What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO involves optimising code for SEO purposes.
When a website’s code becomes better optimised, it makes it search engine friendly.
This means that search robots can easily discover, access and index your website more effectively.
They know where your keywords are, what your website’s page structure is and also which page is the best to show in search results.
What’s covered in technical SEO
Optimised headings
Heading formats of your page are something to look at when looking into technical SEO.
For the most optimal SEO performance, pages should only contain one H1-tag and no more than five H2-tags.
The H1-tag should contain a page’s primary keyword and H2-tags should include related (LSI) keywords to the main topic of the page.
For example, if we talk about “St Neots SEO Company”, this could be included in our H1 tag. As for H2 tags, we could use “Digital Marketing Services”, “SEO Services”, etc.
Optimised images
Optimised images are also something to consider as not only including alt-text on images would make them optimised.
Images could be further optimised by resizing, reformatting and even stripping away unnecessary colour spaces.
Optimised code
There are numerous things an SEO can help with when optimising a website’s code.
However, these are made much harder once a website has been fully built and should be considered from the get-go.
Minified code for performance
Front-end HTML, CSS and JavaScript code can all be minified to strip away any whitespace and comments.
This can help for speeding up a website’s loading time as there are not as many lines to go through.
Furthermore, multiple CSS or JavaScript files should be combined together respectively, as this reduces the number of loading URLs when accessing the page.
This is especially important to consider if those CSS or JavaScript URLs are external.
Semantic markup
Semantic markup is HTML code which is optimised for search engines. Correct usage of HTML tags is the one thing that can take a lot of time to rebuild if a website doesn’t already follow them correctly.
Structured data
Structured data is something that tells search engines such as Google rich-data about your webpage and business. These are often shown as either rich snippets, additional information about your listing or under your business profile when a user uses Google.
This could include;
- structured breadcrumbs (which are shown under search results),
- company or organisation information,
- business addresses,
- social media accounts (shown under the sidebar of Google),
- step-by-step formats for websites such as recipe websites,
- product reviews for eCommerce websites,
- event times for booking websites.
For the full list, you should read the guidance on the Schema website.
Usage of caches
Caches can help to optimise your website by creating a saved version to output to all users.
The main reason to install a cache on your website is to optimise for speed.
This can help not only users navigate your website better but also search robots index it more efficiently too, as it effectively becomes faster.