Technical SEO, also known as sub-index technical SEO, ensures that your website is prepared to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Google recommends a technical audit before launching a site to ensure that it’s optimized for crawlers and users. Technical SEO comes with its own challenges and requires specific knowledge, tools and experience to tackle these issues. This article will help you understand what it involves if you are new to technical SEO. This guide covers everything from what technical SEO is, why it’s important, the difference between manual and automated technical SEO audits, how to set up your site for crawling, what auditing tools are available for technical SEO audit (both free and paid), and finally some examples of common failures in technical SEO on live websites.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO services ensure that your website is prepared to be crawled and indexed by search engines. That’s the surface-level definition, but there is much more to it than that. Technical SEO starts with identifying how search engines discover and access websites. There are two important components at play here: – The crawler that runs on a schedule and visits your website, then extracts metadata and content to create a rich snapshot of the website. This is called an index. – The indexer, which is the software that processes the data collected by the crawler, then adds the website to the search engine’s database. The crawler and indexer are critical parts of the technical SEO process, so it’s important to understand how they work.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
The first and foremost reason why you should care about technical SEO is because it’s required for search engine crawlers to actually be able to access and index your website. If your website isn’t properly prepared for crawling, it will not be added to the search engine’s index. This means that not only will your traffic from organic search be low, but it will also be low from direct or referral traffic as well. Search is a key element of lead generation. A recent study shows that an average of 66% of sales are generated by search engine traffic, with an average value of $8700 per sale. With the right approach, SEO can be a highly profitable channel with low competition.
Manual Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit is a process of evaluating your website’s current technical SEO health. This can be done manually by you or with the help of a professional SEO team. A manual audit is a great place to start if you are new to technical SEO. It allows you to understand what issues your website has, what causes each issue, and how you can fix them. Depending on how long your website has been live, and how the owner has approached SEO in the past, you may need to address a wide range of issues or only a few.
Setting Up Your Site for Crawling
Many aspects of your website can affect how easily it can be crawled and indexed. If any of these items are incorrect, your website will be negatively affected. In order to set up your site properly for crawling, you need to understand how search engines discover and access websites. Technical SEO ensures that your website is prepared to be crawled and indexed by search engines. There are five main areas where you can optimize your website to improve its crawlability. – A well-structured website architecture – a clear URL structure and URL naming conventions – A sitemap file that tells search engines when to crawl your site – An absence of malicious scripts and links – A lightning-fast website hosting environment – A website that uses the right content and HTML markup
Common Technical Failures in Websites
The two most common technical SEO failures are duplicate content and the lack of proper site architecture. Duplicate content – Having duplicate content on your website means that you are serving up the same content on multiple pages. Duplicate content can cause Google to misinterpret your website and negatively affect your rankings. Duplicate content can happen by accident, or you can have it on purpose if you have a lot of long-form content. Improper site architecture – If you have a poorly structured website, then it will be difficult for search engines to crawl and index your content. A poorly structured site can lead to high bounce rates, which will negatively impact your revenue. Poor site architecture can be caused by a wide range of issues, from a messy URL structure to a lack of site maps.
Conclusion
Technical SEO ensures that your website is prepared to be crawled and indexed by search engines. The most common technical SEO failures are duplicate content and the lack of proper site architecture. In order to reduce these failures, you need to optimize your website for crawling using technical SEO best practices. A well-structured website architecture, a clear URL structure, and a sitemap file are all crucial for indexation. You also need to make sure your website is free of malicious scripts and links. Finally, your website hosting environment needs to be lightning-fast. If you follow these steps, you will have a more crawlable website, which will lead to more traffic and better results in search engine rankings.