{"id":90560,"date":"2024-05-20T12:11:19","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T04:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tanyadigital.com\/?p=90560"},"modified":"2024-05-20T12:11:31","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T04:11:31","slug":"what-is-technical-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tanyadigital.com\/sg\/what-is-technical-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Technical SEO? The Basics and Best Practices Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
Technical SEO, often referred to as website optimization or technical optimization, refers to the practice of ensuring a website meets all of the technical requirements for being crawled, indexed, and displayed in search engine results.<\/p>
It involves optimizing various technical aspects of a website like the site architecture, URL structure, page speed, crawlability, indexability, mobile-friendliness, and more. Technical SEO lays the crucial groundwork for higher search visibility by eliminating barriers that block search engines from easily accessing and understanding a site’s content.<\/p>
While on-page SEO factors like keywords and content optimization matter, even the most well-optimized content won’t rank well if there are major technical issues holding the site back from being properly crawled and indexed.<\/p>
That’s why mastering the SEO fundamentals and best practices around technical optimization is so essential – it creates the ideal conditions for search engines to accurately discover, interpret and rank your site.<\/p>
Technical SEO encompasses all of the behind-the-scenes elements related to how a website is built, structured and coded. It focuses on ensuring web pages meet search engine standards for:<\/p>
The goal is to identify and resolve any barriers related to these core areas so that search engines can smoothly crawl a site, interpret its content and layout, and include it in relevant rankings.<\/p>
Properly handling technical SEO helps maximize the crawl budget usage, ensures no duplicate content issues, prevents soft 404 errors, maintains a strong site architecture, and upholds overall technical SEO health.<\/p>
Technical SEO optimization is absolutely crucial for several key reasons:<\/p>
You can have great content, but without technical SEO in place, search engines may not even be able to find, access or accurately interpret that content. Fixing technical issues first provides the scaffolding for other SEO efforts to be effective.<\/p>
Many technical SEO best practices like fast page speeds, mobile-friendly design, clean URLs, etc. directly impact usability and the overall experience for website visitors.<\/p>
Major technical issues with areas like duplicate content or security could potentially lead to manual actions or ranking penalties from search engines.<\/p>
By optimizing crawlability and addressing wasted crawl budgets, more of a site’s content can get crawled and indexed.<\/p>
Keeping up with technical SEO allows utilizing advanced capabilities like rich results, dynamic rendering, mobile-indexing firsts, and structured data enhancements.<\/p>
Neglecting core technical SEO aspects can severely hamper even the best content optimization efforts. That’s why conducting regular technical SEO audits is so important.<\/p>
One of the most fundamental aspects of technical SEO is ensuring search engine bots can properly discover and access all of the desired content on a website. This process is called “crawling.”<\/p>
Here are some key best practices around optimizing a site for crawling:<\/p>
The way a website is structured and organized has a huge influence on crawlability. Some tips for SEO-friendly site architecture:<\/p>
The goal is a well-organized site architecture that gives search bots easy access paths to all of the most important pages on the site while communicating content relationships.<\/p>
An XML sitemap file lists out all of the URLs and key metadata for a website in a format easily readable by search engines. Creating and submitting one provides a virtual roadmap to help find all pages.<\/p>
Some tips around XML sitemaps:<\/p>
Additionally, you can create image, video, news, and other specialized sitemaps depending on the type of content.<\/p>
Utilizing an XML sitemap helps search engines discover new and updated content faster while understanding a site’s most important pages and hierarchy.<\/p>
Even after content is successfully crawled, webpages still need to be properly indexed by search engines in order to be ranked and displayed in search results. Technical SEO also plays a big role in optimizing for indexing.<\/p>
The `noindex` meta tag is used to prevent search engines from indexing a specific page. When used properly on pages like login portals or staging environments, it prevents clutter in the index.<\/p>
However, be very careful about using noindex unnecessarily, as it can lead to vast sections of a site unintentionally dropping out of search engine indexes entirely.<\/p>
The `rel=canonical` tag helps indicate to search engines the preferred singular version of a page that should be prioritized in rankings if there are duplicates, pagination sections, or other alternate versions around.<\/p>
For example, if a page can be accessed via `https:\/\/example.com\/product` or `https:\/\/example.com\/product?ref=123`, using a self-referencing canonical tag (`<link rel=”canonical” href=”https:\/\/example.com\/product”>`) consolidates ranking signals to the preferred URL.<\/p>
Using canonical tags properly prevents duplicate content dilution while helping search engines understand the authoritative version to index.<\/p>