What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring your website is fast and user-friendly while being up to search engine guidelines and SEO standards. Improving or achieving this enables the site to be crawled and indexed by Search Engines. Long-term improvements such as these most-often lead to better rankings.
Technical SEO is all about improving a site for users as well as for Google, so it is fast and easy to understand
The best websites rank high in Google (or other search engines). Search engines are not just looking for content and related terms but also the best sites. Technical SEO is integral to building the best website. It is complex, and many SEO companies or business owners are focused on on-page or off-page related activities such as getting the right keywords. The technical parts and building a better website – go unnoticed.
Technical SEO is a subset of On-page SEO. On-Page focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings.
Technical SEO is a Solid Foundation
Technical SEO is where I like to start. It is crucial for short or long-term success. It is also a foundation for almost if not all future efforts. Doing an initial audit helps identity and fixing issues. Then I can stay on top of them to makes sure that future activities are successful. Having the maximum impact on a site means addressing the technical issues, minutiae, and keeping to standards.
Penalization can happen to websites in the rankings due to poor implementation of the structure, slow page load times, server issues, other problems. For the best spot in the rankings, a website needs to be up to Google’s standards. If left unfixed, these technical issues may impact SEO efforts or not being a to achieve the desired rankings. Poor performance and issues on a site often led to users just leaving a website altogether.
Technical SEO is Black and White
Since Technical SEO is comprised of optimizing your site for indexing, making it fast and a good user experience is (mostly) black and white.
A site that loads in 2 seconds is better than a site that loads in 10 seconds. A site that has a correct and submitted XML sitemap to Google is right, where an incorrect or missing sitemap is wrong. A website that is mobile responsive vs. a site that isn’t is going to be preferred, and so on.
For Technical SEO it is mostly comprised of:
- Site Structure and Navigation- The overall structure of a site, including how it is laid out and the URL structure for sub-pages, needs to be optimal – Google focuses on usability and a usable site is one that is easy to navigate and use
- Optimizing for crawling, rendering, and indexing is all about making it easy for search engines to find and index your entire site
- Creating, updating, and submitting an XML sitemap to Google to ensure your website is indexed properly
- Improving load times of a website is getting even more important every single year, and is now a major ranking factor
- Finding Duplicate and thin content that hurt your overall site’s rankings no one wants to see the same things over and over, or poorly written pages – not users and not Google
- Making sure the simple Robots.txt is correct – The Robots.txt is a simple text file in the root directory of your website. It informs the robots used by search engines for which pages of the site to crawl and which skip. A properly configure file is great but a tiny mistake could be disastrous.
- Making sure all the basics like Page titles, Meta descriptions, and H1 data exist on every page and are not duplicated or too long or too shot.
- Reviewing broken links and link handling to see if other pages, internally and externally, whether the rel=nofollow attribute appropriately, and to ensure all links work.
- Implement or check hreflang for international websites
- Using Schema to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
- Mobile compatibility more than 50% of all online traffic is done on mobile devices. That number is rising as smartphones and tablets get more powerful. Making sure a site is mobile responsive is key.
- Using an SSL certificate for security is an important ranking factor
A Better Search Experience
To rank pages, Search engine spiders crawl millions of websites, their links, and content. Spiders, such as Googlebot, visit web pages to keep updated.
To make a website rank the pages and content need to be crawlable, and preferably easy to crawl for a Search Engine Spyder. I make sure Search Engines can identify and understand your website’s structure, core pages, and content.
A Better User Experience
Google wants users to have a great experience. Google updates and changes over the past few years have been increasing. Google is providing searchers with high-quality, trustworthy, and relevant results. They also introduced changes to the SERPs and introduced strict algorithm updates. Multiple studies have shown that boosting a website’s SEO efforts without considering or improving user experience is not possible. User experience and SEO go hand-in-hand.
A Technical SEO Service for Businesses
I help identify, plan and execute best practice technical SEO recommendations and maintain up-to-date knowledge of SEO trends to ensure my freelance service delivers results.
Boost your website performance, make the web a better place, and generate more organic traffic with my Technical SEO services.
Technical SEO for your business website is critical for online success. With a proper initial audit and the right technical optimization, I can give short-term wins. If you want to pursue an on-going or long-term SEO strategy, I can ensure SEO elements are correct and working properly.
Here’s what you can expect when you partner with me:
Technical SEO Audit
I use the latest SEO tools from SEMRush, Moz, and other companies to generate an initial comprehensive audit. I also manually verify elements. Your website performance is a combination of multiple parts. As part of the audit, I also use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix for speed information.
After the initial audit, I offer ongoing reporting to keep track of tasks, improvements, and issues that pop up.
Image Optimization
Many times the heavier a web page gets, it is because of images. Images should be the correct file size, optimized for dimensions and file type. Poorly optimized images can slow down a website.
Speed Optimization
Increase your user engagement and keep your customers happy! A fast web is what users demand. A snappy site encourages your visitors to stay on and browse.
I offer my PageSpeed Optimization Service as part of Technical SEO or as its own service.
A Plan to Fix On-Page Issues
What comes out of my reports is thorough and I know how to fix the items. If your pages are missing title tags or have duplicates I will note every page that has an issue. Such as all the duplicate title tags, overly long, short title tags, or missing title tags. Then we can get started on correcting them with an appropriate written and correct length title.
Website Migrations and Hosting Upgrades
Sometimes just migration to a new server or a hosting upgrade is needed. Slow, cheap web hosts present big issues. Getting to a modern fast web host or VPS that is region-specific to your users is key. If hosting or server issues exist I can help you select and migrate an appropriate and reliable hosting plan.
What Does a Technical SEO Audit Include?
The Technical SEO Audit for the site of your website includes me reviewing and producing a written report that covers the following:
- Page Titles, Missing Page Titles, Long or Short Page Titles
- Duplicate Title Tags, Duplicate H1 and Title Tags, Duplicate H1 Headings, Missing H1 Headings
- Not optimal length, duplicate or missing Page Descriptions
- Thin Content Pages, Low Word Count, Duplicate Content Pages
- Robots.txt and sitemaps checks
- Broken Canonical Links
- 404 Status Codes Errors
- Broken Internal and External Links, Broken Images
- Missing Alt Text for Images, Non-Optimal Image Names
- Security Issues such as SSL/HTTPS, mixed content, and 8 other items
- PageSpeed, Load Times, Hosting, and Server Environment
- Site HTML, CSS, JS, platform, and code analysis
- A quick review of mobile compatibility (mobile responsiveness) on real and simulated devices
- Site navigation analysis
Get the Best Results Possible
SEO is getting more advanced, or more technical. Get the best results possible and keep your website up with search engine guidelines so it can be crawled and indexed without any problems. Since it is black and white the audits and on-going work makes it easy for an experienced SEO like me to improve your site for a positive customer online experience.
Additional SEO Services
I offer a full array of SEO, services not just Technical. I offer the following services:
Get Started with an Expert
I am a Search Engine Optimization Consultant in Albany, New York, with a publicly posted code of conduct and ethics.
If you’re ready to get started contact me.