technical seo basics

Technical SEO Basics Every Marketer Should Know

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You can work tirelessly to optimize your content for search engine visibility, but if your technical SEO house is not in order you will never get far. You need to know the technical SEO issues that matter, whether you want to handle them yourself or delegate them.

Technical SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. These details are important to have a viable technical foundation for your website.

Technical SEO Defined

Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization.

Google and other search engines want users to get best possible results for their query. Therefore, search’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on a multitude of factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about.

Serious technical mistakes can decrease your visibility or even keep you from being listed at all on search engines.

Factors in Technical SEO

A technically sound website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about. Here are  the characteristics of a technically optimized website.

  • Secure. A technically optimized website is a secure website. (Starts with HTTPS.)
  • Fast. There are several free online site speed tests. Most also give you pointers on what to improve.
  • Crawlable. Search engines use robots to crawl or spider your website. A linking structure will make sure all of your content is crawled and there are no dead ends.
  • Robots.txt file. This special file gives direction to search crawlers.
  • No dead links. If a link leads to a non-existing page on your site, people will encounter a 404 error page. When that happens to search crawlers, it is a hit to your overall rank.
  • Structured data. Structured data helps search engines understand your website, content or even your business better. With structured data you categorize the types of content at your site in a way that search crawlers understand.