On Page SEO vs Off Page SEO vs Technical SEO
On-page, off-page, and technical SEO are common categories used to categorize search engine optimization (SEO). Let's briefly discuss what each means.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to making your website crawlable and indexable. With technical SEO, you can quickly assist search engines in accessing, crawling, interpreting, and indexing your web page.
It is called "technical" SEO because it has nothing to do with the promotion of the website or the actual content of the web page. It focuses on the technical aspects, such as optimizing a website's infrastructure.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO, which includes image alt text, keyword usage, meta descriptions, H1 tags, URL naming, and internal linking, refers to the information on your page that tells search engines (and readers) what it is about. Since everything is on your website, you have the most control over this SEO strategy.
Off-Page SEO
Through votes of confidence, most notably backlinks, or links from other websites to your own, off-page SEO lets search engines know how well-liked and valuable your page is.
The quantity and quality of backlinks raise a page's PageRank. (Find out more what backlinks are.)
If everything else is equal, a page with 100 relevant internal links from reliable websites will rank higher than a page with 50 relevant links or 100 broken internal links from trustworthy websites.
Why is technical SEO important?
Even though you might be tempted, this SEO element is crucial to your organic traffic. No matter how thorough, helpful, and well-written your content is, only a few people will see it if a search engine cannot crawl it.
It is best to divide technical SEO into manageable chunks because it is a monster. If you're anything like me or any SEO Singapore company, you prefer to approach complex tasks piecemeal and with a checklist. Unbelievably, everything we've discussed up to this point falls into one of five categories, each of which calls for a separate set of concrete recommendations.
Why should you optimize your site technically?
Google and other search engines aim to give users the most relevant results for their search queries. As a result, Google's robots scan and assess web pages based on various criteria. Some aspects, like how quickly the page loads, are based on the user's experience. Thanks to additional factors, search engine robots can better understand your pages' content. Add structured data to accomplish this. Therefore, by making technical improvements, you help search engines crawl and comprehend your website. You may receive higher rankings and search traffic if you perform this task successfully. Or even get yourself some lucrative outcomes!
The opposite is also true: if you make severe technical errors on your website, they could cost you. By inadvertently inserting a trailing slash in the incorrect location in your robots file, you wouldn't be the first person to completely prevent search engines from crawling your website.txt file.
But you should not concentrate on a website's technical aspects to appease search engines. The primary goal of a website should be to make it easy for users to use it. It ought to be quick, understandable, and easy to use. Fortunately, building a solid technical foundation frequently improves user and search engine experience.
Technical SEO Audit Fundamentals
Now that you've seen what technical SEO offers let's look at the technical SEO fundamentals. (You can also visit our checklist here for a deeper foundation on technical SEO.)
Audit Your Preferred Domain
The URL visitors type to access your website, such as https://www.khepridigital.com/, is your domain. Your website's domain affects how easily people can find you through searches and gives them a dependable way to recognize your page.
You can tell search engines whether you want your site's www or non-www version to appear in the search results by choosing a preferred domain. You could select www. For instance- www.yourwebsite.com is preferred to yourwebsite.com. By doing so, all users are forwarded to your website's URL, and search engines are instructed to prioritize your site's www version. If not, search engines will view these multiple versions as separate sites, reducing their SEO audit value.
Google previously asked you to specify which website URL version you prefer. Now Google Analytics will recognize and decide which version to display to searchers. Although we'll cover canonical tags in a moment, if you'd like to specify which version of your domain is preferred, you can do so. After choosing your preferred domain, ensure that all variations—www, non-www, HTTP, and index.html—permanently redirect to that version.
Implement SSL
This phrase has probably been used before, and for a good reason—it's pretty significant. Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, adds an extra layer of security between a browser and a web server (the program in charge of fulfilling an online request), making your site secure. Because you have SSL to protect them, when a user sends information to your website, like payment or contact information, that information is less likely to be breached.
In addition to a lock icon in the URL bar and a domain that starts with "https://" rather than "http://," an SSL certificate can be identified.
Google announced that SSL would be considered a ranking factor as early as 2014, demonstrating how search engines prioritize secure sites. As a result, select your homepage's SSL version as your preferred domain.
You must switch any non-SSL pages from HTTP to HTTPS after installing SSL. It's a challenging task, but the reward of a higher ranking makes it worthwhile. You need to do the following:
- Transform all pages from your website's http:// to its https:// address.
- All canonical and hreflang tags should be updated accordingly.
- Update the links on your sitemap, which can be found at yourwebsite.com/sitemap. The robot and XML. Txt file, which can be found at robots.yourwebsite.com. Txt).
- For your HTTPS website, set up a fresh instance of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and monitor the migration of all traffic.
Optimize Page Speed
How long does it take for a website visitor to wait for your site to load? Six seconds, exactly. And that is being kind. According to some data, the bounce rate rises by 90% as the page load time increases from one to five seconds. You need to increase your website's speed as soon as you can because time is of the essence.
The user experience and website conversion aren't the only reasons site speed is essential; it also affects rankings.
Improve your average site speed load time by following these suggestions:
Organize your files by compression.
Your images and your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files can all be compressed to make them smaller and load more quickly.
Review redirects frequently.
A 301 redirect takes a moment to complete. Your site speed will be significantly impacted if you multiply that across multiple pages or layers of redirects.
Your code should be cleaned up.
The speed of your site may suffer from messy code. Messy code is lazy code. Like writing, you only need six sentences to make your point in the first draft. You succeed in three in the second draft. In general, a page will load faster with more efficient code. You'll minify and compress your code after you clean up the mess.
As an illustration, consider a content delivery network (CDN).
CDNs are distributed web servers that store copies of your website in various geographic areas to deliver your website based on the searcher's location. Your site loads quicker for the user because there is less distance for the information to travel between servers.
Try to avoid getting too plugged in.
Older plugins frequently have security flaws that expose your website to malicious hackers who can lower your website's rankings. Use only the most necessary plugins; always use the most recent versions. Similarly, consider using custom themes instead of pre-made ones because they frequently have less helpful code.
Cache plugins should be used.
Cache plugins save a static copy of your website to send to returning visitors, reducing the time it takes to load on subsequent visits.
Async (asynchronous) loading should be used.
Before processing your website's HTML, or "body," or "code," servers must first read scripts, which are instructions. E. The elements of your website that visitors want to see. Scripts are typically put in the. <head> where they take precedence over the content on the rest of the page of a website (consider your Google Tag Manager script). Async code allows the server to process both the HTML and the script simultaneously, reducing lag and speeding up page load times.
What distinguishes a website that has been technically optimized?
A technically sound website is easy for search engine robots to crawl and loads quickly for users. An excellent technical foundation makes it easier for search engines to comprehend the purpose of a website. It also prevents confusion caused, for example, by duplicate content. Furthermore, it doesn't direct users or search engines to dead ends brought on by broken links.
1. The website is fast
Web pages today must load quickly. People don't like to wait for a courier to open because they are impatient. Fifty-three percent of mobile website visitors already abandoned a page if it took longer than three seconds to load, according to research from 2016. The trend is still present today, according to a study from 2022, which indicates that for every additional second, it takes for a page to load, e-commerce conversion rates decrease by about 0.3 percent. As a result, if your website is slow, users will become impatient and switch to another, causing you to lose out on all that traffic.
Google knows that slow websites sometimes provide a better user experience. Therefore, they favour websites that load quickly. As a result, a slow website receives even less traffic because it appears lower in search results than its faster counterpart. A Google ranking factor since 2021, page experience measures how quickly users perceive a website to be. Accordingly, having pages load rapidly enough is more crucial than ever.
Find out how to quickly test your site's speed if you need clarification on whether it's fast enough. Most tests will also provide you with suggestions for how to improve. You can also look at the Core Web vitals, which Google uses to indicate Page experience.
2. Search engine crawlability
To "crawl" or "spider," search engines utilize many robots to visit your website. Robots follow links on your site to find content. Thanks to a robust internal linking site structure, the most important content on your website will be clear to search engine spiders.
But there are other approaches to robot navigation. If you don't want them to go to a particular piece of content, you can, for example, prevent them from crawling it. You can also allow them to crawl a page while instructing them not to include it in search results or to click any links.
Utilizing the robots, you can direct them around your website.txt file. It's a potent tool that needs to be used with caution. A minor error could prevent robots from crawling (critical portions of) your site. People occasionally unintentionally block their website's CSS and JS files in the robots.txt file. These files contain code that explains to browsers how and what your site should look like. Search engines cannot determine the functionality of your website if those files are blocked.
The robot meta tag can tell search engine robots why you want them to crawl a page but not show it in the search results. You can also tell them not to follow the links on a page by using the robot's meta tag.
3. "Less" dead links.
Inconvenient websites load slowly. Internal links pointing to a page that doesn't exist may irritate visitors even more than at a slow pace. A 404 error page will appear if a link leads to a page that doesn't exist on your website. Your carefully thought-out user experience is gone!
Further, these error pages could be more liked by search engines. And because they click on every link they come across, even those hidden, they frequently discover more dead links than visitors.
Because websites are constantly changing due to people adding and removing content, most websites, unfortunately, have (at least some) dead links. Thankfully, some resources can assist you in recovering dead or broken links from your website.
Always redirect the URL of a page when moving or deleting it to avoid creating needless dead links. To replace the old page, you should redirect traffic to that new page.
4. Search engines are not misled by duplicate content.
Search engines may need clarification if they find the same content on various pages of your website or even on other websites. They might give all pages with the same content a lower ranking because if these pages display the same content, which one should they rank highest?
Unfortunately, you might need to be made aware that you have duplicate content problems. Different URLs may display the same content due to technical limitations. The same content will appear on a different URL, irrelevant to visitors but relevant to search engines.
The problem can, fortunately, be solved technically. Using the canonical link element, you can specify the original or duplicate page or the page you want to rank in the search engines.
5. Website security
A website that is secure from a technical standpoint. Making your website safe for users to ensure privacy is essential today. You can do many things to make your (WordPress) website secure, but implementing HTTPS is one of the most important.
When data is sent between a browser and a website, HTTPS ensures that it cannot be intercepted. So, for instance, if users log in to your website, their credentials are secure. To implement HTTPS on your website, you'll need a thing known as an SSL certificate. As a result of making HTTPS a ranking signal, Google has recognized the value of security and gives secure websites a competitive advantage over their less secure counterparts.
In most browsers, you can quickly determine if your website is HTTPS. If the site is safe, a lock will appear on the left side of the browser's search bar. You (or your developer) have work to do if you see the phrase "not secure".
6. Data is structured.
Thanks to structured data, search engines can better comprehend your website, content, or even your business. Search engines can be informed about the types of products you sell and the recipes you have on your website using structured data. Additionally, it will allow you to share various information about those products or recipes on the same site.
You should provide this information in a specific format (described on schema.org) so that search engines can quickly find and understand it. They can contextualize your content better as a result.
Implementing structured data can benefit you in ways other than just improving search engine understanding. It also qualifies your content for rich snippets, gleaming outcomes with stars or additional information that stands out in the search results.
7. XML sitemap is present.
Simply put, an XML sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. It offers a site map to search engines for your website. It will ensure that search engines notice all important content on your website. The number of images and the most recent modification date for each page are included in the XML sitemap, which is frequently divided into posts, pages, tags, and other custom post types.
A website shouldn't necessarily require an XML sitemap. Robots only need a well-designed internal linking structure connecting all the content. An XML sitemap won't hurt, but not all websites have a great design. Therefore, having an XML site map on your website is always suggested.
8. "hreflang" for international websites
Search engines require a little assistance to identify the countries or languages you are trying to target if your website targets more than one country or multiple countries where the same language is spoken. They can show people the appropriate website for their area in the search results if you can assist them.
You can do that with the aid of hreflang tags. They can be used to specify which nation and language each page is meant to support. This also resolves a potential issue with duplicate content because Google will understand that even if your US and UK websites display the same content, they were written for different regions.
Technical SEO Best Practices
From a technical SEO standpoint, it consists of many link-building strategies. However, not all can elevate your site's content.
1. Specify a Preferred Domain
Choosing your preferred domain when creating your website or blog would be best. By doing this, you can tell search engines which domain variation to use for the duration of your website.
By default, both the www and the domain name without the www can be used to access a website.
If your domain is example.com, for instance, both http://example.com and example.com (i.e. Lacking the www).
While this is acceptable for users, search engines need clarification because they see these as unrelated pages.
This implies that you might experience indexing issues, duplicate content issues, and a drop in page rank.
Setting your preferred domain and letting search engines know about it will help you solve this issue.
www or none?
One of the common queries is whether to use www in front of their domain name or stick with the non-www version.
It's up to you which format you prefer; there is no SEO benefit to one over the other.
You can use the HTTP version, even though I prefer to have www in front of my domains because it seems more natural.
It's crucial to inform search engines of your choice and maintain consistency throughout your website's existence.
2. Optimize Your Robots.txt
Robots. A text file called "txt" is located in the root directory of your website and instructs search engines which pages to crawl and add to their index.
This file has a very straightforward format; you typically don't need to change it.
However, it's crucial to check and ensure all correct blockings prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your website.
3. Optimize Your URL Structure
Reviewing your website's URL structure comes next on your list of technical SEO audit items. By URL structure, we mean the format of your URLs.
The following are URL rules recommended by best SEO practices.
- Enter letters in lowercase.
- Separate words in the URL with -.
- Cut the descriptive parts of your sentences.
- Avoid using extraneous characters or words.
- Without stuffing the URL, use your desired keywords.
- The only thing you will typically need to do when publishing new content is optimized your URLs once you've established your permanent link structure.
If you use WordPress as your content management system (CMS), you'll see that when you create a new post, WordPress automatically generates the URL using the post title.
For instance, if the title of your post is "10 Technical SEO Best Practices For Beginners," WordPress will create the URL http://www. 10-technical-SEO-best-practices-for-beginners-at-example.com.
Although it's okay, you could shorten it by using http://www—for instance, the more specific and simple-to-remember http://www.example.com/technical-seo.
If you alter your permanent link structure, like with the preferred domain, you can do so using 301 redirects.
Although it is not advised because there is little benefit, you can use the best practices for your new posts instead.
4. Navigation and Website Structure
For many reasons, a website's structure is a crucial SEO factor.
Users are more likely to browse a website for a more extended period and find the information they seek more quickly, and search engines can better comprehend and index a website.
A standard error web admins make is to neglect navigation and site structure in their quest to increase conversions, which has the unintended consequence of degrading their SEO on essential pages.
A typical example is to hide the archive pages from users and group all content under a single category.
Archive and multiple-category pages were once considered detrimental to SEO, but this is a bad SEO practice.
Google does consider a website's overall structure when assessing a particular page, so it's essential to keep this in mind.
Naturally, you should optimize your category pages if you want to gain anything.
Furthermore, according to Google, a clearly defined structure aids web admins in identifying to Google the critical information on a website, which will significantly help in boosting the rankings of the pages that truly matter.
5. Add Breadcrumb Menus
A set of links at the top or bottom of a page, known as a breadcrumb menu, enables users to return to a previous page (typically the category page) or the website's home page.
A breadcrumb menu has two main functions: it facilitates user navigation on a website without requiring them to use the back button on their browsers. It also provides additional website structure information to search engines.
Because Google highly recommends breadcrumbs, they are mentioned as an SEO component in several SEO guides.
Check to see if your website has breadcrumbs enabled and that they have the proper schema if it still needs to.
6. Structured Data Markup and SEO
Due to Google's extensive use of structured data in search results, structured data has become more and more significant in recent years.
Structured data is code that you can add to your web pages to make it visible to search engine crawlers and to aid them in understanding the context of your content. It's a way to communicate with search engines about your data in their language.
Despite having to do with a website's content, structured data falls under technical SEO because it requires coding to be implemented correctly. Typically, more is needed to be done after adding the structured data definition just once.
For instance, you only need to configure your structured data once for breadcrumbs, after which you are done.
Similarly, articles. Your CMS will automatically apply the appropriate structured data definition to new content as soon as you do.
It can improve how your listings are presented in the SERPS, whether through featured snippets, knowledge graph entries, etc., and raise your CTR.
Structured data can be used in various ways to describe your content. Articles, recipes, events, job postings, local businesses, and other content are among the most popular.
7. Check Your Canonical URLs
It's a quick and easy way to instruct Google on which version of a page to consider when indexing your website. The idea is similar to the preferred domain, where different URLs can lead to the same page.
When you have pages with similar content, for paging purposes, or when you add content from other websites to your website, you can use the rel="canonical" tag to prevent issues with duplicate content.
Generally, each page on your website needs to have a canonical tag or URL.
The simplest way to see if your website offers a canonical URL is to visit any of your pages, right-click anywhere on the page, and choose VIEW SOURCE. Look up rel=canonical and look into the value.
If there isn't a reference to "canonical," you can use a plugin to add it automatically or hire a developer to update your code.
Once you've configured your website to output the canonical URL correctly, just like with other technical SEO components, there's nothing else you need to do.
8. Optimize Your 404 Page
When users visit a URL on your website that doesn't exist, they are presented with a 404 page. They might have mistyped the URL in their browsers, deleted the page, or changed the URL.
The majority of contemporary WordPress themes come with optimized 404 pages by default. Still, if not, you can quickly improve the SEO friendliness of your 404 page by using a plugin or changing your theme templates.
It's simple to check how your 404 page appears; just open a new browser tab and enter a website's broken URL. Your 404 page will be displayed in the browser.
Ensure that a custom 404 page is returned when a page cannot be found, but save time optimizing your 404 pages.
9. XML Sitemap Optimization
Optimizing XML sitemaps is one of the most crucial aspects of technical SEO.
An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages and posts on your website. It also includes the published and last updated dates in addition to their title.
Search engines can refer to the XML sitemap while crawling a website.
10. SSL and HTTPS
The latest trend on the Internet is security. A well-known ranking factor and additional method of building user trust are HTTPS.
Your website can only be accessed via HTTPS after you install an SSL on your server. Any data (including usernames, passwords, and personal information) transferred between your website, and the server is encrypted.
SSL used to be crucial for eCommerce websites, but today every website on the Internet needs one installed.
If you still need to install SSL on your website, first, you should contact your hosting company and request that they enable SSL for your account. After that, you must go through a migration process to activate SSL on your website without jeopardizing your search engine rankings.
You must carefully follow the instructions because adding an SSL is similar to moving to a new domain.
11. Website Speed
The speed of a website is another recognized ranking factor. All of Google's SEO recommendations stress the value of rate, and studies show that quicker websites outperform slower ones.
The technical challenge of improving website speed necessitates alterations to your infrastructure and website to achieve positive outcomes.
It would help if you began using the three tools listed above to test your speed: Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom Tools, and Google Mobile Speed Tool.
12. Mobile Friendliness
A mobile-friendly website is a necessity. The vast majority of your users are on mobile. Since Google has implemented the mobile-first index, your rankings will suffer if your website isn't quick and mobile-friendly.
Technical SEO tools include mobile-friendliness because you won't have to deal with this issue again once you have a mobile-friendly theme that is correctly configured.
Additionally, setting it up requires technical expertise.
Utilizing this Google tool, the first thing you should do is examine your website's mobile friendliness.
If your website fails the test, you have a lot of work to do, which should be your top priority.
13. Pagination and Multilingual Websites
Only if they pertain to your website do you have to deal with these two highly technical tasks.
Pagination
When you want to divide a long page into several smaller ones, and when you enable paging in your category pages, you use pagination.
You can use rel="next" and rel="prev" links to inform search engines that the subsequent pages are an extension of the main page, which will help you avoid issues with duplicate content and consolidate links and page rank to your main page.
The main page will be identified as such by Google when it discovers the rel="next" and rel="prev" links in the code, which will be used for indexing.
Multilingual Websites
Use the hreflang attribute to tell Google more about the structure and content of your website if it contains content in multiple languages.
Thus, they will be able to provide users with the appropriate content (i.e. By avoiding duplicate content and indexing issues, you will improve your SEO and be able to display Swedish-language content to Swedish speakers.
14. Register Your Website with Webmaster tools.
Webmaster tools are necessary for performing the most crucial technical SEO tasks. The technical SEO optimization of a website can be done using web admin tools, which search engines offer.
The Google Search Console is the most comprehensive set of tools that Google offers.
You can test your robots using the Google search console. Find and correct crawl errors, upload a sitemap to Google, and create a.txt file.
You should set up your site's basic settings in Google and Bing web admin tools.
Now that you're aware of the wonders of technical SEO, you might want to consider a digital marketing company in Singapore like Khepri Digital. As one of the best SEO companies in Singapore, they can help with keyword research, technical SEO and other technical aspects to help you rank higher.
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