocation, where search engines allocate resources to crawl and index pages on your site.

Conclusion

Understanding technical SEO and implementing best practices is crucial for improving online visibility, enhancing SERP rankings, and providing a better experience for search engines and users. Businesses can significantly elevate their website's performance and visibility by focusing on technical aspects such as page speed, site structure, sitemaps, content duplication, and robots.txt optimization. 

If you want to enhance your website’s online presence and boost its traffic, consider partnering with a trusted technical SEO service provider, such as SMB Services. By prioritizing technical SEO, SMB services can increase your website’s SERP rankings and ultimately grow your business.

Take the first step toward improving your online visibility today by contacting our team for expert technical SEO services tailored to your needs. Elevate your online visibility and drive desired results with comprehensive technical SEO solutions.