Technical SEO seems complex, but its elements are easier to understand than one might think. Mastering the critical components of tech SEO can boost your website’s performance and visibility in search engines. Let’s break down some of the key components of tech SEO in simple terms, to help you understand how it can help drive success in your digital marketing efforts.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO covers the behind-the-scenes work that helps search engines navigate, understand, and remember your site’s content. By fine-tuning elements like code, page speed, and mobile-friendliness, you’re creating a smoother experience for both bots and users. With these improvements, your site becomes easier to find and engage with—boosting visibility and bringing more traffic your way.
Technical SEO focuses on optimizing your website’s backend to improve its performance and accessibility for search engines. Unlike on-page SEO, which deals with content and HTML tags, tech SEO includes elements like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and security. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, involves activities outside your site, like backlink building, and only relates to tech SEO in terms of ensuring your site remains accessible and functional for users coming from external sources.
Why Does Technical SEO Matter?
Technical SEO matters because if search engines can’t find or interpret your website correctly, they won’t know how to place it within SERPs. Tech SEO ensures your site is easily discoverable and understandable by search engines. By optimizing elements like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data, you make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site and understand where your website should exist in the search landscape. Technical SEO directly impacts user experience, and while Google and other search engines’ crawlers are not technically users, they can emulate how users experience, interact, and understand the content on a website. A well-optimized site loads quickly, ensuring users don’t leave due to slow speeds. Mobile-friendliness means your site looks and functions well on all devices, providing a seamless experience for users. Other aspects, such as security, bring trust and credibility (especially when processing payments or obtaining sensitive information).
Web Crawlers are CRUCIAL for Technical SEO
Web crawlers like Googlebot, Bingbot, and others are essential parts of technical SEO. The foundation for a website that ranks is a website that can be found. Without web crawlers’ access to your website, your content would remain undiscovered by search engines, essentially cutting out an entire channel of potential users.
Web crawling works by search engines following links on known pages to discover new pages. Crawlers, or bots, start with a list of URLs from previous crawls and sitemaps websites owners provide. They then navigate these links, indexing the content they find. This process helps search engines build a comprehensive index of the web, allowing them to serve relevant results to user queries. For example, every time we publish new blog posts, we add them to the homepage, so crawlers and bots can easily crawl those new blog posts and add them to the index.
Foundation for Tech SEO: Crawler-Friendly Websites
Follow these steps to make your website crawler-friendly and improve its chances of indexing and ranking in search engines. These will help search engine bots navigate, understand, and access key pages on your site while minimizing potential issues that could disrupt smooth crawling.
- Check Your Robots.txt File: Ensure your robots.txt file is correctly configured, allowing important pages to be crawled and blocking only those you don’t want indexed. Access your robots.txt file at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt and review it for errors, using tools like Google’s robots.txt tester if needed.
- Submit Your Sitemap: An XML sitemap lists all key pages, guiding crawlers through your website structure. You can submit it in Google Search Console under the Index sub-menu under the Sitemaps section. WordPress users can automate sitemap generation with SEO plugins like Yoast.
- Utilize Crawler Directives Cautiously: Set appropriate page-level directives in the robots.txt file, or add “noindex” and “nofollow” tags in HTML headers for pages you don’t want to be indexed. Keep important pages crawlable to help bots follow links and understand site hierarchy.
- Provide Internal Links Between Pages: Internal links connect your pages, enabling bots to discover new content and follow your site structure. These links also help shape PageRank flow, making well-linked pages appear more important to search engines.
- Reduce 4xx Errors and Unnecessary Redirects: Fix or reduce 4xx errors (like 404s) and limit unnecessary redirects. Excessive 4xx errors create dead ends for bots, while redirects slow crawling. Only use redirects when essential, and avoid redirect chains to keep the user experience smooth.
By focusing on key steps like setting up your robots.txt file, submitting a sitemap, using simple crawler instructions, building good internal links, and fixing errors and redirects, you help your website be more easily found and navigated, which is the foundation for having a website that ranks. These basic technical SEO practices make it easier for search engines to access your content and improve the user experience. There are a ton more aspects and elements of technical SEO, which this blog would be a veritable tome of information if we included everything, but establishing a foundation of solid tech SEO is the beginning of a website that can perform well in search engines.
