If you’re familiar with the term search engine optimization
(SEO), you may know about how titles, meta descriptions and alt tags are a
crucial part in getting you more traffic from search engines such as Google.
But what you might not know about SEO is that there is
another, more technical side that can affect your website.
While search engines are getting better at crawling,
indexing and understanding information, they’re not perfect. Therefore, it
doesn’t really matter how much good content you have on your website if no one
can find it or see it.
That’s why having a strong, technical SEO foundation is so
important.
What Does Good
Technical SEO Look Like?
There are three main elements of technical SEO that should
be taken into consideration…
- Performance
- Crawlability
- Indexation
Performance
Possibly the most important performance factor of a website
is if it’s usable.
Responsive Design
If your website doesn’t have responsive design, it’s
essentially unusable by customers searching on their mobile device.
Responsive design makes the user experience (UX) better on
all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices; which all
have various screen sizes.
Site Speed
Your website pages should ideally be loading in under 2
seconds.
If people land on your site and have to wait for it to load,
they’re more likely to go back to the search results instead of wait it out.
This not only loses you a potential customer but can also harm your SEO efforts
by increasing your bounce rate.
There are also other page speed metrics worth tracking and
optimizing for, such as:
Proper Coding
Many sites have unnecessary, long-forgotten code that
continues to exist.
With the help of Chrome Developer Tools, you can review and
then remove, any unused CSS and JavaScript code.
Crawlability &
Indexation
Gary Illyes, in a Google Webmaster Central Blog post, says
there are various factors that can negatively affect crawl budget (the time,
money, and resources that Google is willing to spend on your site). However,
they are mainly due to “having many low-value-add URLs.”
That can include things such as:
- Low quality and spam content
- Hacked pages
- Soft error pages
- On-site duplicate content
- Infinite spaces (i.e., events calendars that go on years and
years into the future)
Regularly monitoring the Index Coverage report and Crawl
Stats in the Google Search Console can help you to easily spot and resolve
issues that affect your website’s crawlability and indexation.
How to Optimize Your
Technical SEO
In order to optimize your technical SEO, SEO professionals,
developers, and designers all need to be on the same page.
- SEO pros should know how to speak developer, understand the
inner workings of a site, and learn about your website’s code.
- Developers should learn how to speak SEO and figure out how
their code affects profitability.
- Designers should understand UX. It doesn’t matter how
beautiful a design is without usability.
Not all SEO companies have the expertise and knowledge to
optimize your technical SEO. That’s why hiring an in-house team that consists
of developers, designers and SEO professionals will give you the best results.
If you’re interested in learning more about the ways your
website could be better optimized, call Sales & Marketing Technologies
today at (407) 682-2222 for a free strategy session.