What is Technical SEO & Why It’s Important
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial aspect of digital marketing that aims to help businesses rank higher on search engine results, helping to increase their online presence and driving more organic traffic (and hopefully sales or conversions) to their website. Technical SEO in particular refers to the optimisation of the website’s technical elements (including coding and server aspects) to ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl, index and understand the content of the site.
Website Speed
High up the pecking order of this is website speed or download speed. Search engines consider site speed as a crucial ranking factor, which means the faster a website can load, the higher its ranking potential. To improve site speed, technical SEO entails optimising elements such as images and videos, using a content delivery network (CDN) if possible to reduce latency (slowing down or bottle-necking of data sent between computers or networks) and the efficient use of caching systems.
Responsiveness
Another important aspect of technical SEO is a website’s responsiveness, often called mobile responsiveness (for mobile phones and iPads). With more than 60% of internet users accessing websites on mobile devices, search engines recognise mobile responsiveness as an essential ranking factor. Technical SEO then includes optimising a website’s design to be mobile-friendly and ensuring that it can adapt to different screen sizes, browsers and devices.
URL Structure
URL structure is another huge factor in technical SEO. The organisation of the website’s information architecture is crucial in helping search engines understand the content and structure of a website, to sort the information appropriately. Technical SEO focuses on optimising the website’s URL structure to ensure that it is simple and easy to understand for both users and search engines and that information and navigation of the website is intuitive.
Metadata
Most people have heard of website metadata. This is simply information on your website (or data) that classifies the rest of the information on your website. Website metadata includes page titles, meta descriptions and headers. Metadata provides search engines with a brief summary of what a page is about, making it easier to determine its relevance to a user’s search.
Structured Data and Schema
This involves optimising your website’s structured data and schema markup. This is becoming more important in SEO and has come to prominence in recent times. Like metadata but more advanced in its classifications, structured data and schema allow you to drill down more specifically into labelling the information and type of products, services or content that your website contains. For example, there are preset catalogues of information for certain types of web pages such as jobs, recipes and e-commerce products which allow websites to put markers on certain types of information in a way that search engines look Google and Bing can understand easily, such as price, size, shipping, ingredients, salary and so on. It’s handy for website owners because the search engines favour websites with their data in a standardised or structured way, and then you can appear more visible including higher in the rankings and in rich snippets and image results.
Your SEO Must Be A Technical Expert
Technical SEO is instrumental in ensuring search engines can crawl, index and understand a website’s content efficiently and easily with the best chance of the website performing well in searches. By optimising a site’s technical aspects, businesses can improve their online visibility, attract more organic traffic and consequently increase business. It’s imperative to work with a professional SEO consultant that understands technical SEO and has a proven track record of ranking clients’ websites higher on search engines like XLWEB.