10 Technical SEO Factors That Might Affect Your Ranking

Intro

The importance of Technical SEO optimization cannot be overstated. It remains at the core of any successful approach, and it's essential to remember that search engine optimization isn't an overnight procedure.

Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a website for crawling and indexing by search engines. It is a subset of SEO that focuses on the technical aspects of a website, such as the structure of the site, the code, and the server.

Imagine the possibilities if you combine SEO with digital transformation. You can gain long-term benefits for your business, such as increased brand awareness and growth in traffic to products or services offered by a digital marketing company!

The goal of technical SEO is to ensure that a website fulfills the technological standards of modern search engines in order to improve organic rankings. Crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture are all critical elements of technical SEO.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO is important because it helps search engines understand and index a website accurately. If a website has poor technical SEO, it will be more difficult for search engines to find and rank the site. This can lead to lower organic traffic and fewer conversions. Google and other search engines must be atleast able to find, crawl, render, and index the pages on your website.

But that's just the beginning. Even if Google indexes all of your site's content, you're not finished yet. In order for your site to be completely optimized technically, it must be safe, mobile-friendly, free of duplicate content, quick-loading... and a slew of other criteria that go into technical optimization.

That isn't to say that your SEO has to be flawless in order to rank. It doesn’t. However, the easier you make it for Google to access your material, the better your chances of ranking are.

How to Improve Your Technical SEO?

To enhance the technical optimization of your website, you need to work on the following:

1. Sitemaps

A sitemap is a document that explains how to navigate your website and what information should be indexed by search engines. Sitemaps also let search engines know which pages on your site are most relevant.

There are four main types of sitemaps:

• Normal XML Sitemap: It is designed for websites that are large and well-structured.
• Image Sitemap: It is for websites that have a lot of images.
• **Video Sitemap: **It is designed for websites that have a lot of videos.
• News Sitemap: Helps Google locate content on websites that are approved for inclusion in the Google News service.

It is quite easy to generate your own sitemap for a website. One such tool is XML-sitemaps.com.

2. Robots.txt

The robots.txt file can make or break a website’s performance in search results.

This text file is used to tell search engine crawlers which pages on your website can and cannot be indexed. If you have a page that you don’t want Google to index, you can add it to your robots.txt file, and the crawler will ignore it.

It is always supposed to be set at “disallow: ” (without the forward slash). If this is enabled, all user agents will be able to crawl the site.

Check Google Search Console for the presence of a robots.txt file. You can go to_ Crawl > robots.txt Teste_r to do this.

3. Website Architecture

(Image source: delante.co)

The architecture of a website is the structure in which the web pages are organized and linked together. The goal of effective website architecture is for visitors and search engine crawlers to find what they're looking for with ease on the internet.

The search engines like Google and Bing crawl all of your website's pages in order to index them appropriately. If your site has numerous clicks between your homepage and other significant pages (or none linked to any other), you should consider deleting those links. Bots will have a hard time finding and indexing those pages.

4. Thin and Duplicate Content

If you create unique, original material for each page on your site, then you shouldn't be concerned about duplicate content. But if you have a lot of pages with similar content, it can pose a major issue. Duplicate content can appear on any site, one such example being the CMS generating numerous versions of the same page on various URLs.

It's the same story with thin content. This is when there's not enough text on a page to provide value or answer a searcher's question. Google may see this as a sign that your site isn't relevant and won't rank it as highly.

Hence, it is important to track down all the thin and duplicate pages and remove them as soon as possible. To ensure best SEO and organic growth of your website, you must ensure that content on your website is neither thin nor duplicate.

6. Page Speed

(Image source: clickseoservices.com)

Improving the speed of your website is one of the few technical SEO strategies that can have an immediate impact on its position.

That's not to say that a quick-loading website will get you on Google's first page, but still, increasing the speed at which your site loads will have a significant impact on your organic traffic.

Today, there are multiple tools in the market to evaluate the speed of your website, the most common one being PageSpeed Insights.

7. Mobile Optimization

The popularity of smartphones is ever-increasing. Google claimed that mobile-first indexing was being utilized on more than half of the web pages in Google search results at the end of 2018.

Google's mobile-first indexing means that the search engine will look at the mobile version of your website before the desktop version when crawling and indexing pages. If you don't have a mobile-friendly website, you're likely to lose out on organic traffic from mobile users.

Make sure that your website is responsive, which means that it will adjust to fit the screen of any device. You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your website is responsive.

8. SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is a must for any website that wants to rank high in search results. It's a security protocol that encrypts information sent between a user's browser and your website.

In 2014, Google announced that they would be giving preference to websites with an SSL certificate in their search rankings. This means that if you don't have an SSL certificate, your website is likely to rank lower than your competitors.

It's good to monitor SSL certificate validity for your site because of Google's recent efforts to give preference to the security of their users.

9. HTML Errors

According to Google's John Mueller, correcting HTML mistakes alone won't improve your ranking, and having a fully W3C valid site may not help your position.

However, if the errors are severe enough that they prevent Googlebot from indexing your pages correctly, then you're going to have a problem.

The first step is to check for HTML errors with a tool like W3C's Markup Validation Service. Once you've found and fixed the errors, you can resubmit your website to Google for indexing.

10. Use Canonical URLs

Most pages that have duplicate content on them should get the ol’ No Index tag added to them or have the duplicate content replaced with unique content. However, there are some pages where you may want Google to index both the original and the duplicate page.

For these pages, you'll need to use canonical URLs.

A canonical URL is a way of telling Google that a certain URL is the "master" version of a page. It's used to consolidate link equity and avoid duplicate content penalties.

To set a canonical URL, you'll need to add a rel="canonical" tag to the HTML of the duplicate page. The canonical URL should be pointing to the original "master" page.

This will help you repurpose your content effectively without attracting plagiarism penalties.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, but by paying attention to the details, you can ensure that your website is well-optimized and ready to compete for top positions.

In this article, we tried to cover the essential technical SEO factors that can affect your ranking. Consider this as a checklist, and If you want to improve your website's position, ensure that you tick all the boxes!