What is Technical SEO? How it Can Help You Get to the Front Page of Google?

In this digital age, businesses that have a website are able to reach a global audience. Thanks to search engines like Google internet users can easily find the information that they need. If your business has its own website, it’s almost guaranteed that potential customers will be able to find you in their search results. So, why aren’t you seeing the traffic that you want coming to your site? The problem is not with Google; it’s with your website. There are tons of companies who rank high on Google because of their solid technical SEO foundation. This type of SEO involves focusing on specific aspects of your website in order to make it easily crawlable and indexable by search engine bots. As well as more appealing for real human users. Read on to learn about technical SEO and how it can help you get to the front page of Google.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO relates to the way your website is built and how it is presented to search engines. It includes elements such as your site structure URL structure, as well as your site speed. These factors are extremely important because they let search engines know how to rank your website. If your website has low-quality or if it is built in a way that is difficult to read and navigate, search engines will likely rank you lower. 

The better your website is built, the higher you’ll rank on Google. The higher you rank, the more traffic will be directed to your site. Even if you have great content and visuals, if your website doesn’t have the right technical SEO, you’re not going to get the results you want. Using the tips below, you can improve the technical SEO of your site and get the results you’re hoping for.

How to Improve Your Technical SEO?

1) Crawling

Crawling is the process of search engine bots visiting the pages of your site. This discovery process is carried out by following internal or external links. It wouldn’t be economical for bots to visit every single website and page on the internet. Therefore they are using a quality value that they assign to each website. The value assigned by bots to our site represented by the crawl budget.

The search budget does not have a specific numerical value, but using search engine optimization techniques, we can efficiently use this budget to allow bots to discover, crawl, and index our pages more frequently.

Assuming that our page can be crawled by the bots during the review, the bots will associate our page with the relevant keywords in our pages and perform the indexing process.

2) Indexing

Indexing means search engine bots storing our pages in a database considering various metrics.

 When a user searches for a keyword in the search engine, indexing doesn’t perform live-time.  Google sort the page groups that were previously associated and indexed with the relevant search query and presents you the most relevant search query-related results.

When search engines sort these page groups, they use many a high number of ranking signals. Once a search is performed by a user, the top 10 websites are ranked as organic results on the first page.

Just because we have a page does not necessarily mean that bots will crawl or index this page. Therefore, if we want a page to be in the search engine database and show up on search results, it should be crawlable and indexable. 

3) Robots.txt

The Robots.txt file is a text file located in the main directory of our site, which allows us to edit the access and crawling capabilities of search engine bots to our website. 

There are certain commands to be aware of when preparing your robots.txt file. These:

4) Sitemap

Sitemaps, as the name suggests, are the files that present the link architecture of a site to the bots that visit the site in XML format. Site maps can be created in different structures for URLs, images, videos. It is generally provided on “website.com/sitemap.xml” but it can be presented to visitors and bots with different names either. You can check Google’s guide for detailed information.

Sitemaps must only contain URLs from our website. Also any non-200 response code URLs should not be included in the sitemap.

5) HTTP Response Codes and Redirects

An HTTP status code is a response sent by the server when a request by the browser is completed or not.

HTTP response codes are one of the most obvious ways to see what happens between the browser and the server. That’s why search engine bots read these codes when they first request the server to upload a site to see the health/status of that page. Among these codes, the most important ones in terms of the SEO are; 2xx, 3xx, 4xx and 5xx are response codes.

6) Speed

Google is constantly making changes and introducing new algorithms, ranking factors, and quality standards. One of the biggest factors that affect your ranking is site speed. If your website is slow, search engines will see that as a negative thing. You can fix this by using a CDN, using a caching plugin, or making sure your host is not too overloaded.

7) Mobile-First Indexing

Before Google switched to mobile-first indexing, both mobile and desktop search results were determined by using desktop pages. Factors such as mobile clickthrough rates, mobile site speed could result in slight differences between desktop and mobile rankings. Starting from 2018, Google has switched to mobile first indexing. 

Here is a checklist below for making a site compatible with mobile-first indexing. It is vital to go through these steps meticulously.

• Are all category links also available on mobile pages?
• Are all in-site links included in the mobile version?
• Are the number of products/content shown on the listing pages the same on mobile and desktop?
• Are category and product descriptions used properly on mobile pages?
• Can mobile user-agents see all of the configured data markups on the desktop
• Are breadcrumb links included in the mobile version?
• Is user-generated content (comment fields, reviews) included in the mobile version?
• Are CSS, JS resources open to indexing by mobile user-agents?
• Are metadata such as an open graph, twitter cards, meta robots included in the mobile version?
• Are the annotations such as Canonical, prev / next, hreflang placed on mobile pages?
• Is the Sitemap accessible by Googlebot Mobile?
• Mobile Site Speed ​​Performance

Conclusion

The better your website’s technical SEO is, the higher you’ll rank on Google. This means that you’ll get more traffic, leads, and sales as a result.