What is Technical SEO? Complete Technical SEO Guide in 2024

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a critical aspect of search engine optimization techniques that makes it easier for search engines to find, understand, and store your content. It entails optimizing your website's technical elements to improve its visibility and search engine ranking.

Technical SEO boosts your SEO performance and helps search engines effectively crawl, index, and understand your website’s content for ranking purposes.

In this post, you will learn the fundamentals and best technical SEO practices.

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is an important aspect of search engine optimization that helps search engines identify your website and rank it according to its search results. This practice is mostly about working with on-page SEO, in which you need to work with site speed, mobile friendliness, URL structure, etc. To improve your user experience and guide search engines to rank your pages accurately on search engine result pages, you need to use best technical SEO practices.

Technical SEO is an essential practice because it improves your website’s visibility, resulting in higher organic traffic and better search engine rankings. Overall, technical SEO is the foundation that makes a well-optimized website. It provides a seamless user experience and archives your overall online business success.

Best technical SEO optimization practices

Technical SEO practices actually are highly popular for search engines. By effectively implementing these practices, your website can ensure seamless interaction with its visitors. So, let’s have a look at these best technical SEO practices:

Create an SEO-friendly site architecture

Creating an SEO-friendly site architecture helps you organize your website's pages in a way that helps search engines easily find and understand your content. You must link your pages in a logical manner so that visitors can easily access them from the homepage. If you seek help from the best SEO company, it will help your website improve its ranking in search results with expert support. Plus, it also reduces the chances of having orphan pages, which are hard for both search engines and users to discover. However, for that matter, you can use dedicated tools to identify and fix any issues.

Submit your Google sitemap

Submitting your sitemap to Google is a smart move for effective website optimization. A sitemap tells Google to give priority to important pages on your website. Doing so helps you show relevant pages to your users, especially if you have lots of pages or if they are not linked together well. You can find your sitemap at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml. Once you have found it, you can go to Google Search Console, click “Indexing”> “Sitemaps,” paste your sitemap URL, and click "Submit." This step ensures that Google will find and index your pages, thereby improving your site's visibility.

Use the “noindex” tag

Using the “no index” tag carefully is crucial for website performance. When you use this tag on a page, it tells search engines not to include this page in their search results. That gives you the advantage of not showing some pages, such as duplicate content or private information. However, you need to use it carefully, because applying it on important pages will make that content invisible in search results. So, once you carefully use this tag, you can see it by using the “site:'' operator in Google Search. Overall, using the “no index” tag will help you show the right pages to search for and improve your visibility.

Where necessary, implement canonical tags

Implementing canonical tags where needed is a smart move for technical SEO. When similar content exists on different pages, it can be confusing for search engines to decide which page to show in search results. Adding canonical tags to the duplicate pages helps clarify which one is the original and should be indexed. This SEO technique helps you show the right page in the search engine and increases your website's visibility.

Additional technical SEO best practices

You can consider following additional technical SEO practices to make your website fully optimized for search engines. Here are some extra but relevant SEO best practices:

Use HTTPS

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, or HTTPS, is a safer version of HTTP. It protects sensitive data, like passwords and credit card details. As you may know, Google has considered it a ranking factor since 2014. You can check if your site uses HTTPS by looking for a “lock” icon. If you see “Not secure,” it indicates that your website lacks HTTPS. To fix this, you can install an SSL/TLS certificate, which verifies your website's identity and establishes a secure connection with users.

Find and fix duplicate content issues

Having duplicate content on your website is not a good practice for better ranking. You must locate and remove such content from your website. When duplicate content appears on multiple pages or sites, it confuses the search engine and leads to a lower ranking in search results. You can use the popular tool to perform tasks related to similar pages, canonical tags, no index tags, and much more. Resolving duplicate content helps you increase search engine ranking, improve your user experience, and accurately monitor your website's activity.

Make sure only one version of your website is accessible

Instead of using multiple versions of your website, you should use any one of the following two versions:

●       https://yourwebsite.com

●       https://www.yourwebsite.com

Having both versions on your website can lead to problems. For example, you can deal with some content-related issues and reduce the effectiveness of your background profile. Some websites link to the www version, and some are in another language. This will create a negative environment on your website. Therefore, only use one version of your website and redirect it to the main website.

Improve your page speed

Page speed is a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop devices. So make sure that your website loads as quickly as possible. Poor loading times can lose the interest of your target audience, which will lead to less traffic and poor search engine ranking. This is why you should take a variety of steps to improve your website's speed. You can get help from a dedicated tool like Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to check the speed of your website. If you find that your website performance score is high, It is better for page speed; otherwise, you can follow some steps to make your website fast. You can compress your images, use the content distribution network, and adjust HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

As we know, a large number of people access the internet using their mobile phones. This is why optimizing your website is essential for better ranking. You must ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and responsive, depending on the size of different mobile screens. You can turn to the best digital marketing company to make your website more user-friendly so that your users will find your website more interactive and useful for them.

Last Words

As we discuss the top technical SEO practices, following them on your website will help you increase its usability and authenticity on the internet, and search engines will rank your website higher in search engine result pages. So, while optimizing your website for search engines, make sure that you employ these SEO techniques in your practice.