Technical SEO is the process of structuring the backend of your site so search engines can locate your site, understand your site, and rank your site. This process involves making your site load faster, easier to crawl, sitemap submission, and marking your site with schema.
Off-page SEO is important because backlinks are one of the most influential ranking factors. Backlinks are analogous to citations in that they signal to search engines that a claim is credible and that the website is relevant and authoritative.
Search engines continually attempt to answer user queries with results that are trustworthy and relevant. The most reputable sites signal trust and relevance when they link to your site. Search engines need to see that evidence to determine if your site really deserves a ranking.
| Tool | Price | Use Cases |
|---|---|---|
| SEO India's SEO Checker | Free | Audits your site's current SEO performance, gives custom recommendations, and flags issues hurting your rankings. |
| Google Search Console | Free | Submit URLs for crawling, validate indexability, monitor schema issues, and track impressions and clicks. |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Free | Validate crawlability for Bing, monitor performance issues, and track Bing search results. |
| Screaming Frog | Free | Audit broken links and redirect chains, analyze robots.txt, and generate XML sitemaps. |
Submitting a sitemap helps Google understand the structure of your website and find all of the pages on your site. Google uses website sitemaps in two formats, HTML and XML. You only need to submit the XML version.
Google Search Console will assist you in submitting your sitemap. Simply click on the Sitemaps tab, type in the URL of your sitemap, and then click Submit. You will need to resubmit your sitemap to Google Search Console any time you add or modify a large number of pages on your website.
The robots.txt file is located in the root directory of your website and is an instruction manual for search engines. From this file you can tell search engines which pages or directories they should or should not access.
Be cautious with this file. This is a very powerful file, and if you are not careful, you could easily block search engines from accessing your entire site. If you are not familiar with robots.txt, it is best to consult a technical SEO professional for assistance.
Google, and all other search engines, appreciate a well structured website. If your website is easy for your customers and users to navigate, it is likely to score better on searches.
Website architecture is the structure and layout of the pages on your site, how they are linked to one another, and the URL structures. Make sure that all of the links on your site are working and lead to other, relevant pages.
In technical SEO, nothing is as critical as security. If your site is unsafe, search engines may forgo indexing it (and it won’t help how good your content is). Users don’t want to browse or share their personal information on unsafe sites.
The fix is simple — implement HTTPS by acquiring a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate from a Certificate Authority (like GeoTrust, RapidSSL, Comodo SSL, GlobalSign, etc.). This will help ensure that the information transferred from a user’s browser to your site is safe and remains protected from being intercepted.
Making your site user-friendly is making your site work for everyone, including people with disabilities. If your site is not user-friendly, it won’t be indexed (even if it has good content). This is because it does not cater (even in the slightest) to a good experience for a large number of users.
Some steps you can take are adding alternative text to audio and video, writing transcripts for single-audio or single-video-text content, adding captions to audio-sound videos, clear labels for forms, and headings for content, allowing navigation by keyboard, and writing page titles that are distinct and descriptive.
Schema markup (structured data) is code that helps search engines to better interpret your content. It can also help gain richer search results. It can be very helpful on product pages, contact pages, pages with guides or step-by-step articles, and pages that have content which directly answers a question.
For one, a page that responds to the query “what does a pest control technician do?” can implement FAQ schema to allow the answer to be displayed directly in search results. The implementation is easy thanks to a template. All that is left to do is choose the type of schema, answer the proposed questions, and put the template solution on your website.
Broken pages are a promise of content that fails to deliver, leaving users frustrated. Links should be monitored and fixed. An easy to use tool for this job is Screaming Frog. Run a crawl, and pay attention to the response code for 4xx errors. Fix these by redirecting, editing the link, or removing the link.
If your website is not operational and well formatted on smaller screens, your ranking and traffic will be negatively affected. Search engines give priority to the experience of smaller screen users.
Using the tool, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, will show the current status of your website. All the buttons and the layout should be designed to function properly and smoothly in every screen size. Responsive design is key.
You should now know the basic technical expectations search engines have for websites. Would you like expert assistance to identify or remedy these technical issues on your website? SEO India provides comprehensive technical SEO audits and implement the findings.
For a free technical SEO scorecard for your website, reach out to SEO India.
