So, you think you’ve mastered SEO, but have you really identified all the necessary elements to find success in search?
SEO is much deeper than developing high-quality content and keywords. In fact, this is only about half of the battle! If you truly want to master SEO, you need to ensure your on-page and off-page strategies are up to par.
Incorporating some of the more technical aspects of SEO can be the difference between a site that ranks highly and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Keep reading to learn what technical SEO is and why it’s so crucial to your site’s success in search.
Technical SEO Defined
According to Moz, traditionally, the phrase “Technical SEO” refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad field that covers numerous high-level elements. Here are just a few examples:
- Response codes
- Canonical tags
- Structured data
- Sitemaps
- Page speed
- Crawl optimizations
- Robots.txt
- Internal links
- HTTPS
- Javascript
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- Thin and/or duplicate content
- Hreflang
While this may seem a bit complicated, you may not always need to have a deep technical understanding of these concepts. Instead, you can learn to identify and communicate these issues to your web development team to help get them addressed.
It’s important to have a healthy and close relationship with your developers so that you can successfully tackle SEO challenges from both sides. Don’t wait until a technical issue causes negative SEO ramifications to involve your development team. Instead, join forces from the get go to avoid the issues altogether.
Why is Technical SEO a Must?
You may think you have the best site with the best content. But, if your website is full of technical SEO errors, you’re simply not going to rank.
At the most basic level, search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render, and index the pages on your website. But it doesn’t stop there.
If search engines like Google can successfully index all of your website’s content, that doesn’t mean your job is complete. In order for your site to be fully optimized for SEO, covering all of the technical aspects is an absolute must.
Does this mean that your technical SEO has to be flawless in order to rank? No, it doesn’t. But, it’s worth ensuring your site is free from errors that could ultimately be detrimental.
Technical SEO: The Bottom Line
To generate more traffic and better engage your visitors, having a website that is fully optimized is key. Take the time needed to go through your site, fix any errors, and optimize it to its full potential. The easier you make it for search engines, the better chance your webpages have to rank.