Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. As much as we like talking about the newest and latest digital marketing tactics, SEO is a reliable mainstay and will be so for the foreseeable future.
When designing a comprehensive SEO strategy, however, most digital marketers spend their time on several things. Choosing high-ranking keywords to target is obviously an important step. Integrating these into high-quality pieces of content may be your next goal. At the same time, building backlinks is also critical.
All these on-page and off-page SEO strategies are necessary elements. However, technical search engine optimization is equally important to create strong SEO. Focusing on your website architecture and ensuring that Google can properly crawl your website goes a long way in allowing your website to rise in the search rankings.
Why Technical SEO Is Important
There isn’t one overarching plug-in or hack that will help your website have the “perfect” technical SEO. That said, there are a variety of things you can do that, collectively, can significantly improve your technical SEO and put you ahead of the competition.
Why do you want to prioritize technical SEO? Well, because technical SEO is what allows search engines like Google to know that you have a website of high value. This is important because it can prompt the search engines to rank you higher. After all, they primarily want to present users with the best possible results for their chosen keywords, and technical SEO is a way to ensure your website meets the requirements.
If Google prioritized webpages that were slow, nonresponsive or confusing to navigate, Google users would be more likely to take their search queries somewhere else. So if your website loads quickly, has no dead links and is secure, Google’s crawlers will give it an extra boost in search rankings.
The reasons for this are evident. Creating a strong technical foundation for your website will go a long way in satisfying and delighting your users. Search engine crawlers take notice and prioritize your website over others who offer slower and buggier experiences.
Technical SEO: Some Tips And Advice
Technical SEO is definitely something that you should take seriously. So, what are some of the things that you can do to raise your technical SEO? While it would be impossible to list all of them in this article, here are some of the most important things that you can do.
First, make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. This is a big one, because more users are now browsing the internet on their smartphones. Google and other search engines, therefore, prioritize websites that offer a great mobile browsing experience. Luckily, search engines like Google have released mobile-friendly tests that can help you optimize your mobile website.
Website speed also plays an important role. To get a basic audit of your website’s current speed, you can use a tool like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights. With that baseline, make sure that you are doing several key things. Think about enabling browser caching, optimizing your website’s images and enabling compression on your site. These are small steps, but put together, they can make your website much faster.
Next, make sure that you include an SSL certificate on your website. SSL (secure sockets layer) certificates provide extra security for visitors to your website. It protects data, confirms identities and improves customer trust. Therefore, by purchasing an SSL certificate, you will not only improve your SEO ranking, but you will add additional security to your website. It’s a no-brainer, so if you haven’t already obtained an SSL certificate, don’t hesitate to do so.
Finally, submit your sitemap to search engines. Sitemaps are essentially lists of pages on your website. They are critical because they let search engines find and index your website. Fortunately, sitemaps aren’t that difficult to create. For instance, if you use WordPress as your content management system, you can easily find a plug-in that will create a sitemap for you. Once your sitemap is ready, submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Doing this makes it easier for these search engines to crawl your website.
Rising Through The Rankings
Technical SEO isn’t going to automatically get you to the top of Google or Bing. That said, ignoring technical SEO will guarantee that doesn’t happen. A slow or buggy website is going to be punished by search engines, thereby preventing you from achieving your digital marketing goals.
Because of this, we encourage you to take technical SEO seriously. Audit your website, and implement some of the suggestions mentioned above. Ultimately, they will go a long way in strengthening your website’s technical SEO.
source: forbes
