In part 2 of our Technical SEO series, our Senior SEO Engineer Anatolii highlights the fundamentals of Technical SEO. With this introduction to Technical SEO, we want to help IT professionals better understand what technical elements impact the website’s SEO performance.
Definition and Purpose of Technical SEO
SEO offers a framework of best practices, technical guidelines, competitive benchmarks and reporting, to improve organic visibility and overall performance of the website.
Technical SEO is about optimizing the technical elements of a website that improve the overall quality and visibility of that website.
The purpose of these technical SEO optimizations are to create a website that delivers a better experience for both search engines and users. And are aimed to improve rankings and conversions.
Technical SEO Essentials
1. Website Crawlability and Indexability
Crawlability: A website is crawlable when search engines can access the website and are allowed to crawl the website’s content.
Search engines continuously crawl the web to discover new and updated content. They do so through web crawlers (sometimes also called a “robot” or “spider”). While crawling the web search engines download text, images, and videos and store information about the pages it finds online.
Crawl issues often happen because of blocked pages, broken links, redirect and server errors, and rendering issues.
Indexability: For a website to be indexed it needs to be crawlable, and meet the search engines content guidelines and policies.
After crawling search engines process and analyze the content, tags, and attributes to understand what web pages are about. And indexes the pages when they meet the search engine’s content guidelines and policies.
Indexing issues are typically caused by crawling issues or overall website and content quality issues; duplicate or thin content, missing or incorrect tags, poor AI-generated content, and content that doesn’t meet the search engine’s guidelines.
2. Website Performance
Page speed is a direct ranking factor for both desktop and mobile search results. This means that faster-loading websites are generally more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than slower-loading websites.
Optimizing page load time can be both very satisfying and easy to implement. Showing direct impact when optimized properly.
Website performance issues happen when pages load slowly, aren’t mobile-friendly, or have unoptimized images and code.
Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Design
Over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, and this number is even higher for websites in Dubai. While it’s not required to have a mobile version of your pages available, we strongly recommend making your website mobile-friendly.
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, bounce rates will be high, conversions low and your rankings are most likely underperforming.
3. Website Architecture and Navigation
Website architecture is the way a website’s pages, content, and links are organized. It helps users and search engines easily find and understand the content by grouping it clearly and logically.
Common website Architecture and Navigation issues are often the result of a poor URL structure, orphan pages, broken links, or a lack of an internal linking strategy.
4. Meta Data & Structured Data Markup
Meta data are snippets of text in a website’s code that describe a page’s content to search engines and users. For instance, the meta title and meta description tags help define a page’s purpose in search results. Structured data, on the other hand, is code added to a website to help search engines understand content in more detail.
Meta Data & Structured Data Markup issues are usually caused by the data being missing, incorrectly implemented, or duplicated.
5. Tracking Implementation
Tracking might not be a traditional part of technical SEO, but tracking a website’s performance is essential to understanding its strengths & weaknesses, what to fix, and what optimization opportunities are worth implementing.
Technical SEO will help IT teams implement, manage, and monitor tracking codes, tags, and attribution models. The tracking issues we come across most are missing and incorrectly implemented tracking code.
6. Technical SEO Audit
Code releases, server changes, browser updates, and other external factors can cause technical SEO issues. Regular (technical) SEO Audits will help keep the website’s SEO elements optimized and make the website perform at its best.
A typical SEO Audit done by the Rankability team reviews over 100 elements that can cause issues and can be optimized.
TL;DR Summary
Technical SEO improves your website’s visibility and user experience by focusing on critical technical elements like crawlability, page load, website architecture, metadata implementation, and tracking.
Regular SEO audits help maintain optimal website performance and allows your team to quickly adapt to evolving search engine algorithm insights, changing web technologies, and competitor behavior.
Shameless plug: Schedule your free consultation
If you want to learn more about Technical SEO, and how SEO can improve your website’s performance, don’t hesitate to schedule a free consult. We are glad to help, no strings attached.
Content Authenticity Statement
90% of this blog post was written by Anatolii, the human, senior SEO Engineer and author of this article. AI helped to create the outline of this article and improved my writing by rephrasing a few sentences.
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Image credits: Amit J. Sharma, fieldinsight.com, nordvpn.com
