What is Technical SEO? – The Definitive Guide!

You want to make your website reach a wider audience, right? We are aware of that, so we have developed Screpy! Today we’re going to talk with you about the technical SEO, which you should definitely have a checklist for to reach a wider audience.

You may think that you have made your site “capable of keeping the user inside” with some content optimization efforts. But unless you do the necessary technical SEO, you may still be missing a large part of the audience. And hey, your effort deserves more than that!

Today we’ll go over what technical SEO is. If you’re ready, let’s first explore what the point is.

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What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of scanning your website in-depth and optimizing the problematic details that will not pass through the audits. You know Screpy, the continuous tracking, uptime monitoring and Google Lighthouse integration made in this process will give you information about all technical issues. But still, it can be beneficial for you to explore what is Technical SEO theoretically and get to know the world of search engines.

Actually, on-page SEO includes technical SEO. Because everything you do within technical SEO processes is related to the specific web page itself:

the speed of that page, its URL, the sitemap, and more.

So now you know the answer to the question “what is the difference between on-site SEO and technical SEO?” is ready: Technical SEO is a sub-category that requires only technical optimizations of your site.

Knowing How Do Search Engines Work Matters for Technical SEO

The technical SEO specialists know very well how search engines work. They know how search engines crawl your site through bots or spiders before ranking your site in relevant searches, what exactly happens during rendering, and what kind of situations indexing can be blocked. Experts organize every detail, from the source code of your site to other commands that direct search engines within your site, according to the requirements and behavior patterns of search engines.

A little note: a 2017 study by seoClarity, BuzzStream, and Medium revealed something very valuable about the importance of technical SEO: According to the result of the study, approximately 59 percent of experts prioritizes technical issues in their SEO strategies.

Such a high percentage can’t be wrong, is it?

So are you ready to continue with the checklist for Technical SEO? We are absolutely ready!

Site Architecture

Think of your website as a complex city. In this city, the healthy connection of highways, transportation networks, and living spaces with each other brings order. Otherwise, it will mean an extremely chaotic and problematic city, we wean, a website, both for the user’s experience and for bots to crawl your site.

What was the crawling? Hey, we mentioned it in how do search engines work: Crawling is the process of search engine bots going from one link to another on your site and navigating your site along with links. If bots, for example, Googlebots, cannot do this comfortably, you will have too many pages on your website that cannot be indexed because they cannot be reached to be crawled.

Would we like this?

No way!

Moreover, this will make it difficult not only for bots but also for your visitors to find what they are looking for on your website.

What about XML Sitemap?

Having a sitemap file that acts as a kind of sketch for your site can allow search engines to navigate your site more easily. Thanks to the XML sitemap file, you tell search engines “especially crawl these pages and add them to the index“.

This allows you to mark the pages you want to highlight and organize your site. This map, which you usually make to guide and direct the navigation and indexing behavior of various tools such as Googlebots, provides Googlebots with various information about the importance and functions of the pages and allows them to scan your site without error.

Recent research says XML maps are one of the most important crawling resources used by Googlebots. First URLs, then hyperlinks, and then direct XML sitemaps. Because thanks to these, Googlebots’s job is getting easier.

What does sitemap do?

So what does the sitemap inform Googlebots about?

1. The importance and hierarchical features of the pages,
2. The last update date of the pages,
3. How often pages are changed
4. Alternative language versions that apply to pages

What are the benefits of sitemaps?

With Sitemap, you can benefit from the following advantages:

1. The indexing process may take less time.
2. Your deep pages are easily included in the indexing process.
3. You can follow the indexing process more easily with URLs.

A little note: Sitemap files do not directly affect ranking and are not considered a requirement. However, they can be beneficial for a very complex and busy site to direct the search engines.

Mobile-Friendly Optimization

One of the most important features of technical SEO is that it requires speed, performance, and on-page experience optimization in a mobile-friendly manner.

You’ve heard of mobile-first indexing, right? This concept reveals that Google is now accepting mobile versions of websites as the primary version. So we are not talking about mobile pages anymore as an alternative to the “desktop version”. Google now evaluates mobile pages as the main source in the indexing process.

Research conducted by Impact Plus in 2019 shows that 52 percent of internet users worldwide are connected to the internet via mobile devices and 45 percent with desktop. So mobile performance may be more important than you think. For this, try the following:

1. Identify pages with Excessive RTRs and choose to optimize them. Otherwise, you may get 301 and 302 responses.
2. Edit the rendering order, and thus shorten the time it takes for search engines to display your site to the user.
3. Minify HTML, CSS, Javascript files and get rid of unnecessary files to speed up the page load. Also remember, it is always useful for a page load to not exceed 150 bytes for a file.
4. Increase user experience by using caches.
5. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) always work.

Make Sure There Are No Error Pages (404)

Consider a route that causes you to come across dead-end streets. The user will not like this route either, nor will the application that provides navigation information to the user.

Just like that, if you often have pages that fail to load due to 404 errors, search engines avoid ranking you high and your site visitors will stop choosing your page for their needs over time.

What can you do in that case? Well, there are various solutions to getting rid of 404 errors. But as the most common way, you can redirect the page to solve this problem. For this, you should often use 301 redirect. Check out our tasks for more detailed information.

The Key to Technical SEO: Make Sure Your Website Provides a Secure Infrastructure

Ready to learn a Technical SEO benchmark that directly affects your rankings? Yes, you are, it is Security.

As you can imagine, a search engine primarily cares about websites being safe for the user. Google, one of the search engines that demanded a truly reliable website about data sharing, payment processing, and much more, officially announced in 2014 that sites that do not have the HTTPS protocol will lose significant points in the SERP rankings.

By having SSL certificate on your site, you can provide a secure experience to your users and Google. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and they ensure that the connection between the user and the browser is secure and confidential within the HTTPS protocol.

Structured Data or Google Schemas

There is no official statement that structured data directly affects your ranking on Google. But Google, who wants to show the most useful and relevant results in SERP, is aiming to highlight more websites that say “what’s there” by speaking the language of search engines. And Google Schemas means telling what part of the site means what, using specific code snippets.

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