What is Technical SEO – A Detailed Guide
Technical SEO: A Detailed Guide
Technical SEO is an important measure in SEO to improve website performance. Simply building a website based on technical SEO can often increase the number of views. Here is an article on Technical SEO: A Detailed Guide, Where I will explain the points of technical SEO that you need to remember to effectively utilize your website. It is a must-see for those who are thinking of opening a website or who want to improve their current website.
If you would like to read a detailed guide on what is SEO and how to increase traffic to your website with SEO please read it before starting to read this guide. Also, we have 30 hours of sessions during our Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing course with practicals.
1. What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is to improve and organize the internal data of the website and optimize the provision of information to search engines.
By preparing the contents of the website correctly for search engines and proceeding with measures for the internal structure, it is possible to improve the search ranking.
In order to determine search rankings, Google conducts patrol surveys by crawlers and saves them in a database called Indexing.
By addressing such processes from within your website, you will be able to optimally display your content in search results.
Technical SEO is an essential measure if your goal is to improve the search ranking of your website.
2. How Technical SEO is different from Content SEO
Unlike technical SEO, which optimizes the internal structure, content SEO is a method of improving the quality of outgoing content such as articles to increase search rankings.
The basis of content SEO is to write articles that meet user needs, create content based on the correct selection of keywords, and create content in good condition.
Both technical SEO and content SEO are essential measures to improve search rankings.
However, if you focus only on content SEO and neglect technical SEO, the reputation of the website that publishes the content will decline, and high-quality articles may not be understood correctly.
Therefore, it is recommended to first proceed with technical SEO and create a foundation that can make use of content SEO.
3. Advantages of Technical SEO
Technical SEO has many benefits.
Let’s take a look at the following and see why technical SEO is attracting attention.
- Aim to increase inflow from organic traffic
Website optimization through technical SEO is an opportunity to increase the inflow from organic traffic (inflow from sources other than listing advertisements, etc.).
With more organic searches driven by active user behavior, you can increase the number of customers who are interested in your content without spending money on advertising.
If you want to increase the number of visitors to your website, there are merits to taking measures with technical SEO.
- The effect of measures is easy to see
Technical SEO also has the advantage that the effect of measures is easy to understand.
After the countermeasures are taken, the effects can be visualized simply by using a dedicated tool, making it easy to verify.
You can immediately check the pages actually crawled by the crawler and the status of the search index, so you can smoothly consider and improve the measures to be implemented.
- Required measures are clear
Google has clarified the necessary measures for technical SEO, so it is also an advantage that it is easy to understand what to do.
By referring to the “Guidelines for Google Search Console” published by Google, you can check how your website is recognized by Google and how to improve user convenience.
Technical SEO measures can be advanced simply by implementing measures according to the guidelines, so it is possible to respond without specialized knowledge.
4. Disadvantages of Technical SEO
- May not be possible due to system restrictions
Technical SEO can require changes to your web server settings, site-wide changes, and automated processes. Therefore, it may not be possible depending on the server or CMS (EC site ASP, etc.) you are using.
- A certain amount of content is required
Content with extremely little information will also have less information to convey to Google. Since less information is registered in the search index, it is disadvantageous for SEO as a result.
In such a case, it is better to practice technical SEO after increasing the text volume first.
5. Measures necessary for technical SEO
The measures required for technical SEO can be roughly divided into two types: “for crawlers” and “for indexes”.
Let’s check the specific measures for each of the following.
5.1 Measures for Crawlers
Measures for crawlers are measures to provide appropriate information to “crawlers”, which are robots that Google makes to collect information necessary for recognizing and ranking websites.
Building an environment where crawlers can smoothly move around your company’s content and collect information is part of technical SEO.
Specifically, the following measures are included in crawler countermeasures.
Improved display speed
Improving the display speed of your website is one of the technical SEO for crawlers.
If page information is slow to load, crawlers tend to rate the site poorly.
You will need to take measures that do not overload the page, such as not using images or videos with large file sizes or compressing files on the server.
Hierarchical optimization
Optimizing the hierarchical structure that makes up a website is also part of technical SEO.
Measures such as reducing the number of clicks to reach the page and setting up a breadcrumb list to make it easier to move between pages will lead to the optimization of the hierarchical structure.
URL normalization
Along with optimizing the hierarchical structure, I would like to normalize the URL.
For example, if multiple URLs lead to the same page, such as with or without “www”, it may be considered duplicate content and the number of crawls may decrease.
To canonicalize such duplicate URLs, first specify a canonical page.
Specifically, there are methods such as adding a code indicating the canonical page to all duplicate pages or specifying the URL of the canonical page in the sitemap.
Introduction of XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of information for an entire web page.
By introducing this XML sitemap, the structure of the site can be smoothly conveyed to the crawler, so it is characterized by being able to provide Google with specific page content.
Mobile friendly
Mobile-friendly support is a measure to prepare a website so that it can be viewed comfortably by adapting it to the screen of a smartphone.
In today’s world where there are many smartphone users, it is also an important technical SEO to make it mobile-friendly, such as adjusting the text size to suit smartphones and adjusting the links and input items on the site so that they are easy to press.
You can check the degree of mobile-friendliness with the official ” Mobile-Friendly Test ” service provided by Google.
5.2 Measures for indexes
Measures for indexing are to improve internal information in order to convey the content of web content in an easy-to-understand manner to search engine crawlers who visit the page.
It will also lead to the improvement of the content, so let’s practice technical SEO for the index with reference to the following.
Improved titles and headings
In technical SEO, it is essential to improve and adjust article titles and headlines as index measures.
By taking measures such as setting the target keyword at the beginning of the title or headline, limiting the number of characters in the title to 30 characters or less, and setting a different title for each page, you can accurately convey the information of the content.
Also, it is important to improve the “description”, which is the description of the site. A few crucial measures to take are:
Improve how you attach images
If you’re using images in your articles, you’ll also need to improve how you attach them for technical SEO.
For example, measures such as writing an “alt attribute” that describes the content of the image (it is good to include keywords) and not using Roman characters in the filename of the image will contribute to making the site easy to understand.
Improved linking
In technical SEO indexing measures, it is necessary to devise how to paste links.
Be proactive in pasting links to relevant articles, and include keywords in the anchor text to describe the linked page.
It’s also important to set up 404 errors and 301 redirects in case of broken links.
Eliminate duplication
Technical SEO also includes eliminating suspicion of duplication with other sites.
If it is judged that your company’s content overlaps with the content of other sites, it will be treated as copy content and the evaluation of the entire website will decrease.
Also, if you use similar content on your own site, you may be concerned about the negative impact on search results.
It is necessary to take measures such as regularly checking that there are no duplicates and rewriting and improving the content.
6. How to proceed with technical SEO
- Start from crawl optimization
For technical SEO, start with crawl optimization. Problems with search engine crawling can cause major problems, such as not being indexed by search engines. Wait for index optimization to occur after a successful crawl.
- Carry out while checking the search index
In the next index optimization phase, we will use Google Search Console to check what keywords are being evaluated from the search ranking . After performing index optimization, check the search index, perform the next index optimization, and repeat the cycle.
7. Technical SEO tools
Here are few recommended tools and services for technical SEO.
- LightHouse Test – Webpage Test
Lighthouse is an extension for Google Chrome officially provided by Google. When used on the page you want to check, it is a tool that measures, evaluates, scores, and displays site performance, internal SEO information such as titles and anchor texts, and site accessibility. In addition, the detected SEO improvement points are displayed in a list, so it is easy to correct the relevant points.
- PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is also Google’s official tool, and among the functions of Light House mentioned above, it only performs performance checks.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
By entering the URL of the site screaming frog, you can crawl the pages in the site and analyze meta information such as titles and canonical tags. It can also detect site issues such as broken links, redirects, and duplicate content. It also supports the crawling of SPA applications such as Angular.
- Deep Crawl
On deep crawl when you enter the URL of the site, it is an analysis tool that crawls all pages in the site based on it, acquires all internal SEO information such as titles, descriptions, hashtags, and anchor text, and evaluates them. Detected improvements such as title duplication, content duplication, anchor text flaws, etc. are listed so that they can be fixed instantly. You can also check if it has been corrected correctly by executing a post-correction check.
Summary
So, I hope this article Technical SEO: A Detailed Guide explains the basic technical SEO measures and the advantages and disadvantages. Technical SEO is different from content SEO, if you take measures according to Google’s guidelines, the search ranking will increase accordingly. There is an advantage in that it is easy to take countermeasures because the method of countermeasures is clear.
Why don’t you take this opportunity to learn about systems related to search results such as crawlers and indexes and take measures to aim for the higher display of your company’s content? Visit NIDE to learn more about SEO
