Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a key component of Search Engine Optimization that focuses on optimizing the technical aspects of a website to improve its crawling, indexing, and ranking by search engines.
This discipline is concerned with making a website easily accessible, understandable, and functional for both users and search engines. Technical SEO covers a wide range of activities and interventions, including:
- Optimizing loading speed. Improve server response time, reduce resource weight, and optimize code to reduce page load time.
- Core Web Vitals. Optimize Core Web Vitals, the specific metrics Google uses to evaluate the user experience on a web page, such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Input Delay (FID), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
- Site structure and information architecture. Create a logical and hierarchical structure that facilitates navigation and understanding of the site by users and search engines.
- HTML tag optimization. Properly use header tags (H1, H2, etc.), title tags, description meta tags, and other HTML elements to improve page relevance and readability.
- Indexing management. Use the robots.txt file, robots meta tags and XML sitemaps to control which pages should be indexed or excluded by search engines.
- Mobile-friendliness. Ensure that the site is optimized for mobile devices, with responsive design and navigation suitable for different screen sizes.
- Site security. Implement the HTTPS protocol to ensure secure connections and protect user data.
- Redirect management. Use 301 redirects to maintain link equity when moving or removing pages and to guide users to the correct content.
- Troubleshooting 404 errors. Identify and fix broken links leading to pages not found to improve user experience and crawling efficiency.
- Elimination of duplicate content. Use rel=”canonical” tag or redirects to manage duplicate content and consolidate ranking power.
- Implementation of structured data. Use schema markup to provide search engines with contextual information about page content, improving the chance of appearing in advanced search results such as rich snippets.
Technical SEO requires a thorough understanding of how search engines work and web development best practices. It is an area that is constantly evolving, with new techniques and algorithms emerging regularly, requiring SEO professionals to stay current and proactive in the technical optimization of their sites, while also using a variety of tools to perform technical SEO audits to diagnose and fix technical problems that could negatively affect rankings.
For example, performance analysis tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights can be used to evaluate and improve page speed; SEO Spiders such as SEOZoom’s Spider or Screaming Frog to perform comprehensive SEO audits; or even the Google Search Console to get overviews of indexing status, search performance, and any technical site issues.
