Hi everyone, this is Pradeep, your digital marketing friend and I am going to discuss What is Technical SEO? And the 9 Ranking Factors for Technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO and why is it important?
As you would have already guessed by the name, it refers to the technical aspects of SEO like site architecture, page speed, broken links, etc.
Why is it important?
Since it is a part of SEO, so obviously it helps you to rank higher in the search results. But other than that it also helps search engines in understanding the technical aspects of your website. You can use tools like Ubersuggest to analyze the technical factors of your website. So what are these technical aspects which affect the Technical SEO of our website?
9 Ranking Factors for Technical SEO
XML sitemap:- The first step is to create an XML sitemap for your website. And what is a sitemap? It is like a roadmap that tells the search engines where each of the pages is located on your website. You can think of a sitemap as an index of a book.
Just like in a book we have an index at the beginning or at the end which tells about the topics of the book. Similarly, is also like the list of contents on your website. This helps search engines to understand your website even better. In WordPress, you can use Yoast SEO to automatically create an XML sitemap for your website.
Google Search Console:- Once you have created a sitemap you need to submit it in the Google Search Console. For this, you need to create an account onGoogle Search Console and verify the ownership of your website. And what is Google Search Console?
It is basically a web service by Google which allows you to index your website in Google’s database. Through the Google Search Console, you are able to learn and understand why your website is doing good or bad in the organic results.
Just like Google Search Console, Bing has bing Webmaster and Yahoo has Yahoo Webmaster. After submitting the sitemap, Google starts collecting data about your website with the help of crawlers.
Crawlable and Indexable:- The next technical aspect is that your website should be Crawlable and Indexable. Search Engines use crawlers to read the content of your website.
Then they index the content into their database. And depending on the quality of your content,they rank your website. So, you need to make sure that your website is easy to crawl and index.
And how to do that? For this, you need to create Robots. txt file. If you are a WordPress user, you can easily do that with the help of the Yoast SEO plugin.
Website architecture:- The structure of your website should be simple so that users can easily navigate through it. It simply means that the user experience on your website should be good. To ensure a good user experience your website should also be responsive.
Mobile-friendly:- It means that your website should be mobile-friendly. And should adjust its interface according to the screen size. This factor is very important. Why?
Because more than 60% of the searches are done through mobile devices. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check if your website is responsive or not.
Structured Data and Rich Snippets:- They are pieces of code that help search engines to understand your content even better. A great example of this is star ratings and question-answers snippets. There are a lot of WordPress plugins which you can use for this.
The best part of these rich snippets is that they are visually appealing. So, they increase your chances of getting a click on the Search Engine Results Page. Thereby, helping you to rank higher.
Deep pages and broken links:- If you are linking to a page that no longer exists, so make sure you remove the link. Or redirect it to another relevant page.
If your user is redirected to a 404 page, it gives a negative signal and negative impact. And thereby, hurting your website rankings.
Security:- Make sure that your site is HTTPS enabled. It means that your website should have an SSL certificate. Basically, SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It indicates that your website is secure for the users. You can get free SSL from Cloudflare.
Website Loading Speed:- A fast-loading website means the user doesn't have to wait to get his/her query resolved. Hence, a good loading speed means a good user experience. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Gtmetrix, and Ubersuggest to check the page speed.
Some of these factors may coincide with On-page SEO but that doesn’t mean that they are the same.
So, that was all about Technical SEO and the different factors affecting it. So, that was all for this article. I hope this episode added some value to your life. If it did, do let me know in the comments section.
