Technical SEO as the name suggests is all about the technicalities of a website. It is all about the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems. While on-page SEO is all about content and off-page SEO revolves around links, technical SEO focuses on the technology used and how to technically enhance the content as well as guide the google crawler towards certain elements.
Before knowing more about technical SEO one must know about- how does a site work? It is really important to know the technology used for a website as well as the process of how google traverses a website. Google traverses websites using web crawler. It is a search engine bot that downloads and indexes content from all over the Internet. The goal of such a bot is to learn what every webpage on the web is about, so that the information can be retrieved when it’s needed. By knowing these two things one can understand the best way to optimize a website.
How is a website created?
The front face of a website is created using HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are essentially used for defining page structure and style information. These are not programming languages and are very easy to learn. They include simple lines of code which tell the computer about how the page looks. With the use of only these two languages we can create a static website. To make a website dynamic different scripting languages are used like JavaScript. It is plays a huge part in data validation and manipulation.
After the coding part, comes the hosting part. For hosting, one must have a domain name and domain space. In simple terms, domain name can be explained to be an address where internet users can access your website and domain space is a virtual place where this website exists. You can buy domain name and space from domain providers like domain.com or godaddy.com.
What happens when we search for a website?
Servers are computers that store webpages, sites, or apps. All websites need a server. When a client device wants to access a webpage, a copy of the webpage is downloaded from the server onto the client machine to be displayed in the user’s web browser.
Now that we know about things required to build a website and working of a website we will have a look at how HTML elements affect our SEO.
Some HTML tags
- Page title and Meta descriptions
- HTML headings
- Meta tags
- Internal linking
- Alternative text
- Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
Page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. If the page title does not seem relevant to the user, then why would he/she visit the page? Page title is set by a HTML element known as title tag. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.
Code for writing a page title is –
<head> <title> Write your page title here </title> </head>
Meta Description is a snippet of up to about 155-160 characters which summarizes a page’s content. When we search for something we look at the title and then read the meta description. Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. It should be written in such a way that it doesn’t give away too much information and at the same time drives the user to open the website. While writing meta description one must not forget to use keywords.
Code for writing meta descriptions –
<meta name=”description” content=”The page’s description”/>
- HTML headings
HTML defines six levels of headings. The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least.
Your H1 introduces the topic and tells what your page is all about. It is the main heading, like- Here H1 is ‘Technical SEO’ as this article is about how to optimize a website using technical SEO.
The H2s like book chapters, they describe the main topics you’ll cover in sections of the article.
Subsequent headers, H3s to H6s, serve as additional sub-headings within each section, just as a book chapter may be split up by multiple sub-topics.
Given below are the tags used to write the headings.
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
<h4>This is heading 4</h4>
<h5>This is heading 5</h5>
<h6>This is heading 6</h6>
H1 is given the most priority by the web crawler and the priority decreases as we increase the heading number.
- Meta Tags
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about. The content written in the meta tags are considered as key words for the crawler. For example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”digital marketing, content writing, SEO, on-page SEO”>
<meta name=”author” content=”John Doe”>
- Internal linking
An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another webpage or resource. It connects your content and gives Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, pages.
Links can be written using the below given HTML code
<a href=”write link here” title=”link title”> Keyword text </a>
The ‘Keyword text’ will become a hypertext i.e. when we click on the text, the link in href attribute will open.
- Alternative text
Sometimes when the image fails to load – due to reasons like slow internet speed, alternative text is displayed instead of the image. This text should describe the image and also contain keywords for the crawler to scan through.
Other than HTML elements there are other aspects to technical SEO too.
Server location
Server location affects the raking of your page. Now-a-days google browser asks the user for their location in order to show location specific results for some searches like jobs, music, universities etc. SO, if you are targeting a specific state or country it’s better to opt for a local server. Server location along with affecting the ranking also affects the speed of loading. This can be eliminated by using tools like geo-hosting.
Dead links
Dead links are the links that have expired, as in the site pointing to that link no longer exists. As the length of the content increases so does the chances of having dead links. It is very important to remove them as having more number of dead links points toward the site being unreliable and hence ranking will decrease.
HTTPS
SSL certificates are security certificates that can be bought in order to convert your website from http to https. Secure websites rank higher than the unsafe ones.
XML sitemap
XML sitemap is a list of all pages of your site. It serves as a roadmap for search engines on your site. We can make sure search engines won’t miss any important content on our site by implementing sitemaps. The XML sitemap is often categorized in posts, pages, tags or other custom post types and includes the number of images and the last modified date for every page.
3-click rule
It is a rule followed by web developers. It means that the site navigation should be in such a way that the user can reach whatever he/she is searching for in three clicks.
The most important thing about technical SEO is that it doesn’t guarantee the page ranking and may not improve it, but without technical SEO your page will not pass the basic regulations for publishing a site. So, it is very important to implement this.
