Technical SEO: A Guide To Improving Technical SEO on Your Website

Technical SEO is the process of improving a website’s architecture to enhance its crawlability & indexing by the search engine (Google) bots to achieve higher Google organic rankings.

But how do you know if the technical SEO of your website is good or bad?  How important is technical SEO in reality?

Modern SEO in itself is holistic in nature, which means the website as a whole has a huge impact on the ranking of individual pages.

Hence, even if your content is worth reading and you build enough backlinks for the website to run a small network, messing up technical SEO will drag your rankings down. You would not achieve the Google rankings your content and the backlinks you created deserve if your technical SEO is subpar. 

Now, it might be daunting for you to deal with technical SEO, but you still want to learn & maybe implement those learnings on the website and why you are still reading this blog. Hence in this blog will explain every detail you need to know about technical SEO that you, as a website owner or developer, should know. 

We will try to answer all your questions, such as, What is technical SEO, and Why is it important for a website?

What are the differences between on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO?

Finally, we outline 6 actionable tips for improving a website’s technical SEO, which can help boost your page views by improving search engine rankings.    

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is defined as the process of improving a website’s architecture to allow search engines to easily crawl & index its pages. Along with ranking strategies such as creating content worth reading and link building, technical SEO helps a website to rank better in any search engine.  

In Other words, technical SEO is a process of examining the website’s architecture to remove the friction points that can hamper its proper indexing and crawling by search engine bots.

Why Technical SEO Is Important?

As explained earlier, technical SEO is crucial for your SEO. It can make or break a website’s overall SEO rankings. Without a good technical SEO strategy, your all endeavors in writing content & building links would result in less than optimal organic rankings.

You might have an aesthetically pleasing website design. However, if the website’s loading speed is low or it glitches when a user clicks on a button, or is not mobile-friendly, it can harm the user experience. Since user experience is a significant ranking factor it would impact your organic ranking & traffic.

The goal of a website owner is to increase organic traffic. This is only possible when your website is technically optimized to ensure Google and other search engines can easily crawl & index it..  

The Difference Between On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, And Technical SEO

On-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO are three different parts of the Search Engine Optimization puzzle, together they define how a website would do in google search. But there are several key differences among them. 

Let’s see the key difference between on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. 

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) is a set of optimization techniques that can be done within the website. This process can involve keyword research, developing content, adding title & subtitles, alt text for images and many other techniques that can be done within the website itself. 

What is Off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO (also called off-site SEO) includes optimization processes that can be done outside of the website (or externally). These include link building, content marketing, social media marketing, guest posting, and others. 

How Does Technical SEO Differ From On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO?

Let’s see how technical SEO differs from on-page SEO and OFF-page SEO.

Many website owners know the importance of technical SEO but they often avoid this technical SEO as it looks too complicated and needs them to explore unknown territories. Here, we are trying to make this technical SEO easier by explaining the technical aspects of improving a website.

Improve the Crawling of Your Website.

What is Crawling? and How to Optimize it?

Crawling is a process that Google or other search engines use to find new pages on your website, these bots follow links on your website to discover new pages, content & any updates to your content, they go through the texts, images, videos, PDFs, or anything else that on your website.

In order to rank higher on  Google search, you need to make your website accessible to Google & other search engine bots, you can do this by doing the following,

1.1. Make The Website Structure SEO Friendly 

 A website structure, also known as site architecture, describes how the web pages are interlinked with each other. An organized site structure helps Google find and crawl the website’s content quickly. 

The main goal of making a website’s structure is to reduce the number of orphan pages. Orphan pages refer the web pages that are not connected with the other pages on the website. It is difficult for a search engine like Google to crawl the orphan pages. 

To identify your website’s orphan pages, you can use an online tool like Dofollo. 

1.2. Add a Sitemap to Improve Crawling.

While everything on the website needs to be crawled, sometimes, due to some inconsistency, the content takes more time or never gets crawled. This can decrease your website’s Google crawl rate. 

An XML sitemap allows a website to be crawled effectively. A sitemap consists of URLs of all the pages of your website. So, Google can crawl the page’s links and index them faster. 

Usually, the sitemap of the website is hosted on the domain.com/sitemap URL, there could be other variations of the sitemap where you can have one or more than one index for the site map. One such example would be the site map for this website located at https://rabbitloader.com/sitemap_index/

If you still do not have a sitemap on your website or need to create a new sitemap you can use one of the 3 helpful sitemap creation tools mentioned below.

1. Yoast SEO
2. Screaming Frog
3. Validate XML sitemap

The sitemap you create can then be submitted to Google through the Google search console. 

1.3. Add a robot.txt file.

A robots.txt file is a text file that instructs a search engine bot like Google’s crawler, how to crawl and website. Like other files, it is hosted on a web server. This file is used to block unwanted bots from crawling the website.

For example, the admin page or the backend page doesn’t need to be crawled by Google. Thus, by creating a robot.txt file, you can prevent this.

You can check the RabbitLoader.com’s robot.txt file here, https://rabbitloader.com/robots.txt

 Several online tools are available to create robots.txt. Here we have mentioned 3 tools that would help you generate a robots.txt file:

1. Google Search central
2. SERanking
3. SEOptimer 

URL Structure/ Architecture

A URL is the address of a web page that includes protocol, domain name, and path. It allows users to navigate the website & visit web pages.

 URL optimization can not only help you rank your pages by adding the main keywords in the URL itself, but it also helps you and your visitors understand the website well if you can follow a pattern for the URLs.   

Shorten URL

The unnecessary words or characters in a URL can harm the search engine optimization rankings. A short and simple URL can be typed and read quickly. If there are fewer words in the URL with the right words to denote the content of the webpage it helps immensely in SEO.

To get your URL structure right you can set the URL pattern in your CMS. If you are using something like WordPress you would use the URL pattern option in the setting, which is both low effort & very helpful. 

If you are using a custom developed website you might have to rely on your developer to help you out with it.

URL Best Practices.

Here, we will discuss a few helpful tips for making a URL more efficient and improving search engine Optimization (SEO) rankings. 

1. Always try to use the lower characters in your URL on the website.
2. Instead of using an underscore (_), the best practice is to use a hyphen in order to separate the word in a URL.
3. Avoid using prepositions in the URL. This makes a URL unnecessarily longer.  
4. Always try to include the main keyword in your URL in order to make it more efficient.  

     Breadcrumb

A breadcrumb is a small text navigator that enhances the user experience by indicating location so that the user can easily understand where they are on the website. Therefore, any search engine bots like Google can easily find the understand the URL. 

When you are manually implementing breadcrumbs in your website for better rankings, you need expertise in CSS coding.  

Let’s mention the 3 helpful tools to implement this in your website:

1. Upgrowth
2. Breadcrumbs schema generator
3. SEO Smoothie 

Internal Links

An internal link can be any link that can make connections between two web pages on the same website. In order to navigate the site, users and search bot uses these links. 

Building internal links is important to increase Google’s ranking. Several online tools are available to build internal linking such as dofollo. 

Redirecting URLs 301, 302

301 redirect status indicates to the user and any search engine that the web page is permanently moved and also ensures that they will go to the right page. Where 302 redirect status tells the page is temporarily moved. 

Fix the Broken Pages

Having too many broken pages can negatively impact the user experience as well as SEO rankings. When you see a 404 error on your website, there are two possibilities behind this: either there is a broken page or the user enters a wrong URL. 

To fix this broken page, first, you need to identify them. For this, you can use an online site audit tool like Semrush site audit, Ahrefs Audit Tool and others. 

After finding the broken pages, you need to follow the bellow strategies to fix the broken pages. 

1. Remove the dead link from your website.
2. Update the URLs. 

505 Error 

The 500 error indicates that the server is unable to fulfill the user’s request due to an unexpected condition. This error is also known as an internal server error. 

PageSpeed is another technical aspect of enhancing the user experience and improving the rankings in any search engine like Google. When a slow-loading website can frustrate a user, it can harm your search engine Optimization (SEO) rankings too. 

Let’s see how to optimize the website’s PageSpeed performance. 

 Improve the Performance of Core Web Vitals Metrics

Core web vitals are the set of performance metrics that Google uses to determine the website’s PageSpeed PageSpeed based on initial loading time, visual stability, and page interactivity. For more information check our blog on Core Web Vitals.

While optimizing the performance of core web vitals can require a lot of technical knowledge and effort, you can use an optimization tool like RabbitLoader, which can improve the performance score of First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS), Interaction to Next paint (INP), Speed Index (SI), and other performance metrics. 

Google considers these core web vitals a ranking factor. Therefore, improving the performance of these core web vital metrics can significantly improve Google’s rankings.  

 Boost the Website’s Page Loading Time

Boosting a website’s PageSpeed performance can positively affect the user experience and Google rankings. It is possible by following the below strategies:

• Compress the image file size without compromising the original quality, known as lossless compression.
• Implement a lazy load in non-critical images
• Share the static content among edge servers that are available in the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• Add an efficient caching mechanism for faster rendering of the content.
• Add a link rel=preload in the HTML header for the critical resources.
• Optimizing the web fonts. Please keep in mind, that using web-safe fonts can reduce the improve the initial loading time of a website. 
• Generating Critical CSS
• Reduce the unused CSS rules
• Optimize the JavaScript file by splitting the code and deferring the non-critical JavaScript function. 

As you can see, most optimization strategies involve coding, which can be challenging for a non-technical person. Here RabbitLoader comes into the play. It optimizes your website’s PageSpeed performance by implementing all optimization strategies that are required for improving the PageSpeed performance. 

So, if you want a non-technical solution, you need to install RabbitLoader and improve the PageSpeed performance which can positively affect the Google rankings.  

Improve the Mobile Responsiveness Of your Website 

Google always prioritizes the mobile experience over the desktop. Therefore, your website needs to be mobile-friendly to improve its ranking. Here we will discuss how to improve the mobile responsiveness of a website.  

For Different Size Screens

To perform well for different size screens, a website needs to be optimized properly, especially the image optimization. The best way to do this is to use adaptive or responsive images on the website which can adjust their size with respect to the screen size. 

Implement Encryption For Improving the Website’s Security 

Encryption is a process of hiding the original information with a secret code. By hiding sensitive information, encryption can typically improve a website’s security. In this part, we will guide you on how to improve a website’s security. 

  Adding SSL

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a type of encryption-based security protocol. This SSL protocol secures a website by generating a protection layer between the origin server server and the end user’s browser. 

Because of this SSL protocol, the chance of hacking the end user’s personal information such as contact info, and banking details becomes very low. Therefore, in order to secure the website, add SSL to that website which can lead to improving your Google ranking as well. 

Structured Data (Schema)

Schema is a very common term in structured data that can categorize the content of a website so that a search bot can easily recognize the data. For your better understanding, let us explain the structured data and product schema with an e-commerce website.

Assume you are running an e-commerce site. The time you are adding a schema, a search bot will clearly understand “what the site is about”, “what is the product”, and everything about the website. So that, a search bot can easily index that website’s content. It would increase the Google ranking of your e-commerce website. 

Delete The Duplicate Item From Your Website 

When you use duplicate content on a website, the search bot may become confused and be unable to index properly. Thus, the ranking of that website in any search engine is likely to automatically decrease. 

 Use  Canonical URL

The best way to use canonical URLs is when you have too much duplicate content on a website. When you are using a canonical URL, Google considers the web page as a main or primary page if there are duplicates. Let’s understand with an example. 

Assume you have three duplicate content on your website. So, you need to add a canonical URL for one web page.

Canonical URL: https://rabbitoader.com/blog/

Alternative URL1: https://rabbitoader.com/blog/?page=1

Alternative URL2: https://rabbitoader.com/blog/?page=2

In such cases, a search bot like Google considers the canonical URL for its ranking and indexing.  

Use Pagination 

Pagination is an SEO-friendly website optimization technique to break long content into multiple parts. Let’s understand this pagination with an example. Assume a website RabbitLoader.com’s blog page. 

As you can see in the above image, the page content is very long. If all the content is on the same web page, it requires a lot of scrolling to reach the last element, which can be frustrating for a user. Also, Google can’t index all content properly. 

If you have expertise in JavaScript and CSS coding, you can easily implement pagination manually. Otherwise, you need to use an online tool for pagination such as Pagebreak. 

Conclusion 

As you can see in this blog, technical SEO is just a single thing. It is a combination of a lot of technical aspects. If you have a large website, you need a proper technical SEO specialist in your digital marketing team to find and fix the technical SEO issues. 

This blog is a guide on how to improve the technical SEO for a website and improve the ranking in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings. You can implement the aspects such as:

Optimize crawling, improve the URL structure, optimize the website’s PageSpeed performance, improve the mobile responsiveness of the website, implement encryption, use structure data, delete duplicate items from the website, and use pagination. 

This implementation needs a lot of effort if you want to do it manually. Here also we mention some automation tools to make your work easier. However, when it comes to PageSpeed optimization, you need to install RabbitLoader for an all-in-one solution.   

RabbitLoader will implement all optimization techniques like image optimization, web caching, CSS and JavaScript optimization, and many more optimization techniques that are required to improve the PageSpeed performance of a website. 

So, if you want to improve the user experience as well as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings on the website, don’t waste your time and money with the other plugins. Install RabbitLoader and achieve a 90+ PageSpeed score in Google PageSpeed Insights.