Beginner to advanced Guide: basics of technical seo

Have you ever been terrified of hearing the word technical? & think that man it’s a task of pro coder’s. Writing thousand lines of code!!!! 

Man, I am giving up.   

Yes it might be a little bit tricky. But hey technical seo is not about coding. & I swear you didn’t need any coding skills. And for the site that is built in wordpress it’s a matter of using some easy plugins.

In this blog we will learn all the basics of technical seo. Let’s dive deep into the topic.

What does technical seo mean?

The basic concept behind the technical seo is to get higher ranking in the serp result by optimizing technical components. 

Why technical seo is important?

Imagine, you have the world’s best piece of content but the user is not able to find that content on the search engine. So, what’s the problem? Why on earth is it not ranking at all?

What does technical seo components include

How much secure your site is 

If you are running an ecommerce site then the user data is much more valuable than anything.

You must want the user’s privacy to be kept as secure as possible and so does the google. In the year 2014 google notified that https is a must requirement for the ranking of the websites.

Then how to make the website secure? It’s simple by implementing an ssl certificate on your site.

Ssl stands for secure sockets level; it ensures a secure data transfer between the server and the browser.

Lets see, Search engine works in three ways: first it crawls the page, then indexes it and finally it ranks the page. And technical seo make sure, all the three things works perfectly.

Technical seo is the point of contact between your website and search engine. 

The ranking of the website is highly dependent on the technical components. This makes the technical seo one of the most important factor in seo practice.

mobile friendly website rank faster on serp

In the year 2015 the mobile internet user surpassed the desktop user. And as of 2022 data from statcounter the global mobile user is 56.49% and desktop user is 41.11%.

Source: gs.statcounter

But if we focus on the world’s most populous nations like India and China then their respective mobile users are 75.98% and 63.98%.

Due to the increase in the mobile user, Google introduced the mobile first indexing approach. 

Having a responsive website that can adjust automatically to the device will rank faster in the serp result. So, having a mobile friendly website is much more necessary than before.

site speed

With the increase in the speed of the internet the waiting span of user’s is decreasing. They want the website to load at the fash of light. Look at the data, if the load time is more than 3 second then the chance of bounce rate is 32% and for more than 10 second the bounce rate is 123%. This makes the site speed one of the critical factor of technical seo.

The better the speed, the lower is the bounce rate and increase in the organic traffic. As per the google recommendation the best page loading time should be 2 seconds. Lets see how we can increase the site speed.

Find a good hosting provider

The site speed highly depended on the hosting provider. The most common mistake when one is just starting up is choosing the cheap hosting provider. It may seem like cracking a great deal, but in the long run it will hurt your page performance.

Reduce the size of the images files

Look at the condition, letters and words are being displayed but there is a huge blank space in the whole content yeah you got that the image is loading. To avoid such issues try to reduce the size of the image file as small as possible.

You can use some free tools to compress the image files like tiny png or if you own a wordpress site then use a plugin called lazy load. Lazy loading will only load the image when the page is scrolled down.

Use cloudflare CDN 

CDN refers to the content delivery network or content distribution network is the group of servers located on different corners of the world. These networks provide the copies of the static content from the servers and hence improves the page loading speed.

Check out the images of page loading speed before and after implementing the Cloudflare CDN

Before cdn

after implementing CDN

You can use the tool called google page insight in order to audit the site speed.

Core webvitals 

The way you can measure the site speed by observing the data of core web vitals obtained from page speed insight. There are three main types of core web vitals:

Largest contentful paint (LCP)

The time taken in seconds to load the largest text or image file on the user screen is defined as LCP. 

Here are some tips which can help you in improving the LCP

1. Try to choose the best hosting provider
2. Implement lazy loading on the site
3. Remove the third party scripts
4. Try remove the large page text
5. Minimize the css files

First input delay (FID)

The time taken in milliseconds for the user actually being able to interact with the site.

Here are some tips which can help you in improving the FID

1. Minimize the javascript
2. Remove the third party scripts
3. Use the browser cache

Cumulative layout shift (CLS)

It determines how stable your site element is throughout the entire loading page lifecycle.

Here are some tips which can help you in improving the CLS

1. Use size attributes for the image and videos
2. If your are using the adsense make sure they have reserved space

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file tells the crawler which url to crawl and which to not, this helps in optimizing the crawl budget. Crawl budget is the time allocated to your website for crawling. The budget also depends upon the authority of the website, the more authority you have the more the crawl budget is.

Check out the simple robots.txt file with only two rules:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogooglebot/

User-agent: *

Allow: /

Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml

Duplicate content issue

One of the most common mistakes made by the web content creators is creating the same piece of content. Duplicate contains are the identical piece of two or multiple contains that is placed on your website. It can confuse the web crawler while indexing.

Here are some tips to avoid creating duplicate content

1. If you are using cms like wordpress or wix then, there is a probability that the cms automatically creates and publishes the same content again. By preventing the cms to publish the post or pages is a good way to avoid the duplicate content.
2. Using the canonical url for the pages having similar content.

xml sitemap

Xml sitemap is the list of file which contains the data of your website like posts, pages that are present on the website. This sitemap works as a guide to crawl the website.

You can use the google search console to submit the sitemap to google.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

AMP is an open source frame project conducted by Google to optimize mobile web browsing. The aim of the project is to boost the speed of page loading by implementing a special code called amp html.

It can create a carousel post in the serp result. Most news websites use AMP to get more CTR.

The AMP version of the website has many pros and cons. And google officially announced that AMP has no impact on seo.

Pros of using AMP

1. Make the mobile loading faster
2. In might improve ctr in mobile devices

Cons of using AMP

1. Not easy to implement
2. You will have to compromise with other seo factors
3. The analytics and search console report will messed up because of data will be collected from both site

Structured data markup:

Schema markup is a collaborative project conducted by major search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and many others. The aim of the project is to provide structured data on the internet.

This structured data will help search engines know better about the content and hence increase the CTR.

Implementing schema is a nice technical seo strategy as it gives the opportunity to get rich snippets which will eventually bring your website on the top of the serp results.

Types of schema markup

1. Organizational schema
2. Local schema
3. Product page
4. Article
5. FAQ
6. Events
7. Videos
8. How to
9. Job listing
10. Recipes, etc

The above picture describes the use of a recipe schema.

Final touch

Hope this blog might give you some idea about the basics of technical seo. Stay connected as we will go deep in the upcoming blogs.

check out the ecommerce seo article.