Search engines—and your audience—might never find you without the proper technological optimizations, regardless of how interesting your material or visually striking your design is.

Technical SEO is that unseen power that ensures your website is speedy, discoverable, and easily navigable. It’s not only about adjusting a few parameters; it’s about laying a strong foundation so search engines may efficiently crawl and index your website.

Whether your company is a digital marketer or owner, knowing the subtleties of technical SEO could make all the difference in your search results.

In this article, we will uncover seven effective technical SEO ideas for optimizing your website. Following this technical SEO strategy will enable you to take your website’s performance to the next level.

Table of Contents:

SEO — The Content Marketing Building Block

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of refining your website to raise its Google search engine results page visibility.

It combines off-page link-building initiatives, on-page content methods, and—often disregarded but crucial—technical SEO. Although producing excellent material and getting backlinks are important, what really makes your website discoverable is making sure its technical basis is sound.

One can go as far as to call SEO the first building block of a robust content marketing strategy. Through it, your website and all of its pages appease and appeal to the Gods of search engines. If done correctly, they bestow a high rank on your web pages when somebody searches for a related keyword.

How can you optimize your website? Through:

  • Unique content
  • Good quality content
  • Optimizing the website for seamless crawling by search engine spiders

Also Read: How Do You Blend User Experience in SEO Writing?

What is Technical SEO?

Much has been written about creating great and unique content. Let’s focus on the third point: Technical SEO.

In SEO parlance, technical SEO is optimizing your website and server to enable search engine spiders to crawl and index your site more effectively.

In simple language, change certain technical aspects of your website, such as design, link building, speed, etc., so that search engine bots can easily find and record your site and note it as a “valuable” site for readers. The more value, the higher the search ranking.

Key components of technical SEO include:

  • Site Architecture: A thoughtfully organized website makes navigation smoother for users and search engines alike. A clear hierarchy and logical URL structure enhance the efficiency of crawling and indexing.
  • Page Speed: Quick-loading pages improve the user experience and are preferred by search engines. Enhancing images, utilizing browser caching, and streamlining code can greatly boost load times.
  • Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): By implementing HTTPS, you encrypt the data exchanged between users and your site, promoting trust and enhancing your search rankings.
  • Structured Data Markup: Using schema markup allows search engines to grasp your content more effectively, which could result in improved search result displays, like rich snippets.

7 Effective Tops on Technical SEO

Go through the tips below, curated by Hurix Digital’s Analytics team, to have a fully technically optimized website:

1. Use Shallow Link Structures

Not every page on your site will provide the same amount and level of valuable content. Some parts of your website will offer more valuable information than others. Such pages should be easily accessible.

The link distance or the number of link clicks required to get to such pages from other pages should be low. This is known as building shallow link structures.

Quick Tip: The content should be valuable in terms of matching the search intent and providing the required information or data to the reader. This will reduce the bounce rate and increase traffic.

2. Use Canonical Tags for Duplicate Content

Some pages on your website may have 100% identical content, but they are in different sections and, hence, have different URLs. The issue here is which URL should appear in the results when the search engine crawls through your website.

Here is where the canonical tag comes into the picture.

Pick the URL you want to rank. This will be the canonical page. Go to the other page and add the tag there as

This tells the search engines which is the master page or the original page of that content, and it will rank that particular page in the search results.

Quick Tip: Self-reference the master page; use the canonical tag for the master page also. This is a good way to reduce confusion later.

3. Create a Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Website

By mid-2023, mobile devices made up almost 60% of global web traffic, and this percentage was even greater in mobile-first areas such as Asia and Africa. Hence, the importance of a mobile-friendly site cannot be overstated.

For a mobile-friendly design, think about incorporating these tips for SEO:

  • Responsive Design: Embrace flexible grids and layouts that seamlessly adapt to various screen sizes. This method guarantees a seamless user experience no matter the device used.
  • Mobile-First Approach: Initially, prioritize designing your website for mobile users, then expand for larger screens. This approach guarantees that key content and features are easily reachable on mobile devices.
  • Enhance Your Images and Media: Compress images and select the right formats to speed up load times on mobile networks. Quick loading times enhance user experience and boost SEO performance.

4. Optimize Website Performance—Loading Speed and Bounce Rate

Search engines reward fast-loading websites. Optimize your website in terms of images, videos, and other content to ensure that it loads in the least possible time. Benchmark it against competitor websites and compare the load speeds.

Even at slow internet speeds, the website should be capable of loading the pages easily and quickly. This is true across all devices, including PC/laptops, tablets, and mobiles.

Quick Tip: Use AMP HTML to speed up content delivery and load times on mobiles.

Slow load speed is one of the factors of a high bounce rate. This, in turn, affects the website’s ranking. There are several other factors, and Hurix Digital can help you analyze your website performance and suggest improvements.

5. Ensure a Clean Website Structure

A good website structure has two parts:

  • Site Mapping
  • Using Subfolders

Site mapping helps search spiders understand your website. It tells the spiders the location of every page and also provides information like the last modified date, its priority on the site, and the frequency of its updates.

Using subfolders is a bit of a gray area. Google, for example, treats subdomains and subfolders the same in terms of ranking if all other SEO parameters can be satisfied.

If you host your content on subdomains, you will have to work on each subdomain’s SEO separately. This means obtaining links for every subdomain.

Instead, if you use subfolders under the same domain, you have to obtain links for only one domain. This makes it much easier to manage your SEO activities.

You can also use breadcrumbs to manage the links. Place section links at the bottom of the page to help visitors navigate to the major pages of the website.

6. Optimize your Robots.txt

Speaking of crawling and indexing, the Robots.txt file is a crucial part of it. It resides in the root directory of your website. Its job is to help the search engine spiders crawl and index your website, deciding which pages to crawl and which links to record (dofollow) or not record (nofollow).

Check out these important points for your technical SEO strategy:

  • Clear Directives: Make sure the robots.txt file includes specific instructions to avoid accidentally blocking essential pages. When configurations go awry, important content might slip through the cracks of search engine indexes.
  • Syntax and Formatting: Follow the proper syntax and formatting guidelines in the robots.txt file. Mistakes in syntax can lead search engines to misunderstand your instructions, resulting in incorrect crawling behavior.
  • Testing and Validation: Make it a habit to regularly test your robots.txt file with tools such as Google’s Robots Testing Tool to spot and fix any issues that arise.
  • Dynamic Content Management: For websites featuring dynamic content, like e-commerce platforms, effectively managing parameters and session IDs is essential. Improper handling can result in duplicate content issues, but you can easily address this by properly configuring your robots.txt file.

7. Design your 404 Page

It is not an error any visitor wishes to see or you, as the website owner wants to show. Neither you, as the website owner, want to show this error, nor does any visitor wish to see it. Nonetheless, the error crops up once in a while.

It may be the user’s fault; they may have typed in the wrong address after the main domain name. Or the links you have pointed to just don’t exist anymore, leaving you with broken links. In any case, a 404 Page Not Found error page is inevitable.

How does this affect your ranking? If a visitor’s home page is Say Google and he types in the wrong address, he will see a 404 page. He will obviously hit the back button and go to Google.com.

If this happens enough times, Google will think your website has inferior content and reduce your page rank. But you can be savvy and optimize your 404 page to help your SEO.

Design a branded SEO page with links to your website—could be the home page product/ service page or blog page. Anything to let the visitor know how they can get to the intended page.

Quick Tip: Quirky or funny design is an important aspect of using 404 pages to help SEO. It can also incorporate your branding message.

Also Read: Getting Started with Adobe Marketing Cloud: A Step-by-Step Guide for New Users

Conclusion

Technical SEO is all about keeping your web page optimized and up-to-date. In addition, it means keeping the search engines informed and updated with their crawling and index reports. To make sure that your page ranks well organically, it is essential to act on the suggestions given by Google reports and tools as well.

So, go forth, optimize, and rank high!

If you’re looking for expert guidance or solutions to enhance your website’s technical SEO, Hurix Digital can help. Talk to our experts to discover how Hurix Digital’s Technical SEO services can boost your site’s ranking, speed, and overall performance.