With great power, comes great responsibility… or in other words, once you hold the key of technical SEO knowledge, you’ve got all the SEO responsibilities a user could dream of.
Technical SEO is just as important as on-page SEO and off-page SEO, but first – what actually is SEO?
What is SEO
SEO is the process of growing your website’s traffic by increasing the quality and quantity of leads. In other words, SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of your website organically across search engines which has four main focus areas; SEO Strategy, which leads to Onsite SEO, Offsite SEO and of course Technical SEO. They all work hand in hand to create the best online performance..
What is Technical SEO
Technical SEO is different methods of improving the technical aspects of a website. Like SEO in general, the idea behind technical SEO is to help increase the rankings across pages and increase traffic. Technical SEO is basically the nitty-gritty of behind the scenes SEO.
Technical SEO is looking into ways to improve your website speed, ensuring your website is crawlable and understandable to search engines and so on. Technical SEO often overlaps with on-page SEO, which focuses on landing pages changes covering images and meta descriptions.
Areas you need to focus on for technical SEO
We’re going to make this simple, short and sweet, below are the top three areas you need to take into consideration when getting technical with SEO.
Sitemap & links
The sitemap is important for SEO as well as all the links (URLS) involved. XML sitemaps allow search engines to know that your website is available and can be crawled, they can be optimised in many different ways and you can control what you want to allow and block for search engines.
Another important aspect in technical SEO is the links you have on your website, these go from URL structuring in your navigation to internal links and image links, if broken these can have a negative impact on your website so keeping on top of your websites health and any errors onsite can help massively.
There’s also spammy links that you need to keep an eye on which is more so an issue with E-commerce websites, read more about optimising your E-commerce website here.
Image optimisation & website speed
Website speed is such an important factor for technical SEO, for both user and the search engine bot. Ensuring your website is mobile friendly and up to speed, results in better SEO performance.
There are many factors to consider when taking the speed of the website into consideration, loading time, animations, image sizes, text and bandwidth of a page. When getting started it’s always best to review the image sizes throughout the site, you can read more about image optimisation here.
SSL certificate
SSL is essential for protecting your website, it shows search engines as well as users that the site is safe even if it doesn’t include any sensitive information like credit cards or user information. Sites will get flagged up as unsafe without an SSL certificate so it’s kinda important to jump on that..
The bottom line
There are so many factors to cover in technical SEO, we hope that by starting out with those four areas can give you the help you need when it comes to fixing up your SEO on the site. If you think you need to speak to an SEO specialist today for an in-depth technical SEO audit then please get in touch!
