Without proper technical optimizations, no matter how engaging your content or how visually impressive your design is, search engines and your target audience may never find you.

Technical SEO is the invisible force that makes your website fast, discoverable, and easy to navigate. It’s not just about tweaking a few parameters; it’s about creating a solid foundation so that search engines can crawl and index your website effectively.

Whether you’re a digital marketer or a business owner, knowing the ins and outs of technical SEO can have a big impact on your search results.

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

SEO — The Building Block of Content Marketing
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google’s search results page.

It combines off-page link building efforts, on-page content methods, and—often overlooked but vital—technical SEO. While it’s important to create quality content and get backlinks, what really makes your website discoverable is making sure its technical foundation is solid.

You could go so far as to call SEO the first building block of a solid content marketing strategy. Through SEO, your website and all of its pages appease and please the search engine gods. If done correctly, it will ensure your web pages rank highly when someone searches for a related keyword.

Here’s how to optimize your website:

Unique Content
Quality Content
Optimizing Your Website for Smooth Crawlability by Search Engines

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 terminology, technical SEO is optimizing your website and server to allow search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively.

In simple terms, changing certain technical aspects of your website, such as design, link building, speed, etc., so that search engine bots can easily find and save your site and mark it as a “valuable” site for readers. The more valuable it is, the higher the search ranking.

The main components of technical SEO are:

Site architecture: A well-organized website makes navigation smoother for both users and search engines. A clear hierarchy and logical URL structure increase the efficiency of crawling and indexing.
Page speed: Fast-loading pages improve the user experience and are preferred by search engines. Improving images, using browser caching, and streamlining code can significantly improve load times.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): By implementing HTTPS, you encrypt the data exchanged between users and your site, thereby increasing trust and improving your search rankings. Structured Data Markup: Using schema markup allows search engines to understand your content more effectively, which can lead to improved performance in search results, such as rich snippets.

7 effective tips for technical SEO

To have a fully technically optimized website, check out the following tips prepared by the Kent Agency team:

1. Use shallow structures with links

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

The link distance, or the number of link clicks required to reach these types of pages from other pages, should be low. This is known as creating a shallow link structure.

Quick Tip: Content should be valuable in terms of matching the search intent and providing the reader with the information or data they need. This will reduce bounce rates 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 therefore have different URLs. The problem here is which URL should appear in the results when a search engine crawls your website.

This is where the canonical tag comes in.

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

This tells search engines whether this is the home page or the original page of the content in question and will rank that page in search results.

Quick tip: Provide your own home page link; also use the canonical tag for the home page. This is a good way to reduce confusion later.

3. Create a mobile-friendly and responsive website.

By mid-2023, mobile devices accounted for almost 60% of global web traffic, and this percentage was even higher in mobile-centric regions like Asia and Africa. Therefore, the importance of a mobile-friendly site cannot be overstated.

Consider using these SEO tips for mobile-friendly design:

Responsive design: Use flexible grids and layouts that adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes. This method ensures a seamless user experience regardless of the device being used.
Mobile-first approach: Prioritize designing your website for mobile users from the start, then extend it to larger screens. This approach ensures that key content and features are easily accessible on mobile devices. Improve your images and media: Compress images and choose the right formats to speed up loading times on mobile networks. Fast loading times improve the user experience and boost SEO performance.

4. Optimize website performance — loading speed and bounce rate

Search engines reward websites that load quickly. Optimize your website for images, videos, and other content and make sure it loads as quickly as possible. Benchmark your website against your competitors and compare their loading speeds.

Even with slow internet speeds, your website should be able to load pages easily and quickly. This applies to all devices, including desktops/laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

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

Slow loading speed is one of the factors behind high bounce rates. It also affects your website’s ranking. There are several other factors, and Kent Agency can help you analyze your website’s performance and suggest improvements.

5. Maintain a clean website structure

A good website structure consists of two parts:

Sitemap
Using subfolders
Sitemap helps search engines understand your website. It tells search engines where each page is located and provides information such as the last modified date, priority on the site, and frequency of updates.

Using subfolders is a bit of a gray area. For example, Google treats subdomains and subfolders equally in terms of ranking, as long as all other SEO parameters are met.

If you host your content on subdomains, you will need to work on SEO optimization for each subdomain separately. This means getting links for each subdomain.

Instead, if you use subfolders under the same domain, you will only need to get links for one domain. This makes managing your SEO efforts much easier.

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

6. Optimize your robots.txt file

Speaking of crawling and indexing, the robots.txt file is an important part of it. It sits at the heart of your website. Its job is to help search engines crawl and index your website by deciding which pages to crawl and which links to keep (dofollow) or not (nofollow).

Consider these important points for your technical SEO strategy:

Clear guidelines: Make sure your robots.txt file contains specific instructions to avoid accidentally blocking important pages. When configurations go awry, important content can slip through the cracks of search engine indexes.
Syntax and formatting: Follow proper syntax and formatting guidelines in your robots.txt file. Syntax errors can cause search engines to misunderstand your instructions, resulting in incorrect crawl behavior.
Testing and validation: Make it a habit to regularly test your robots.txt file with tools like Google’s Robots Testing Tool to identify and fix any potential issues. Dynamic Content Management: Effectively managing parameters and session IDs is important for websites with dynamic content, such as e-commerce platforms. Inappropriate use can lead to duplicate content issues, but you can easily fix this by properly structuring your robots.txt file.

7. Design your 404 page

This is not an error that every visitor or website owner wants to see. You, as the website owner, don’t want to see this error, and neither do your visitors. However, the error does occur from time to time.

It could be the user’s fault; they may have entered the wrong address after their main domain name. Or the links you were pointing to may no longer exist, leaving you with broken links. In either case, the 404 “Page Not Found” error page is inevitable.

How does this affect your rankings? If a visitor’s homepage is Google and they enter the wrong address, they will see a 404 page. They will obviously hit the back button and go to Google.com.

If this happens often enough, Google will think that your website has low-quality content and will lower your rankings. However, you can be smart and optimize your 404 page to help with SEO.

Create a branded SEO page that includes links to your website – the homepage can be a product/service page or a blog page. Anything that will let visitors know how to get to the page they want.

Quick Tip: Quirky or fun design is an important aspect of using 404 pages to help with SEO. It can also include your brand message.

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