Technical SEO
Technical SEO is all about improving a website’s technical aspects to increase its pages’ ranking in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other channels.
What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?
A technically sound website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about. It also prevents confusion caused by, for instance, duplicate content. Moreover, it doesn’t send visitors, nor search engines, to dead-ends caused by non-working links. Here, we’ll shortly go into some important characteristics of a technically optimized website.
- 1. It’s fast
- 2. It’s crawlable for search engines
- 3. It doesn’t have (many) dead links
- 4. It doesn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content
- 5. It’s secure
- 6. Plus: it has structured data
- 7. Plus: It has an XML sitemap
- 8. Plus: International websites use hreflang
You may be tempted to ignore this component of SEO completely; however, it plays an important role in your organic traffic. Your content might be the most thorough, useful, and well-written, but unless a search engine can crawl it, very few people will ever see it. It’s like a tree that falls in the forest when no one is around to hear it … does it make a sound? Without a strong technical SEO foundation, your content will make no sound to search engines.