Beginners Guide To Technical SEO – an Integral Part of on-Page Optimization

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website for crawling and indexing. It can be further defined as optimizing a website such that search engines can crawl, interpret and index effectively.

In other terms, Technical SEO makes a website crawler friendly.

Search engines have their own way of interpreting a website and consider a lot of on-page and off-page activities of the particular site and crawl through it to determine its position on SERPs. All Digital Marketing Companies strive hard to get to the #1 position in SERPs and take a lot of measures to get there.

On-Page Optimizations refers to the process of optimizing a website without any flaws in design, content, images and the overall structure. On-page optimization includes keyword research, title optimization, meta tags, image optimization, generating a sitemap, setting up robot.txt file, etc. In short, on-page refers to the overall actions taken on the website so as to make it user and search engine friendly. All these optimizations are done on-site and are called on-page optimizations.

Off-Page Optimizations refers to all the necessary steps taken to create awareness about the existence of one’s website. In this process brand recognization, backlink generation, and trust-building takes place. All these optimizations are done outside the website and therefore called off-page optimizations.

From the above explanation, we can conclude that technical SEO is an integral part of on-page optimizations as they are meant to be done on-site.

Let’s dig deeper into Technical SEO

All the technical issues/factors that a website needs starting from website building to ranking in SERPs comes under technical SEO.

Firstly, identify the site issues where your site is lagging behind. To do so audit your site to get some knowledge on the site and SEO issues. We have numerous site auditing tools available for free such as Seoptimer and Raven tools.

Step 1: Select a site auditing tool.

Step 2: Paste your URL in the search bar of that tool and start auditing.

Step 3: Get the full site audit report within few seconds.

Step 4: Download and identify the areas that need attention.

Step 5: Rectify the errors.

Here are some of the factors that come under Technical SEO

Site Load Time: It is an important technical SEO metric to check. It is one of the Google ranking factors and also affects other metrics such as bounce rate and time spent on the page.

XML: It is an URL inclusion protocol that explains to search engines about all the URLs available for crawling a website and the last updated stats.

txt: Having a Robot exclusion protocol also called a robot.txt file in a website helps crawlers to identify pages that need not to be crawled or scanned. A robot.txt file is a way of communicating to the crawlers about what to not consider for crawling.

Broken links: Broken links are not just bad for SEO but also bad for user experience and can ultimately lead to a lower ranking.

HTTPS: The “S” in HTTPS stands for “Secured” which implies that it is a secured version of HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTPS is equipped with Secure Socket Layer Protocol that transfers data securely. So search engines prefer HTTPS over HTTP.