Technical SEO: How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization, simply SEO, consists of different areas: technical, on-page, and off-page. In this article, we will focus on technical SEO, which is about optimizing the backend of your website to ensure search engines can rank it effectively.

So, how do you do technical SEO? What are the factors you need to pay attention to? Continue reading to find answers!

How Important is Technical SEO?

It is very important. Imagine you are an author who wrote an English novel. You consider it your masterpiece, the best thing you’ve written. But you sent it to a publisher that does not understand English. Therefore, the publisher wouldn’t be able to measure how good the story is.

In a sense, Technical SEO is the same. Even if your website is good, if search engines can’t understand it, they won’t recommend it to users. That said, you should not ignore this area. It ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your website.

Key Elements of Technical SEO

• Website speed: Ensuring fast loading times.
• Mobile-friendliness: Optimizing for responsive design.
• Crawlability: Making it easy for search engine bots to explore your site.
• Indexing: Using meta tags to control what pages search engines index.
• Website structure: Implementing clean URL structures, sitemaps, and logical navigation.
• Security: Ensuring the website does not have vulnerabilities.

How To Do Technical SEO

Here are several factors on the technical side of your website that you can edit to improve your ranking in the SERPs.

1. Preferred Domain: Some would think that “website.com” is the same as “www.website.com.” But search engines don’t think so. They will treat these as different websites, and that will affect your website ranking. That said, you must inform search engines which version you prefer. Your options include www, non-www, http, and index.html. After stating your preference, ensure that all versions redirect to your selected version.
2. Site Architecture: Technical SEO also looks at the user-friendliness of your website. Therefore, you should review your site architecture. You need to make every page reachable with just a few clicks from the home page. The more it takes, the lower your ranking will be. Group related pages together using categories. Then, figure out their hierarchy. Creating a category page that links to the individual pages is common practice. It makes the pages reachable within a few clicks without adding way too many buttons on the home page. Also, do not forget about the pages that do not belong to any group. These are called orphan pages. If there are no internal links that redirect to them, search engines may not find them. To solve this, insert the link for the orphan page to a non-orphan page.  
3. Website Speed :Search engines evaluate your website’s speed and responsiveness. They prefer to recommend fast websites to users. Therefore, you should aim to make your website load within 3 seconds.Make sure to check both the mobile and desktop versions of your website. Prioritize the mobile version since Google checks it first for indexing.There are many things you can do to improve your website speed. For starters, you should choose one of the top hosting providers. Migrate your website if the current one is causing you problems.Within the website itself, you should compress images and videos. Furthermore, you need to reduce the number of HTTP requests by removing unnecessary elements like plugins that are no longer useful. Minifying your code also helps.You should also consider leveraging techniques like using content delivery networks or activating browser caching.
4. XML Sitemap: An XML Sitemap contains information about the important pages in your website. It serves as the search engines’ guide for finding them. It is even more important if your site has a lot of pages or when the pages are linked together well.
   The thing is that search engines don’t obtain your sitemap naturally. You need to submit it. You can find the XML sitemap by putting /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml after your website name. Once found, use the Google Search Console (GSC) to submit it to Google.
5. Security:
   Security has been a ranking factor since 2014. Thus, your website should use HTTPS. It is a secure version of HTTP, which adds a layer of protection between the web browser and the server. It encrypts sensitive user information like passwords, contact information, and credit card details. That makes it more difficult for malicious actors to obtain that information.To check, simply double-click the URL on the address bar. You can also click the icon beside it or see if there is a “Not Secure” warning beside it. If it is not secure yet, you need to install an SSL or TLS certificate. After doing so, update your sitemap and resubmit it to GSC.

Work with Nvent Marketing

Technical SEO does not stop once you’ve optimized the factors listed above. You also have to look for HTTP errors, use breadcrumb menus, use pagination, review the robot.txt, and a lot more.

Nvent Marketing can help you with this. If you don’t have time to do technical SEO or are afraid you can’t do it properly, let Nvent Marketing handle it for you. With experts in the fields of SEO and web design, optimizing your website would be a breeze. Besides technical SEO, they will also do off-page and on-page SEO for you.

So what are you waiting for? Contact Nvent Marketing to get in touch.

Conclusion

Technical SEO makes or breaks a website. So what if your content is relevant and educational, and your social media presence is great? If search engines can’t find your web pages or all they find are errors, they won’t be able to index and rank your website. That said, you shouldn’t ignore this area of SEO.

The task can be daunting and overwhelming, especially for small businesses. Thankfully, you can count on others for help. For example, Nvent Marketing can provide you with a technical SEO audit and help you devise new and effective strategies. That will put your website at the top of the SERPs.