Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for crawling and indexing. Through technical SEO, you can facilitate search engines in accessing, crawling, interpreting, and indexing your website efficiently without encountering any issues.
Technical SEO is a crucial step in the overall SEO process. If you encounter technical SEO problems, your SEO efforts will yield a different result.
Therefore, it is essential to understand what technical SEO entails and how to execute it correctly.
The good news is that once you perform a technical SEO audit of your website and address any potentially critical issues, you will not have to face them again.
In this article, you will learn what technical SEO is, what best practices entail, and how to conduct a thorough technical check of your website using our comprehensive technical SEO checklist.
What is Technical SEO?
To grasp the true meaning of technical SEO, starting with some basic terminology is helpful.
Firstly, consider what SEO itself entails. In its simplest form, SEO is optimizing your website for search engines.
Optimization, in the context of SEO, means:
- They ensure that search engines can access and index your website without issues.
- It is providing high-quality content that aligns with the searcher’s intent.
- Offering signals that help search engines accurately interpret and understand the structure of your website.
- You are assisting search engine crawlers in comprehending your content’s meaning (context).
- They provide reasons for search engine algorithms to trust your website and rank it higher than other sites.
When you have successfully addressed all these aspects, your website will be SEO-friendly and a strong candidate for appearing in search engine results pages for various relevant search queries.
How to Start with SEO?
If you have read my previous article on how search engines operate, you should be aware that the first step performed by search engines before responding to a search query is the crawling and indexing process.
During this process, search engines seek out publicly available websites to add to their indexes.
They explore, read, and categorize these pages into their databases so that their algorithms can later access this information to provide accurate answers to user queries.
What is Technical SEO? Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing stages. Through technical SEO, you can ensure that search engines can access, crawl, interpret, and index your website without encountering any issues.
It is termed “technical” because it does not pertain to the actual content of the website or its promotional activities. The primary goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website.
To gain a comprehensive understanding, consider the chart below, which illustrates the three main pillars of SEO: Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO.
On-page SEO involves the content and how to make it more relevant to users searching.
Off-page SEO, also known as link building, involves obtaining mentions (links) from other websites to enhance credibility and improve ranking.
11 Best Practices for Technical SEO
Let’s explore the best practices for technical SEO that you should follow. You can use the recommendations below to conduct your technical SEO audit.
1. Identify a Preferred Domain
You need to establish your preferred domain when setting up your website or blog. This helps guide search engines on which variant of your domain you want to use consistently throughout the lifecycle of your website.
Why is this necessary?
A website can be accessed by default with or without “www” in front of the domain.
For example, if your domain is example.com, you can access your site via http://www.example.com and http://example.com (without “www”).
While this is fine for users, search engines may need to be clarified, as they may interpret these as two separate websites.
This can lead to issues with indexing, duplicate content, and loss of page ranking.
To address this, you must set a preferred domain and inform search engines of your choice. For more details on this setting, refer to my post: “www vs. non-www Domain – The Best Choice for SEO.
2. Optimize Robots.txt
Once you have set your preferred domain, the next step is to review and optimize your robots.txt file.
What is Robots.txt? The robots.txt file is a text file located in the root directory of your website that provides instructions to search engines about which pages on your site can be crawled and indexed.
The format of this file is quite simple, and in most cases, you won’t need to make any changes to it.
However, it is crucial to check and ensure that no erroneous directives might prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your site.
3. Optimize URL Structure
The next item on your technical SEO checklist is to modify the URL structure of your website. URL structure refers to the format of your URLs.
Best SEO practices for URLs include:
- Using lowercase letters.
- Employing hyphens (-) to separate words in URLs.
- Keeping URLs short and descriptive.
- Avoiding unnecessary characters or words.
- Include your target keywords in the URL without keyword stuffing.
Once you establish the format for your permalink structure, you should optimize your URLs when publishing new content.
If you are using WordPress as your CMS, you will notice that when you create a new post, WordPress automatically generates a URL based on the post title.
For example, if the post title is “Self-Learning SEO – A Beginner’s Guide,” WordPress would generate the URL as http://www.example.com/self-learning-seo-web-beginners-guide.html.
This is not bad, but you can make it shorter like http://www.example.com/self-learning-seo-web.html, which is more targeted and easier to remember.
In the case of choosing a preferred domain format, if you decide to change your permalink structure, you can do so using a 301 redirect.
However, it’s not recommended to change the URLs of existing links, as it provides little value, but you can follow best practices for your new posts.
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