Technical SEO is a vital part of a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy. It ensures that search bots can easily crawl, index and render your pages. It also improves your website’s speed.
Technical SEO provides several benefits that are difficult to achieve with on-page and off-page tactics alone. The entire team at Rank Boss is on the same page to optimize your site — from SEO pros to web developers.
Crawlability
Crawlability is one of the most basic components of technical SEO, yet it is often overlooked. It affects whether search bots can access and index your website’s pages. It’s also essential for ensuring that your content is displayed in relevant search results. In addition, it’s important to consider if you’re blocking crawlers, which could negatively impact your rankings.
The first step in evaluating your website’s crawlability is to check the site structure. Ideally, your pages should be inter-connected with internal links and have a clear hierarchy. You should also make sure that your XML sitemap is submitted to Google and updated frequently. Additionally, it’s a good idea to reduce the number of nested pages on your site in order to improve crawlability.
When a web crawler visits your site, it starts with the most accessible pages, such as your homepage. It then follows the links on those pages to discover more content and build a comprehensive index of your website’s information. This index is then used to display relevant search results for user queries.
If a crawler cannot access your website, it will not be able to create an index and will not be able to display your content in search results. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your site’s crawlability, such as optimizing your internal linking and reducing the number of broken links. It’s also a good idea to avoid keyword cannibalization, where your pages compete against each other for the same keywords.
Another major factor that affects crawlability is the speed of your website. The faster your website loads, the more likely it is that the search engine bots will be able to crawl and index all of your pages. Additionally, it’s a good practice to regularly test the load time of your pages to ensure that they are loading quickly and correctly.
In addition to improving your website’s crawlability, you can also increase its visibility by adding targeted keyword phrases in the body of your text. This will help the search engines find your website more easily and rank it higher in the SERPs.
Speed
Technical SEO is all about optimizing the underlying code and server level of an ecommerce website to improve its search engine performance. Unlike other digital marketing strategies, which focus on keywords and content, technical SEO digs deep into the structure of your site to ensure that Google can crawl and index it properly. Ultimately, it can improve user experience and search engine ranking.
The first step in technical SEO is to identify the errors that prevent Google from crawling your pages and indexing them correctly. These errors can be analyzed using tools like the Index Coverage Status Report, available in Google Search Console. You can also use these tools to identify the problem areas on each page of your website and take corrective measures.
In addition, technical SEO is focused on ensuring that the pages of your website are mobile-friendly and have a fast loading time. A slow loading speed can result in a high bounce rate and poor user engagement. It can also cause users to abandon your website and choose a competitor’s instead. In order to avoid these problems, it is important to maintain your website and fix errors over time. This can be done with the help of a web developer or SEO expert.
Image SEO is another aspect of technical SEO that involves optimizing the image meta data and alt text to increase the visibility of your webpages in search engines. This can improve your website’s rankings, as well as boost the number of clicks and conversions. This is because images can provide a lot of useful information to search engines, which are primarily text-based and cannot understand the content of your site.
While some people may be tempted to try and optimize their website on their own, it is not always recommended. Tinkering directly with the code of your website can lead to serious mistakes and could negatively impact your site’s search engine optimization. If you have a limited amount of technical knowledge, it is best to leave this task to professionals. Otherwise, you could end up wasting money on a website that does not rank highly in search engines.
Structured data
Structured data might seem like a small detail, but it can make a big difference to your website’s SEO. It helps search engines understand your content better and can create rich snippets that stand out in the SERPs. These snippets are often more informative than traditional snippets, and they can lead to higher organic click-through rates.
Structured Data is a set of rules that help search engines understand what your page is about. It is usually coded in the form of HTML markup that describes the content of a specific page. It is important to note that you should only add structured data to pages that contain relevant information. Avoid adding structured data to irrelevant or duplicate content, as this may negatively impact your SEO performance.
The best way to determine whether or not structured data is beneficial to your site is to run a before-and-after test. To do this, select a few pages on your website and compare their performance over the course of several months in Google Search Console. This will give you a clear picture of how much your structured data affects SEO.
To get started, go to the Google Structured Data Markup Helper and enter your URL. It will then display a list of possible options for your page. Choose the one that best matches your content. For example, if your web page is about a book, choose the “Book Reviews” option. Once you’ve chosen the correct category, press “Submit.” The tool will then generate the code for your webpage. You can also use the Structured Data Testing Tool to see how your structured data will appear in a search engine results page (SERP). The tool uses JSON-LD, which is Google’s preferred format for structured data. It is more scalable and less prone to errors than Microdata. The tool also shows which types of rich snippets can be created using your structured data. JSON-LD is an easy-to-use and flexible method for implementing structured data. It also integrates with social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, by tagging content to be displayed and shared in native formats on those sites.
HTTP errors
HTTP errors are important to identify and fix as they can affect your SEO. These errors are messages sent by the server that your web browser is trying to access. Some of them are informational while others indicate a problem with the website or server.
Some of the most common issues include 404 errors, duplicate content, and incorrectly configured canonical tags. These errors can be fixed by removing the duplicate pages or using 301 redirects to send them to the correct page. Canonicalization issues are also a major issue because Google may prioritize the wrong URL in search results, which can harm your website’s rankings.
Another issue that can have a big impact on your site’s SEO is having too many media files. This can slow down your page load speed, which is a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop searches. You can fix this issue by compressing your images and videos, and using a caching plugin to reduce the amount of data being transferred.
You can also find out what types of error codes your website is sending by running a site crawl. These tools will help you identify and resolve issues quickly. They will also tell you how the site is performing overall, including its crawlability and XML sitemap status. They can also identify errors in your metadata and other technical SEO elements.
Moreover, you can run a website scan to identify other errors that are not as easily identifiable. These issues can include incorrectly configured rel=canonical tags, resolving XML sitemaps, and international SEO. The scan can also detect a number of other errors, such as broken links, improperly formatted meta descriptions, and missing header fields.
One of the most overlooked components of technical SEO is ensuring that your site’s metadata is properly loaded. This is especially true for your title and meta description tags, which are crucial to improving your search engine visibility. You can check if these are loading correctly by viewing the source code of your page. You can also use a tool like Moz’s Page Speed Tool to determine how fast your site is.