What is Technical SEO: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Website

What is technical SEO? If you're running a website, you must ensure you're doing everything possible to optimize it for search engines.

Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects of optimization, and it covers a wide range of factors, including website security, mobile friendliness, site speed, and more. In this article, we'll discuss technical SEO and why it's so important. We'll also cover what you need to do to optimize your website technically.

Technical SEO refers to various techniques used to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Technical SEO aims to make it easier for search engines to find, crawl, and index a website.

Technical SEO usually starts with website audits to identify potential issues holding back a website's ranking. Once these issues are identified, you can fix them through various means, such as improving the website's code, optimizing its content, and improving its structure.

Many factors go into technical SEO, but some of the most important ones include site speed, mobile-friendliness, indexation, and crawlability. Improving these technical SEO factors can help your website rank higher in search results.

To help ensure your technical SEO meets search engine standards, refer to the checklist below. If your site meets all these criteria, it's more likely that you'll appear higher in relevant search results.

One of the essential aspects of technical SEO is using SSL on your website. It ensures that your site is secure and that visitors can trust it. Google also favors sites that use SSL, so switching to SSL is a good idea if you're not already using it.

To switch to SSL, you must purchase and install an SSL certificate on your server. Once you've done this, you can enable SSL in your WordPress settings.

You can still add SSL to your site if you're not using WordPress. Check with your hosting provider or website platform to see available options.

Once you've switched to SSL, ensure all your pages redirect to the SSL version. You can do this by setting up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. If you're not using WordPress, you'll need to consult your hosting provider or website platform for instructions on how to set up a 301 redirect.

These are just a few steps in switching to SSL to improve your technical SEO.

Site speed is another critical factor in technical SEO. Visitors won't stay on your site if it takes too long to load, so ensuring your site is as fast as possible is essential. You can do several things to speed up your site, including optimizing images and using a content delivery network.

You can check your site speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. This technical SEO tool will list things you can do to improve your site's speed.

Make sure to address any issues that the PageSpeed Insights tool identifies. Improving your site's speed will help with technical SEO and enhance the user experience.

Here are the ways you can speed up your website and improve your technical SEO:

Caching Plugin

You should also consider using a caching plugin to speed up your website. Caching plugins store static versions of your pages and posts to load them faster.

Gzip Compression

Enabling gzip compression is another great way to speed up your website. Gzip compresses your files to take up less space on your server and can be loaded faster.

Minify Your Codes

You should also minify your CSS and JavaScript files. Minifying these files removes unnecessary characters, such as whitespace, from the code. It can help reduce the size of the files and make them load faster. If you're not comfortable editing your website's code, some plugins can help with this.

Optimize Website's Database

Optimizing your website's database is also a good idea. Over time, your database can become bloated with unnecessary data. It can slow down your website and make it difficult for visitors to load pages.

You can optimize your WordPress database with a plugin like WP-Optimize. This plugin will clean up your database and remove unnecessary data. If you're not using WordPress, you must manually optimize your database.

Use CDN

Finally, consider using a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN stores copies of your site's files on servers worldwide. When visitors load your site, your website will serve them the files from the closest server. It can help improve your site's speed and technical SEO, especially for visitors far from your server.

Another important factor in technical SEO is mobile-friendliness. With more and more people using smartphones and tablets to access the internet, ensuring your site is designed for mobile devices is essential. Google favors mobile-friendly sites, so it's worth optimizing your site's technical SEO for mobile users.

You can do a few things to make your site more mobile-friendly. First, you should make sure that your site is responsive. Your site will adjust to fit any device's screen size. You can test your site's responsiveness with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Second, you should ensure your site's content is easily read on a mobile device. It means using short paragraphs and large font sizes. You should also avoid using pop-ups, which can be difficult to close on a mobile device.

Finally, it would help to simplify your site's design for mobile users. It means removing unnecessary elements and ensuring your site's navigation is easy to use.

An XML sitemap can help search engines crawl and index your site more effectively and improve your technical SEO. A sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages on your site. By submitting a sitemap to Google, you can ensure that all your pages are indexed and that Google knows about any changes you've made to your site.

You can create a sitemap for your WordPress site with a plugin like Yoast SEO. Once you've installed and activated the plugin, you can find the XML sitemap under SEO > XML Sitemaps.

If you're not using WordPress, you can create a sitemap manually. Once you've completed your sitemap, you can submit it to Google through the Google Search Console.

Duplicate content is another issue that can hurt your technical SEO. If there's more than one version of a page on your site, it can be difficult for search engines to figure out which one is the original. As a result, they may not index your pages correctly or rank them as highly as they should. If you have duplicate content on your site, you'll need to fix it.

The first step is to identify any duplicate content on your site. You can do this with a tool like Screaming Frog. Once you've found the same content, you'll need to decide which version of the page you want to keep. You should then redirect the other versions to the original page.

If you're unsure how to redirect pages, you can use a plugin like Redirection. This plugin will handle the redirects for you. These steps will help you improve your technical SEO.

Structured data markup can help search engines understand the content on your site and display it more effectively in search results. By adding structured data to your pages, you can ensure that they appear in rich snippets and other special features in search results. It is essential in technical SEO.

Using WordPress, you can add structured data to your pages with a plugin like Yoast SEO. Once you've installed and activated the plugin, you can find the structured data settings under SEO > Search Appearance.

If you're not using WordPress, you'll need to add the structured data markup manually. You can find more information about how to do this in Google's structured data documentation. After you've added the structured data markup, you can test it with Google's Structured Data Testing tool.

AMP is an alternative to traditional HTML that can speed up the loading of your pages and improve your technical SEO. If you're unfamiliar with AMP, it's worth learning about it and considering whether it would fit your site well.

If you enable AMP on your site, you can use a plugin like AMP for WordPress. Once you've installed and activated the plugin, you can find the AMP settings under Settings > AMP.

If you're not using WordPress, you can learn more about implementing AMP on your site in Google's AMP documentation.

Finally, you should register your site with Google Search Console to improve your technical SEO. It is a free tool from Google that allows you to submit your sitemap, track your website's performance in search results, and get notifications if there are any problems with your site.

To register your site, you'll need to add a new property to your account. You can do this by clicking on the "Add Property" button and entering your website's URL.

Once you've added your site, you can start using all of the features of Google Search Console.

If you're running a website, technical SEO is one of the most important things you need to care about.

What is Technical SEO? It helps ensure that it's fast, secure, mobile-friendly, and easy for search engines to crawl and index. Implementing the tips in this article will help you get started with technical SEO. However, keeping up with the latest technical SEO trends and changes is essential, as they can impact your technical SEO strategy.

By technically optimizing your website, you can help ensure that it appears higher in relevant search results. Use this technical SEO checklist to make sure your site meets all the criteria for a high-ranking site. And don't forget to register your site with Google Search Console.

I would love to help you optimize your website and increase your search engine rankings by teaching you how to generate traffic to your online business by leveraging search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Contact me.