Technical SEO helps optimize your website’s infrastructure to help search engines crawl and index it efficiently. Its pillars of SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.
Source: Backlinko
Technical SEO is more focused on the infrastructure that makes a website function smoothly and efficiently. Key areas include improving website speed, ensuring mobile friendliness, and fixing issues with site architecture.
For instance, your website, which is loading slowly, can negatively affect both the user experience and your website’s search engine rankings. By optimizing these technical elements, you can create a strong foundation for your website, allowing search engines to easily understand and rank your content.
That is how technical SEO helps boost your website’s visibility, user experience, and overall search engine performance.
In this article, we will discuss essential key elements of technical SEO, mistakes to avoid for better website rankings, and how we can help you with your technical SEO strategy.
Key Elements of Technical SEO
You need to have knowledge of a few essential elements to understand how technical SEO works. Let’s discover together:
- Website Speed Optimization:
Website speed or page speed refers to the amount of time it takes for a website page to load or to display the page content. According to Hubspot, having a page load time between 0 and 4 seconds is known to have the highest conversion rate.
Slow website speed can put off your users. Even search engines do not like slow websites, ultimately influencing your rankings.
SEO tools help you run page speed tests on your website to identify the issues with your website speed.
- Mobile-friendliness:
According to Hubspot, 61% of searchers on a mobile device are more inclined to contact a local business if their website is mobile-friendly.
Optimizing your website for mobile devices provides a better user experience and also helps boost your SEO rankings.
- XML Sitemaps:
An XML sitemap consists of a list of all pages of your website. It is a roadmap for search engines to index important pages of your website.
- Robots.txt Files:
A robots.txt file tells search engines where they can and cannot go on your website.
- Structured Data Markup:
Structured data, or Schema markup, helps search engines better understand your website, content, or business. It helps you add reviews, ratings, or product prices to be shown in SERPs.
Common Technical SEO Mistakes to Avoid
As it is essential to understand the basics of technical SEO, you must know what mistakes you should avoid for better website rankings. Here is a list:
- Ignoring Broken Links:
As your URLs change, your internal and external links might get broken. These broken links lead to a 404 error and negatively impact your user experience and SEO.
You can find and fix broken links by using SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. Setting up a custom 404 page will enhance your user’s experience when they encounter a broken link on your website.
- Not Having HTTPS:
Site security is a ranking signal across both desktop and mobile sites. Not having a secured website can directly impact your website’s performance.
When you type your domain name into Google Chrome and do not see the secure message at the beginning of your website URL, your website is not secure.
You can purchase an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority to convert your site to HTTPS. After you purchase and install your certificate, your site will be secure.
- Poor URL Structure:
Poor URL structure adversely affects both the user experience and the rankings of your website. On the other hand, clear and well-structured URLs help your users and search engines to understand the content of a link before clicking on it.
404 errors, 302 redirects, and issues with your XML sitemap are signs of your website that it needs to be fixed.
You can fix issues with your website’s URL structure by planning your site hierarchy properly, making sure all content is placed in its correct folder and subfolder, and your URL paths are easy to read and understand.
- Duplicate Content:
Search engines look for duplicate content across different pages of your website. It creates confusion during indexing and may result in your website being penalized.
You can fix this by regularly conducting a site audit for duplicate content.
How K2 Rankings Tech Can Help With Technical SEO?
At K2 Rankings Tech, we specialize in all aspects of technical SEO to ensure your website’s peak performance. Our technical SEO specialists conduct detailed SEO audits to identify issues such as slow website speed, crawl errors, and mobile usability problems.
We extend customized solutions, from fixing broken links to optimizing your website’s architecture. With a strong technical foundation, your website will rank better, load faster, and provide an improved user experience.
Contact K2 Rankings Tech today to unlock your website’s full potential with expert technical SEO strategies!