What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a crucial component of Search Engine Optimization. It is one of the important ranking factors for search engines like Google.
Technical SEO involves enhancing a website’s technical components in order to increase its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). It focuses on enhancing a website’s crawling, indexing, and ranking in order to increase organic traffic and visibility.
There are several areas of technical SEO that are essential for a successful SEO strategy.
Here are some of the key elements to look out for in 2023:
1. Optimized Site Structure
A well–structured website is essential for search engine ranking and visibility. It should be easy for search engines to crawl and index your web pages. If you have a WordPress website it is important to use an SEO-optimized theme. The same goes for Shopify too.
A properly designed site structure must include a flat structure with descriptive URLs, using HTML tags such as H1, H2, and meta tags, and using breadcrumbs to show the proper hierarchy of your pages.
2. Superfast Page Loading Time
Site speed is a major ranking factor of Google. Search engines prioritize sites that load quickly. You can improve your site speed by optimizing images, minifying scripts, and leveraging caching.
A free tool from Google called PageSpeed Insights evaluates a website’s performance on desktop and mobile platforms. It offers helpful advice on how to increase the speed of your website’s pages.
The tool examines a number of variables, such as resource loading, caching, minification, and other things. It then provides recommendations on how to improve page speed, such as optimizing images, minifying JavaScript and CSS files, and using a content delivery network.
3. Core Web Vitals Optimization
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the performance and user experience of web pages. They are part of Google’s initiative to improve the web by making it faster, more reliable, and more secure.
The Core Web Vitals are three core metrics that measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a page.
You can check your core web vitals report from page speed insights or Google search console, Both tools provide information regarding core web vitals.
The first metric is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures how long it takes for the largest content element of a page to load. For a good user experience, LCP should be 2.5 seconds or less.
The second metric is First Input Delay (FID), which measures the time it takes for a page to respond to a user’s interaction. For a good user experience, FID should be 100 milliseconds or less.
The third metric is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures how much the page layout shifts during loading. For a good user experience, CLS should be 0.1 or less.
4. Mobile Optimization
Optimizing a website for mobile is a critical SEO practice to ensure the mobile interface of a website is smooth and user-friendly. SEO is becoming increasingly dependent on mobile optimization since Google has announced that mobile optimization is an important ranking for them.
The best tool to check that your website is optimized for mobile is the Google Search Console Mobile Usability feature.
So for technical SEO optimization, it is important to build a mobile-friendly website, optimize your pictures and scripts for mobile use, and use a responsive design to make sure you rank higher on mobile devices too.
5. Schema Markup Implementation
Implementing Schema on your website pages helps search engines to better comprehend and rank your website pages in the best way on search results.
It provides search engines with additional information about your web pages. It’s the kind of organized data that can be applied to things like events, services recipes, product reviews, and articles to name a few.
There are a number of WordPress plugins like RankMath and Yoast SEO plugins that can help you implement schema markup on your web pages easily and effectively.
6. Sitemaps Submission
The pages on your website that you want search engines to crawl and index are listed in a sitemap. A current sitemap is crucial for helping search engines discover fresh information.
A search engine cannot crawl and index a new web page of your website until it is listed on your site map.
The sitemap must be submitted to Google via Google search console webmaster tool so that Google can access and index all the pages of your website
Conclusion
These are some of the important technical SEO components to take into account while creating your SEO strategy. However, It’s crucial to keep in mind that technical SEO is only a small portion of an all-encompassing SEO plan.
Along with other parts of SEO, you should also concentrate on link building and content optimization. Your website’s technical features can be optimized to improve its SERP visibility, which will increase organic traffic and boost the organic rankings of your target keywords.
Optimizing your website for technical SEO provides you with an advantage over your competitors and assists you in achieving your objectives and long-term goals.
