Technical SEO addresses the non-content aspects of your website, primarily website and server optimizations, the structure and how it functions. This type of SEO can do more for your rankings than any blog post or content page. A search engine’s ability to access, crawl and interpret the content of your site is key to its ability to properly place your website in it’s rankings.
Some of the key factors are:
- How mobile-friendly and responsive your site is
- How quickly your website (pages, images, etc.) loads into a user’s browser
- The level of security built into your pages and functions
- The organization of your content and the associated navigation required to access it
- The validity of your links (broken/outdated)
- How efficiently and effectively your website is coded
As with on-page SEO, there are online tools that you can use to check your site’s technical SEO score. Many provide reports as well as high level instructions on how to improve it.
You don’t have to be technically savvy to make improvements to your website that fall within these areas. Many of the above items can be improved upon with simple techniques.
Some things to keep in mind as you work on making your website more SEO friendly from a technical aspect:
Use SSL
SSL or Secure Sockets Layer – is a security technology which creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can identify the use of this encryption fairly easily as the website URL starts with https:// instead of http://.
Google especially gives preferential treatment of secure HTTPS websites over non-secure HTTP website sin search results.
Given that information alone, it makes sense, when possible, to ensure your site is secure. You do this by installing an SSL certificate on your site. Your hosting company can help you with this in most cases. Some are now automatically providing their customers with free certificates. So check with them before digging too deep into doing it yourself.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
More and more traffic is now coming from mobile devices, like phones and tablets. And there is nothing more more frustrating for a mobile user than to try to read the small print on their screen or not be able to access the purchase button because of a poorly designed site that doesn’t respond to the smaller screen size.
Responsive templates and coding techniques can help to ensure that your site is just as accessible on a tiny phone screen as it is on a desk top computer. Remember to test your site on these devices as well during the design phase. There are also online tools available that will emulate these different screen sizes in case you don’t have the physical devices on hand. One of these is MobileTest.me. Just pick your device and enter your URL. Great for novices!
Create a Faster loading site
This is one facet of technical SEO that you have a good deal of control over. There are a number of factors that you as a website owner or designer can affect in order to improve how long it takes your site to load on a user’s browser. And this is one factor the search engines definitely take into account when ranking your site.
“So what can I do?”, you ask.
Keep the use of scripts and plug-ins to a minimum. The more HTTP calls your site has to generate to load a page, the longer it takes for your page to fully load. Even if you see the page visually instantaneously, there could still be calls happening behind the scenes and this adds to your page’s load time.
Use a single CSS stylesheet. Consolidate all of your CSS into one file instead of using multiple files or putting your CSS inline (ie. if you used Word at any time to create a website, your saw how prolific this type of thing can be.) Again, the extra calls to format the page can cause delays and extend your load time.
Ensure your image files are as small as possible. I see this error all the time. Unless you have photography or art-based site, you do not need to have your images at the highest resolution possible. The more DPI (dots per inch) your pictures are, the larger the file size and the longer it takes to load the image. And you have to remember that it is the user’s screen that ultimately controls how they see it. So use your image processing software (Photoshop, Canva, etc) to optimize your image and reduce the resolution. Most, but not all images, can go as low as 72 dpi and still present the image in a positive way. Again, there are exceptions to this rule but if you always optimize your images, you’ll improve your load time.
Minify your site’s code. This means removing unnecessary white space, line breaks and indentations in the code. While this is helpful to you when you reviewing your code, it does cause delays in generating your pages. Fortunately Google has tools to help you this. (see Google’s Minify Resources page for help with this).
Evaluate Your Site’s Technical SEO
SEO tools often contain a combination of on-page and technical SEO checks. So your current favorite on-page SEO tool may already be your go-to for technical SEO as well. But if you don’t already have a tool, here are few to help you evaluate the how well your website performs in the technical SEO areas:
- Google – Of course, Google has a number of tools that you can use to evaluate all the aspects of your site. A few them are: Google Search Console, Google Mobile-Friendly Test, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Google Analytics.
- Bing Webmaster Tools – Not to be left out, Bing also has tools to help with SEO. It includes a back link checker and an SEO Analyzer.
- SEOQuake – A free Chrome browser plugin that provides extensive SEO feedback on your site – technical, content and link authority. There is also page-by-page evaluation.
- Merkle SEO Tools – a collection of online test that allow you to evaluate your tags, level of mobile friendliness, and how long it takes to fetch and render your site.
Technical SEO, while it can be a bit more involved, is not an impossible feat for novice website owners or designers. As always, do you planning up front so that you address these areas before become a problem. Optimize your images, pick a reliable, fast hosting provider, keep your WordPress plug-ins to a minimum and keep your code clean an streamlined. This will provide your visitors and the search engines with good user experiences.
And isn’t that what it’s all about?
Until next time… Watch for the next post in the series – Off-page SEO – What to do When You Aren’t Online
