Technical SEO – How Does It Help and Why is It Important? 

The Basics First

There are three distinct aspects of SEO and technical SEO is the most important. SEO guidelines are constantly evolving and due to frequent updates in the algorithm of search engines, these SEO practices need to be tailored accordingly. However, when it comes to technical SEO work, the frequency of changes is lower.

The Backbone – Technical SEO

Just like skyscrapers that are supported by strong foundations, websites need a strong backbone. Our digital business structure needs technical SEO and without it, everything falls apart. For example, let us take a look at this scenario. You have a website where you publish the most amazing content in the world and people eagerly wait to receive a notification that a new piece of content is published. Your customers click the link to read your content and it takes more than 10 seconds for the webpage to load. Each second of delay will contribute in increasing the bounce rate and loss of traffic. This is just one aspect that proves why technical SEO is so crucial.

The Story Begins

In this section of our blog, we will walk you through the most important aspects of technical SEO that are crucial for your website’s success and solutions to common website problems.

The Future is in Your Hand – On Hand-held Devices

In today’s world, you will find people looking down into their hand at a device at almost everywhere. They are staring at their mobile phones, reading, viewing and sharing texts, images, videos, doing shopping, exploring internet for information or anything they need. Since people started spending more time on these hand-held devices to do things that they used to do on traditional desktops, Google implemented a mobile-related algorithm change in 2015 to move its focus from computer-based browsing to mobile-based browsing. In 2016, Google announced their mobile-first indexing plans and this proved to be a game changer as mobile traffic is much higher than desktop traffic is these days.

A study revealed that 57% of all visits to retail websites come from mobile devices. Thus, Google started using the mobile version of websites for rankings. Since then, everything needs to be mobile friendly. From health care, education, transport, shopping, and leisure to all sorts of entertainment forms, websites had to adapt to this change and became accessible on devices with different screen sizes, different OSs and on devices with different specifications. You need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly, responsive and supports viewing on all the browsers, platforms and devices.

The Need for Speed

The speed at which your website opens up is critical. If it takes time, people will close it and move to another. This is called “pogo-sticking” and Google hates pogo-sticking. It does not matter how big is your brand is or how amazing your website is designed; your web page will go down on the search results if Google finds that visitors are leaving within the first 5 seconds. There are so many tools available online that allows performing speed tests for your web pages. Seek the help of professionals if you need some serious work on reducing the time a page loads on your website.

No More Broken Links

The information on your website may have a link to something relevant where a visitor might want to check in. When he clicks the link and nothing happens, it is annoying for them. If this is something that happens in many of your web pages, you have broken links. The reasons can be anything and it can happen to anyone. However, the problem is not so difficult to resolve. There are tools available that can help you to find and fix the broken links without consuming much of your time.

Duplicate Content is a Big NO

Be aware, Google is putting a lot of effort in improving their ability to detect duplicate content and they have been achieving good results so far. Unfortunately, Google bots are not capable enough to identify which site has copied the content from another and consequently, Google penalizes both. To avoid such penalties, make sure the content you are posting on your website is original and unique. Tools like Copyscape can help you identify if your content is similar to any other web pages or not. Get a team on board who can write fresh and original content for your web pages with a lot of creativity.

Address Crawl Errors

Your site is crawled all the time by search engine bots. When bots find something is wrong, it shows crawl errors that will affect your rankings on search engines. Ensure that you have a working sitemap and that all your web pages are indexed. If Google cannot read a sitemap, its bots cannot crawl your site, making it think as if your site does not exist. People who are involved in providing Digital Marketing and SEO Services will take care of such errors and implement strategies to help your site rank higher on search engines.

Do not worry if you face any of these technical SEO related issues. Most are easy to fix with a bit of time. Start with the big, critical aspects discussed above and tackle them one at a time.