Technical SEO Tactics

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is about optimizing your website for search engine crawling bots. You will need to provide information that search engine bots will understand and follow best practices. For example, if there is risk if the technical components of your website are neither optimized which means search engine will find it hard to index your website and give you the opportunities you are looking for.

It does not matter how much you have optimized on page and build backlinks to your website. Without implementing proper technical SEO, your website becomes a graveyard except you are interested in waking the dead. I doubt if any marketer will be interested. Look at it this way, you cannot go to a court law to defend yourself without any evidence.

The SEO ecosystem has become so fierce that SEO has become very daunting to faint-hearted. There are many marketers out there that, the moment they hear of the word “Technical SEO”, they want to run and hide on the bed with their mum lol.

Technical SEO is a component of the SEO package. A complete SEO package considers the following;

1. On page
2. Off page
3. Technical SEO

Get all the above implemented with best practice in mind and benchmarking to experience jolly times. So when it comes to technical SEO, what are we actually considering? I am not going to give an explanation of each section but I will certainly give you what to consider during the process. This is something many companies offering search engine optimization services fails to consider. Watch out. However, below is a list of some technical aspects of website to consider when optimizing for technical SEO:

1. Site maps
2. Site architecture
3. Geo-targeting
4. Canonicalization
5. Pagination
6. Server behaviour and crawling
7. Redirections
8. Site speed
9. Html markup
10. Vertical SEO
11. Mobile experience
12. Url duplication
13. Robots disallow
14. Expired and or deleted content
15. Hreflang
16. Broken links
17. Alt tags
18. Title and description tags
19. Internal linking
20. Crawling errors
21. Https vs http duplication
22. www vs non www preferred version or your url
23. And much more

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO should be implemented using agile methodology. Many marketers and designers will consider auditing their website for technical SEO only when the website has been fully developed and published which is wrong. It will save time if the errors or issues identified after the website has gone live or completed could have been avoided if they were considered at various phases of the web development process. As said earlier, if you fail to implement technical SEO, you would typically have difficulty indexing and ranking your website

Tools for Technical SEO analysis and audits?

There are a ton of tools and keeping track of them can be a very daunting task. However, there are some simple tools that will help you achieve up to 70-80% of your technical SEO goals. Some of these tools demand a learning curve for those unfamiliar to them. Of course we all have to start from somewhere. These tools includes but not limited to;

1. Google search console
2. Deep crawl – Deep crawl is a comprehensive SEO tool that helps you to identify and monitor technical SEO aspects of your website that could potentially bar your SEO initiative from achieving the results you all want.
3. W3c validator – Use this tool to check for errors within your website code. It helps you to easily identify and sort coding error especially as we are gradually moving to html 5. Markup validation is an important step to consider if you’d want to make sure your website is technical sound.
4. Google speed test – This tool is very important as it tells you all that is stopping you from doing well within the SERPS. It also tells you what you need to do to improve your rankings when it comes to some aspects of technical SEO
5. Screaming frog – A good crawling tool that will crawl your site considering duplicate content, meta-data, broken links, rel=canonical. It is a good tool for technical SEO as it saves you enormous time. Absolutely very easy to deploy giving room for newbies and seasoned experts to excel in SEO
6. SEMrush – This is a very good tool for all online marketing activities as it gives you the opportunity to carry out site audits, competitor analysis, keyword research and much more. It cannot be under-estimated because you have access to Google’s keyword planner
7. Ahrefs – This is another powerful tool for SEO and back link analysis. This tool gives you the opportunity to track your backlinks, your competitors and their competitors Keywords, brand mention and others powerful tools
8. Pingdom DNS check – Pingdom helps you to track downtimes, uptimes and the performance of your website. You definitely need to know how well your website is doing and how reliable is your hosting service provider.
9. GTmetrics – GTmetrics shares some commonality with Google speed test. The tool provides you with detail reports about your website’s performances in relation by analysing your page’s speed and then generates performance score for your website’s pages with actionable recommendations on what you need to do for better if not best performance.
10. XML sitemap validator – Checks your website for broken links. Search engines can discredit your website if you have broken links that have not been cared for. You would want to make sure that the urls in your sitemap produce a 200 header response
11. SEO tool kit for IIS – This SEO tool helps digital marketers, hosting providers with data to improve their website’s relevance by recommending methodologies that will make their content more search engine friendly
12. Google’s search console – This tool is very important than many I have mentioned above. This tool helps you to monitor, evaluate and maintain your online presence within the search results. It gives you advice and recommendations on what needs doing to maintain a better performance.

To conclude, if you are actually going to do well with your SEO activities, it is important that your website is responsive and loads. Mobile browsing has grown fast and expected to overtake desktop browsing by 2020. With these two things in mind, it is time you considered “Accelerated Mobile Pages” with the acronym AMP.

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