What is Technical SEO? A Complete Guide

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What is technical SEO? Find out in this complete guide to the key aspects of technical SEO and best practices so you can optimise your website performance.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimising the technical parts of your website so that they are not only easy to understand for search engines, but also give the user a good experience.Some examples of technical SEO best practices are to make your site fast and easily crawlable for search engines. We'll talk a little more about these practises later on in this article.In short, Technical SEO is making sure that your site is healthy so that it can rank.Want to make sure your website is healthy and ranking? Check out our technical SEO checklist for beginners and experts.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

The main reason why Technical SEO is important is that it helps search engines understand our site. If we don't optimise the technical components of our websites, then search engines might find it hard to find our content or trust it.However, nowadays, there is more to technical SEO than just making our sites easy to crawl. The other big aspect of technical SEO is giving our visitors a good experience, for example with a fast-loading site and not having 404 errors.If our sites are hard to crawl or give our users an annoying experience, no content or backlinks will help the site's rankings. For example, you might have a killer blog post but if search engines can't find it, it's not going to rank.So, technical SEO is just a piece of the puzzle that needs to be taken care of before you can rank for your targeted keywords.

Technical Parts of Your Website That Should Be Optimised

Technical SEO is quite a big part of optimising your website, so it would be quite hard to cover everything in one blog post. That being said, we have gathered the most important parts of your website that should be technically optimised to help you rank higher.

Site Speed

The first and one of the most important parts of your website to optimise is your site speed.While there have been some studies that suggest there isn't a correlation between site speed and rankings, many SEOs believe it's an essential part of optimising your website. It's also directly tied to your bounce rate and even your revenue, meaning even if it's not important for SEO, it is for your business.Plus, having a fast-loading site gives your users the best possible experience, so you can't go wrong by optimising the speed of your website.Here are some tips on speeding up your website:

  • Remove anything that slows it down
  • Minify Code & Scripts
  • Compress Images
  • Choose the right hosting company
  • Embed media instead of uploading where possible

Duplicate Content

Search engines get confused when they find the same content on different pages or websites.That's why it's essential for your site health to remove any duplicate content. Otherwise, you will have a hard time increasing your rankings, no matter how good your on and off-page SEO is.

Structure

The next part of your site that needs to be technically optimised is the structure.This is a big one, as it helps search engines crawl through your site to find the pages. As you'd probably expect, if you don't get this part right, you will have trouble ranking.That's why it's essential to have a good interlinking structure and to also submit XML sitemaps. Doing so will make it easy for search engines to find your pages meaning they can rank. You should aim for everything to be a couple of clicks away from the home page as this won't only make it easy for search engines to crawl your site, but also for your users to find what they are looking for.Also, make sure that none of your pages are orphaned (i.e don't have any internal links to them) as this is a sign of a bad structure. If this is the case, those pages will rarely perform well.

Links

Also important is that all your links are going to valid URLs.If they go to invalid URLs and are broken, then this is a bad sign for search engines and will also hurt the user experience. Luckily, there are several tools to help you identify broken links meaning you won't have to go through and check all your pages manually.Plus, if you stick with us through the rest of this article, we are going to show you how you can identify broken links and all your other technical SEO problems for free.

Security

Lastly, your site should also be secure.This means your website should have an SSL certificate, as browsers only want to refer users to safe sites.Plus, if your users feel safe, they are much more likely to convert.

Need Help? (Get a FREE Audit!)

If you need help identifying the technical problems with your site, we would like to offer you a FREE SEO audit. To get your audit, just fill out the short form at the bottom of our SEO services page.We hope you have enjoyed this article if you would like to learn more about SEO, make sure to check out our other artilces that is full of in-depth tutorials, tricks, and more.And, always remember that Technical SEO is something that needs to be on-point for you to rank!