SEO Myths 2 – Why Technical SEO Is Key to Your Website Success

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One of the most common SEO myths is that technical SEO is a one-time procedure that does not change a website’s ranking on SERPs. This leaves the optimization process in limbo, as this facet of SEO is critical in determining if your website is search engine-ready.

Before getting into the hows and whys, it is best to define this optimization phase. Technical SEO is the process of adjusting the technical aspects of a website to comply with the protocols needed for it to appear in search engines. or as Google puts it, “What Google needs from a web page to show it in Google Search.”

Technical SEO covers various aspects of a website’s architecture, coding, and integration elements. Some of these are simple and can be adjusted with minimum webmaster skills, and will be mentioned later. At the same time, some can be complex changes that require knowledge of some coding.

Meeting the Bare Minimum of Technical SEO

tecnical seo

According to the Google optimization guide, there are not many technical requirements for indexing a website, and most sites qualify without doing anything. This falls under what it calls the “bare minimum.”

Holiday SEO

Google Is Allowed to Crawl the website

Some websites are private in nature and require passwords to access the content. Such pages will not appear in search engines. In the current technical blog post, Google gives a brief statement on the issue.

Google only indexes pages on the web that are accessible to the public and which don’t block our crawler, Googlebot, from crawling them. If a page is made private, such as requiring a log-in to view it, Googlebot will not crawl it. Similarly, if one of the several mechanisms are used to block Google from indexing, the page will not be indexed.

On most WordPress-powered websites, this is automatically on and the webmaster needs not to do anything. However, it is worthwhile ensuring that this is activated. Follow these simple steps

  1. Login to your website WordPress dashboard
  2. Find the “Settings” tab on the menu bar
  3. Click to open and navigate to “Reading
  4. Make sure that “Search engine visibility” is unchecked.
  5. Click the “Save” button at the foot of the page.

This will ensure that Google can easily crawl your website.

Functioning Page

Google needs a web page that loads. “The page works, meaning that Google receives an HTTP 200 (success) status code.” Almost all WordPress websites will load a functioning page after publishing. You can verify this by asking a friend to visit your site and sharing what they find.

Great Website Content

Meeting this third technical requirement will begin the content journey of each site. Whatever you write, you should make sure that it meets these two criteria.

  • The file type (.docs, PDF, etc) is supported by Google. You find a long list of the kinds of files that Google accepts.
  • Your content is not spam. The web is made of content and optimizing it to reach customers is the common goal. However, not all content is welcomed by Google, especially those that it classifies as spam. This category covers practices such as content copying, keyword stuffing, scraping, machine-generated traffic, etc.

Advanced Technical SEO Practices

technical seo

There is an ongoing side to technical SEO, as you can see. However, the search giant has provided guides and AI assistance to help you meet all requirements. Ideally, these practices are geared toward optimizing the trilateral experience between search engines, service providers, and users.

  • Making it easier for search engines to crawl and index websites
  • Providing superb user experience, and
  • Sharing quality content

Although most site owners can do the bare minimum, ongoing optimization does require some technical know-how. This brief article discusses some of the most important elements. From sitemaps to page speed, these techniques will deliver better rankings.

Getting Started Technical SEO Techniques

The first and most important step for a site owner is to create a Google Search Console account. The company offers this free service to help webmasters “monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot (their) site’s presence in Google Search results.”

Sitemaps

These are files hosted on your website that provide a list of pages and show how they relate to each other. According to Google, sitemaps allow search engines to better understand your content structure. It” tells search engines which pages and files you think are important in your site and also provides valuable information about these files. For example, when the page was last updated and any alternate language versions of the page.”

The good news is that most CMS, like WordPress or Wix, have already created this file for you and you won’t need to sweat about it. You can double this in your Google Search Console by navigating to the Sitemaps section. It should look something like this: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

Page speed

This technical SEO metric stipulates how fast a website loads its content to visitors. Pages that take too long to load will drive away customers. This response by customers is called the bounce rate.

Fast websites are given preference as Google likes to deliver answers in the shortest time possible. This means that improving the loading time of your site can improve SEO, better ROI, and optimize user experience.

Many companies, like CloudFlare, have created networks that are closer to customers with the aim of reducing latency. That means that closer servers can deliver faster load times. In a recent blog post on page speed, the company said:

“Websites that use a CDN (content delivery network) load much more quickly. The Cloudflare CDN caches content in 330 cities around the world in order to store content closer to end users. This reduces latency, because requests from user devices do not have to travel all the way to origin servers, and as a result, load time and RTT are much lower.”

Technical SEO practices can boost your website results on the SERPs and SEOs should continue to follow the recommendations sent by Google. Monitoring the website’s technical readiness is vital to user experience.

 

 

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