In the realm of digital marketing, technical SEO is essential as much as on-page SEO and off-page SEO, for making sure a website is both search engine optimized and user-friendly. It contains different elements that should be considered. In this article, we will dive into what exactly technical SEO is, why it is important, and the different hierarchies of it.
The definition of Technical SEO
It’s basically the process of optimizing a website’s technical elements to improve its search engine ranking and visibility, so technical elements can be anything from the server to actual code on the site to how the code in the website is structured. All of these things are part of a whole system that fits together like a puzzle piece to make sure that your website is both friendly for users and also for the search engines that will be discovering your pages.
It involves optimizing the back-end website infrastructure. back-end meaning, like the servers that the website is hosted on, and the code to make it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and understand the content on your site.
Why is technical SEO important?
It basically improves a website’s crawlability. Without crawlability, the search engines won’t be able to discover new pages on your site; they won’t be able to actually then index them. Without the good loading performance of your site and the indexing performance, you’re just not going to get visible very well. This is the foundation level we need to make sure that the technical SEO’s in place before the content side can actually perform.
Increases website security as well today with GDPR and data protection. It’s very important to make sure the data of your customers is protected and improves mobile friendliness. it’s really important that your website is optimized for mobile friendliness, which increases visibility, of course, because once your foundations are in place, search engines will be able to discover your website pages more and index them, then you’ll be more visible in front of the right audience.
Three Primary Website Elemes
There are three primary website elements we’ll dive into, and each one kind of describes different aspects of what makes up a web page. that will help you understand some of these technical terminologies a bit better as we go through them.
- HTML
Basically, HTML is short for hypertext markup language, and it allows text to be more easily understood by browsers and search engines. It basically creates context around content. because let’s say we have some text on a page. Browsers, servers, Google crawlers, and whatnot won’t know necessarily the importance of that text unless we create a hypertext and markup language around specific pieces. The search engines tell the computers what this text is about—not just the text itself, but it’s a heading; it’s a title; maybe this section is an important tip; it basically gives more context.
- CSS
The next thing is CSS, or what it looks like. CSS is short for Force cascading style sheets, and it basically is a technology that allows the styling of a website. like how it visually looks, and this is amazing because when you go on a site and you see amazing fonts, the colors, and how it’s laid out the different boxes and elements, that’s CSS at work right there. It determines how the HTML elements and fonts are rendered and even animated on the screen. Let’s say you have a heading on your page, and CSS basically determines how large that is, what color it is, what font it is, where it’s placed, how it moves when you resize the window, all of these things.
- Javascript
The third is Javascript and how it behaves. JavaScript is again another type of programming language, a scripting language, and it determines how elements on a website behave when a user interacts with them. This is the interaction layer, so when you’re on a site and you click a button, chances are JavaScript has been used to initiate an action either on the front-end browser side or on the back-end server side. It determines what happens after you do that action. It can also be used for certain actions displaying certain HTML and CSS snippets as well.
Technical SEO Hierarchy
It basically shows you the importance of different aspects of the technical SEO. at the very bottom, it’s the crawlability of your site that’s really important. Without that, search engines or other bots can’t discover your site at all, so you need to have it crawlable.
The next thing is you need to have it indexable, and then you have accessibility, rankability, and clickability. Let’s go through each one in a bit more detail.
- Crawlability
Crawlability is how easy it is for web crawlers to discover pages on your site. This is a number because, without that, they don’t even know your site exists or the new pages that you created exist.
- Indexability
Then it’s indexability—how well your pages are set up to be indexed in search engines. They may be crawlable, but they may not be indexable, which means that they won’t even show up in search engines, so that’s the next stage.
- Accessibility
Next is accessibility—how well-optimized your website is for user experience. absolutely important because user experience is number one, especially in Google’s eyes, and how easy it is to interact with and navigate on your website.
- Rankability
Next is rankability; this has to do with content optimization authority, credibility, and trustworthiness. There are a lot of different factors here: how rankable is that page on Google, and how high will it rank for specific search terms?
- Clickability
This has to do with how engaging or sticky the content is to track users to the website, the bounce rate, like how long they stick on a page before leaving or how long they stay and then check out other pages, and then time per session—how long are they on the site for when they discover your page? All of these go hand in hand.
This is one aspect of technical SEO. how website pages are logically structured, meaning how they are arranged, how they relate to each other, and how the navigation is designed. the menu bars and the different areas on their site, maybe there are specific links that help navigate the user throughout the site. it determines the user experience but also how equity is distributed. When you get backlinks, when you get links from other third-party sites pointing back to your site and it’s a follow link, that means some of their authority rubs off and gets distributed.
Page Loading Speed
This is the speed at which a website page loads. It could be 1 second; it could be 5 seconds; the slower it is, the worse it is for the user and also for crawlers. You want it as quickly as possible. It’s important for the user experience but also for web crawlers, which may actually time out. if it takes too long to load and Skip those pages, which means it’s not going to crawl them and those pages won’t get indexed. You can use the Google Page Speed Insights tool completely free. Just go to that URL and put it on your website or a specific page. It will tell you how quickly it loads and what improvements to make.
Improving Page-speed
- Optimizing images. Make sure your images are in web-friendly file formats such as JPEG or ideally NextGen formats like webDP, which are extremely compressed and small, and you can load them really quickly.
- Make sure images are resized to fit the purpose of the page; you don’t want an extremely high-resolution image. if you’re only loading it in a small square. If you want to make sure that it’s fit for purpose, you resize it before you upload it. and then make sure that the width and height attributes are defined to avoid layout shifting issues. When you load a page, sometimes you notice it loads and it jumps and the content jumps down. That’s because some of these elements, especially images, don’t have a width and height element and will only show that once the image itself loads, and that causes a bad user experience.
- Optimizing page size Review the image optimization, like we just discussed, and also review third-party scripts or unnecessary or unused plugins. If you use WordPress, use a cache or a similar caching plugin that speeds up the loading of your site as well.
- Use a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Your website, basically, will get distributed over multiple servers around the world; wherever you are, it’s going to load the fastest version of your site, and it will improve the loading speed. It will optimize the media on your site and increase the overall security of your site as well. So managed platforms like Wix, Spare Squarespace, and WordPress.com already have this built into their systems, but if you have a self-hosted site or your own custom platform, then you may need to get a content delivery network just to speed up the loading.
- Reducing third-party scripts: remember this rule: fewer scripts equal faster loading times. You want to be highly selective. Ideally, combine functionalities into one platform and one or one plug-in and you can use a tag manager like Google Manager to allow you to easily manage the scripts from one place. You make sure that you don’t overclutter it or out too many scripts because that will just slow down the loading of your site as well.