Technical SEO (or Technical SEO) refers, in general, to all the optimization carried out on your website that is directly related to more technical processes. The purpose of these optimizations is to help search engines crawl and index your site’s content more effectively (promoting organic rankings).
Search engines, such as Google, give privileged treatment to sites that respect certain technical characteristics. It’s because?! Well, the answer is obvious! Think with me…
Google is a free service, right (“Oh and all, but you have Google Ads!” – I’m obviously talking about the entire organic process – crawling, indexing, search, etc…)?! You don’t pay to search for a term, and you also don’t pay to index your content. However, despite being a free service, vast computational power is needed for this service not to fail, and for it to remain stable and updated… with this alone, it becomes obvious why a properly optimized website is privileged, right?! 😉
Parameters such as the security of your website, whether it is “friendly” to mobile devices and even loading speed are Technical SEO parameters that you will need to guarantee to ensure that your website is properly optimized.
1) Use an SSL certificate on your website.
An SSL certificate is a technology that guarantees an encrypted connection between the server, which is hosting your website, and the browser. You can check which sites have an active certificate through their URL – a secure site always starts with “HTTPS”, instead of the traditional “HTTP”.
In fact, back in 2014, Google announced that it wanted to see “HTTPS” on all websites on the web. As a result of this will, since 2018 (if I’m not mistaken) all websites without an SSL certificate are considered insecure. It becomes obvious that if your website is not compliant, it will be penalized in search results…
2) How quickly your website is displayed.
Search engines prefer sites that load fast. Loading speed is one of the most important factors for your website’s ranking. Within the scope of Technical SEO, there are many factors that affect the speed of a website. For example:
- Image compression: Make sure that all images you upload to your website are in compressed format, with a maximum width of 1600px (1200px recommended) and with a size that does not exceed 300kb. If you use WordPress, you have plug-ins that do this automatically.
- CACHE: Make sure CACHE for your site’s pages is active. Almost all CMS have an option to control CACHE. If you use WordPress, you have countless plugins to choose from.
- Fast hosting: Always host your website on proven hosting, and stay away from free or less credible hosting.
- Scripts and Plugins: Restrict the use of scripts and Plugins to the minimum possible
- Stylesheets: Using just one stylesheet (CSS) instead of several can also help with faster loading.
- GZIP Compression: Ensures that your website pages are compressed by the server.
- Code compression: Keep your code as compressed as possible (HTML, CSS and Javascript), using tools such as those included at minifier.org.
3) Is your website “mobile-friendly”?
It’s nothing new that we browse the internet using our smartphone, tablet or phablet. It’s something that won’t change! In fact, it only increases with each passing day. Make sure you have a responsive website, adapted to mobile devices. I believe that the focus on the development of your website, unlike what it was in other times, should always be “mobile-first” and, only then, “desktop”.
4) Does your website have an XML Sitemap?
Another way to help search engines crawl and index your website’s content is to provide a sitemap, in XML format. This file, in addition to listing all the pages on your website that you want to see indexed, also helps search engines understand how frequently your content is updated. In practice, the XML sitemap indicates:
- The exact location of the pages you want to see indexed;
- The date of last update of each page;
- The priority of the page, compared to other pages on your website; It is
- How often you update your website, or pages on your website.
If you use a CMS (Content Management System) to manage your website, such as WordPress or Concrete5, it is very likely that you have a tool that generates and updates it automatically. If you have an HTML website, you can generate it manually using a tool like this https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
5) Add Structured Data (Schema Markup) to your website.
Structured Data are fractions of code that, when added to the pages of your website, help search engines identify, organize and present the content of a given page within your website. In other words, Google, for example, can index your website much more effectively. In practice, if search engines make their work easier through Structured Data, your website will obviously have priority over others that do not have this optimization.
We have reached the end of this content, but not the ones related to SEO 😊! I believe that this content has helped you to optimize the visibility of your website, and optimize it according to the most current standards. If you have any questions, send us your message here or contact us through our Social Media, we will be happy to answer you 😊